Before a federal judge blocked Donald Trump from putting members of California’s national guard on the streets of Portland, Oregon, late on Sunday, the state’s Republican party welcomed the planned deployment in celebratory posts on social media.
On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.
On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart.
When a Guardian reporter pointed out on social media that the image was not a genuine photograph of the generally small and tame protests outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland, the Oregon Republican Party’s X account replied: “We’re not reporters, just bad memers.”
Schrödinger’s lie: it’s to be taken at face value, but if you catch it, then it’s just a meme bro.
Yup. Lies, lies, lies. They keep serving them up and somehow half the country holds their noses and eats it all up.
They can’t accept being wrong. They’ve been voting this way, their entire lives. Their fragile ego can’t handle that amount of failure so they refuse to accept it at all
The people who did this need to be sued by the government of Portland. Can they sue for lost revenue from slander?
I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print it’s libel.
How do you so fucked up that you welcome a completely unnecessary presence of the national guard in the streets of your city? Are these the same people that get bummed out if their dentist tells them they don’t have any cavities?
It’s difficult to understand exactly the magnitude of some people’s obsession with 2020. Covid, the BLM protests, Trump losing. Thise three things did significant brain damage to swaths of the population.
