Opinion: Trump-fueled falsehoods have deep roots
“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,'” McCarthy said, repeating a claim she had made in an earlier interview.
But even tens of thousands of lies are a drop in the bucket on social media, where misinformation is weaponized to drive engagement and achieve political ends. In a new series on “the poisoned public square,” CNN Opinion is putting a spotlight on the menace of deliberate falsehoods.
The business of lying about medicine, Hemmer noted, goes back to the medicine shows of the 19th Century: “Kickapoo Indian Sagwa could do it all: heal the blood, the liver, the stomach and even the kidneys. Purportedly based on a proprietary blend of ingredients developed by Indigenous healers — and patented by White salesmen — sagwa was sold in the late 19th Century as a panacea: you drank it to cure whatever ailed you.” In 1905, an investigation by a writer for Collier’s magazine revealed the truth about patent medicines — they were full of “alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics… and in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.”
Lies about the 2020 election are flourishing, even though every single piece of legitimate evidence affirms Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. The former president is so exercised about Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s refusal to try to overturn Biden’s narrow victory in his state that he suggested Democrat Stacey Abrams would make a better governor.