‘Soros Riot Dance Squad’

Ciara O’Rourke, writing for PolitiFact about false news spreading on Facebook:

“White busses marked ‘Soros Riot Dance Squad’ spotted in Michigan: It’s official, the riots are staged,” reads the headline on a June 2 Intellihub story. “The invisible man behind the curtain has now become visible.”

The post goes on to say that the buses “show the current Black Lives Matter/ANTIFA-sponsored unrest is most likely without a shadow of a doubt part of a much larger George Soros, Barack Obama, Democratic National Committee-backed plan aimed at taking back the Office of the President once and for all.”

The proof, the post says, is a photo published on Facebook.

  1. It’s not half-bad photoshopping. If it said something innocuous you probably wouldn’t think twice about it. So, OK.

  2. But “Soros Riot Dance Squad”? Really? I want to believe this image had to originate as a joke, not propaganda. I mean even if you are squarely in the target demographic for this sort of propaganda — paranoid, racist, anti-Semitic, stupid, and scared — how do you take this seriously? “Soros Riot Dance Squad” is like a Simpsons joke.

  3. That someone actually typed the phrase “most likely without a shadow of a doubt” makes me think, OK, yeah, there are people stupid enough to believe this is real.

★ Monday, 8 June 2020