Far-right Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott is drawing lots of point-and-laugh reactions online after falling for an obviously satirical article and sharing it online.
Abbott took to Twitter to express his outrage over country music legend Garth Brooks' supposed "wokeness" after reading about it in a satirical article from a satirical website that is obviously made to satirize conservatives.
The website's name should have been Abbott's first clue—it's called The Dunning-Kruger Times, named after the psychological phenomenon in which incompetent people don't realize they're incompetent which... just... well, you get the idea.
Along with a link to The Dunning-Kruger Times' story, written a person named Flagg Eagleton for God's sake and titled "Garth Brooks Booed Off Stage at 123rd Annual Texas Country Jamboree," Abbott tweeted:
“Go woke. Go broke. Garth called his conservative fans, 'a**holes.' Good job, Texas.”
The only part of this entire story that is true is that Brooks did in fact call certain conservatives a**holes in reference to the right-wing uproar over trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light sponsorship, while discussing how his Nashville bar, Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk is a place of "diversity" and "inclusiveness."
The rest of it is made-up nonsense as part of the writer's--who's name, we cannot stress this enough, is Flagg Eagleton--satirical story. Brooks did not appear at the 123rd Annual Texas Country Jamboree in Hambriston, Texas, because neither the Texas Country Jamboree nor Hambriston, Texas itself exist.
But okay, who among us hasn't been duped by a bit of fake news now and again, right? How was Abbott supposed to know the Texas Country Jamboree is fake? How is he to know whether the state in which he has held office for 22 years has a town called Hambriston?
Fair enough. But somehow, the actual words in the article seeped into his brain and didn't raise a single alarm. Words like this, for example:
"'We’re not really looking forward to [Brooks'] opening,' said Nashville Mayor Art Tubolls, 'we expect there to be a lot of chaos, with leftists swarming the area to flash their fake breasts in front of children.'
"Mayor Tubolls doesn’t want his city to be another San Fransisco, where drug addicts poop on veterans regularly before the city Narcans them and gives them free room and board."
Not a word of that struck Abbott as strange. And yet Democratic President Joe Biden is the one who's supposedly senile according to every conservative in America.
Anyway! Abbott naturally deleted his tweet without comment, but screenshots are of course forever and Twitter has been having a field day with those.
Even Flagg Eagleton himself got in on the fun.
Hear, hear Flagg. And with that, THIS piece of journalisticatin' has reached it's conclusion. Good day.
@jaketapoer/Bluesky
@BillAckman/Twitter