Man, can it really be eight years ago? Evidently so, because now I read that 2013 was dubbed the “Year of the Viral Hoax” by CNN I became greatly annoyed at a then ubiquitous form of viral social media parody wherein some har-dee-hardster would find a ridiculous mugshot — almost always of a slack-jawed yokel with a Deliverance squeal-like-a-pig scene mien and an amusingly redneckish name like “Lynyrd Skynyrd Dupree” — and then pair it with an over-the-top crime they just made up out of thin air, and voila, a humorous hoax.
It’s really hard to find vintage examples now, as in spite of their other failings, it looks like Facebook and Twitter stamped these out pretty thoroughly, but at least one site of this type remains. Now8News.com (note deliberately sneaky site name) has gone more heavily political in recent years, but early entries included fake crime stories like “82-Year-Old Man Eaten by Pigeons on Park Bench,” “Woman Shoots Veterinarian After He Refuses To Do Sex Re-Assignment Surgery On Her Dog,” and “Woman Arrested in Walmart for Trying on Tampons in Feminine Care Aisle."
I mean, the first couple of times I saw some of them (not those above), they were maybe worth a boring workday chuckle or two, but the joke wore thin as cold rock broth as a rotation of about 100 of them were passed around for the next year or two, often as not, by credulous people duped into believing them real, and worse, as this type of parody continued, the fake articles got also declined in quality.
This was around the same time you had all those new-to-Facebook, gullible Baby Boomers fumingly forwarding the equally lame Borowitz Report as if it too were legit news.
Maddeningly, in both cases, when you’d remonstrate with these people, they’d often huff at you.
“Well, it could have been real,” they’d say.
And then leave it up to forwarded by others. (And given that Borowitz seems to have gone into steep decline since people stopped believing his lame attempts at satire were real, it seems to me that his “humor” relied on tricking the gormless rather than entertaining the savvy.)
But I digress. Both Borowitz and these hoax News of the Weird-type fake crime stories were teaspoons of stale seasonings in a great cauldron of Fake News stew, but they did their part in taking us just a little farther away from the sweet straight honest Truth and creating the current atmosphere of head-spinning bewilderment for many of us and lives 100 percent steeped in truth-estranged alternate realities for others.
But today? Today truth is stranger than even bad satire. I am just going to write this straight, and use this guy’s real mugshot:
GEORGIA LAWYER ARRESTED IN UNITED STATES CAPITOL INVASION
FBI agents say McCall Calhoun, Esq., of the town of Americus, also posted online threats.
“The Deep State cannot stop us,” wrote the south Georgia solo practitioner on the social media site Parler.com. “They learned that today when we stormed the Capitol and took it. The word is we’re all coming back armed for war.”
Elsewhere, in the days leading up to the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Calhoun publicly posted a variety of threats on a number of social media platforms, including Parler, Facebook, and Twitter, including such messages as:
“some of you will live long enough to be exterminated with extreme prejudice.”
“its going to be hard to buy a beer when Democrats are being shot on site (sic)”
“we are going to kill every last communist who stands in Trump’s way”
Amid the insurrection, Calhoun continued posting to social media. In one such message, Calhoun admits to being among those who stormed the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and stated his belief that his number would have assassinated her brutally had she been present:
“The first of us who got in kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s door and pushed down the hall toward her inner sanctum, the mob howling with rage. Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces but she was nowhere to be seen.”
According to Calhoun’s account, his party of rioters was repulsed by a SWAT team at that point, whereupon, he wrote, “we retreated back to the Rotunda and continued our hostile takeover of the Capitol.”
Some of President Trump’s remaining loyalists contend that the mob was goaded into action by agents provocateurs from Antifa. Calhoun categorically denied this version of events.
“I want to be clear about what happened today,” he wrote. “This was not Antifa masquerading as Patriots who stormed the Capitol. These were Patriots — thousands and thousands of them.”
According to his firm’s website, Calhoun has 20 years experience as a lawyer, specializing in civil and criminal defense. When questioned by journalists after the events of January 6, Calhoun claimed his offenses amounted to no more than “trespassing, to which I would freely admit. But I did it for the love of my country.”
Calhoun remains in federal custody after his first appearance in the United States District Court of Middle Georgia in Macon. He is charged with violent entry or disorderly conduct; tampering with a witness, victim or informant; and restricted building or grounds violations. Bond has not yet been set.
Okay, end my fake real news report. I mean…this is beyond the idiocy of those fake fake news stories and into the terrain of the Overly Talkative Bond Villain, Crazed By Hubris, Confessing All and Gloating, Unknowing the Script is About to Flip.
And then all that other stuff: the Dukes of Hazzard mugshot, the NRA ballcap, the hyper-Southern name, the setting of Americus by God Jawja? Unreal, people. Just unreal.
Unreal is right. I'm astonished at the number of people who should be reasonably intelligent and sane, but seem to have completely lost touch with reality.