Greg Abbott Tweeted the Fakest Story About Garth Brooks

Twitter may have become a gargantuan cesspool of racist messages with blue checkmarks thanks to Elon Musk, aka Dumb Iron Man, but in a way, it’s also providing a great service to the world.

Musk thought removing verified account checkmarks from those who’ve earned and worked for them and giving them to anyone dumb enough to pay for one would improve his product, and in doing this he provided a service completely by accident. Now we don’t have to read the hateful, divisive and just plain wrong thoughts of people who think a GPS device can be delivered in a vaccine or that their TV is watching them. The blue checkmark is a CliffsNotes for identifying conservative crackpots.

Here’s a perfect example. Our esteemed Gov. Greg Abbott reposted a fake story about Garth Brooks on his Twitter page on Sunday and kept it up there long enough for more sensible readers to take a screenshot of it.

The fake story’s headline reads, “Garth Brooks Booed Off Stage at 123rd Annual Texas Country Jamboree” and the URL points to a “news” website called the Dunning-Kruger Times.

Abbott shared the link with the caption, “Go woke. Go Broke. Garth called his conservative fans ‘assholes.’ Good job Texas.”

That doesn’t even sound like Garth’s old alter-ego, Chris Gaines.

Even if Abbott failed to click his mouse one more time to confirm that the story was fake before reposting it, he fell for the very obvious ploy of the “publication”‘s name. Dunning-Kruger refers to the psychological phenomenon in which people who are unskilled in certain “social and intellectual domains” don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand how unskilled they are, according to the groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Clearly, Abbott didn’t even bother to click the link to read the story on the Dunning-Kruger Times‘ website where its “About Us” section defines itself as “satire” and states “Everything on this website is fiction.” Abbott didn’t even bother to read the fake news website’s warning about its fake stories.

The deeper you go into the story, the more obvious its fakeness becomes even if most people wouldn’t need further convincing at this point. The story says Brooks’ on-stage breakdown happened at a “Texas Country Jamboree” in a Texas city called “Hambriston.” There’s no such thing as a Texas Country Jamboree and there is no town called Hambriston. Brooks isn’t even in Texas right now. He’s performing his “Plus One” residency show at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Eventually, Abbott took down the retweet probably because his phone flooded with alerts pointing out the story’s clear fakeness. He probably spent more time fact-checking the accounts of the replies than he did of the original post because that Dunning-Kruger effect can be a real bitch sometimes.

It also didn’t take long to find past examples of Abbott tweeting first and not asking questions later. In 2018, he retweeted a Winston Churchill quote that read, “The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists” referring to the Antifa movement. Abbott added, “Some insights are timeless,” but he took it down when the rest of Twitter pointed out that Churchill never said it. The quote came from a clickbait site, according to Politifact.

This is the kind of thing that happens when someone takes Kid Rock seriously as a political candidate. Yes, Abbott did that too…on Twitter. Oh that Dunning-Kruger effect. You’re the dumb gift that keeps on dumbing. 

IT’S HAPPENING! New poll has Kid Rock leading Debbie Stabenow. THIS will shake up Washington. #tcot #PJNET @TexasGOP https://t.co/HtRWFe5U8m

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) July 24, 2017