People are still spreading lies about the Catholic boys from Kentucky.

The viral tweet that spread. Saved via Facebook.

There have been two basic reactions on the left by the now debunked "Catholic boys from Kentucky harass an American Indian" story. Most people have figured out that they were wrong. Many people have apologized and the media has walked back most of the accusations of racism. This likely has more to due with the inevitable libel lawsuits that appear to be coming than any sense of remorse but it is happening. Even CNN and the Huffington Post backed down. 

However, others are either not smart enough or are too angry to think straight and are continuing to double down on the false story. And there are people obviously acting in bad faith as well. Learning nothing from the 2016 election there still appear to be people that are very committed to an obvious lie. 

The above picture is from a troll twitter account. It says some horrible things about giving Americans Smallpox. Why Julie Sandmann, the Mother of the boy that was smiling at Nathan Phillips, would want to draw more attention to herself and her family when she is already under death threats and other various forms of harassment is beyond me and it should have given people a major heads up that the twitter account is fake. 

Of course it's pretty easy to figure out that the account is fake. It took me about a second to realize it and about a minute of searching on Twitter to prove it is. The Twitter handle #GauchoGaucamole, has been deleted and comes up as not found on Twitter, which is a sure sign it has been banned. Someone, and I haven't been able to figure out who, was able to archive the account and it shows that the person was obviously not Julie Sandmann. The name was Soccer Dad, joined in July 2018 and claimed to be from Londonarry, New Hampshire, which is obviously not Kentucky. The tweets show it's an obvious parody account that switched themes when he figured out he could troll even more people.   

Unfortunately people either are way more gullible than I can even believe or the are deliberately lying about Julie Sandmann. I saw the above screenshot on facebook, though I don't want to say more than that (other than it wasn't one of my friends that spread it and it appears that they were taken by the hoax and not acting in bad faith). Unlike the people that attacked the Catholic boys, I don't dox people, even when they are spreading crap like this and especially if they were taken in by fake news. 

It IS still crazy that people still fall for any of this. The original story was unbelievable in the first place but millions of people did and felt so strongly in their beliefs that they sent death threats towards the children involved. And now that it has been completely debunked, they still feel the need to double down. 

Why? My guess is that deep down inside they figured out that their world view was challenged in a very fundamental and deep way. To them it is more plausible that everyone else is lying or being lied to than to trust their own lying eyes. It's not possible that white, male, Catholic, pro-life, Trump supporters could be anything other than the Devil incarnate and when it becomes clear that they were the victims in this case they have to justify their continued feelings of hate. They cannot admit to themselves that, just maybe, they were the bad guy all along and will do anything they can to avoid having to own up to the fact that they are kind of a crappy person. When they see something like this they decide to not try and verify any of it. This is, of course, why this whole stupid story happened in the first place. Nobody wanted to make sure they had it right before they started spouting off on it and it caused a massive amount of trouble and blew up in the face of a lot of people. 

Well, that's my psychology 101 take on it. It could be a lot simpler. Some people don't care if the boys (and their parents) are innocent or not. Lying is fine if you lie about people you hate. Or it could just be that people are just a lot more gullible than I believe and they really can't see an obvious hoax when they see one. The second one is fairly likely as people of every political stripe can fall for fake news. I myself fell for the bogus Jim Webb story that was debunked a few days later by President Trump himself despite the fact that I really should have known better. 

I am happy that I spotted this though. One of the reasons I started this blog is to debunk things that are obviously false and I think I did a decent job of it. I encourage people to spread this if they see the above screenshot, there is no reason for the Sandmann family to go through any further disruptions to their lives and debunking this is something that the professional media should have done yesterday...