Internet Searches and X Foil Media’s Latest Trump Hoax
It took only minutes to debunk the national media’s claim of Trump calling for violence
There is a reason that many so-called journalists working for the mainstream media absolutely hate the internet, social media and in particular, X (formerly known as Twitter). The reason is that it makes it so much harder for them to perpetrate their hoaxes.
On Sunday, X was ablaze with people calling out the mainstream media for trying to make the public fall for their latest hoax that Donald Trump is calling for a bloody uprising of his followers if he doesn’t win the election.
Headlines screamed, “In Ohio rally, Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election.” The same screed could be heard on a variety of cable news channels.
The headlines weren’t false: Trump did indeed say there will be a bloodbath if he isn’t elected. But what the headlines especially, and many of the talking heads on TV, want you to believe is that Trump used the word in its literal sense – the type of wholesale slaughter of citizens that happened in the Soviet Union and China when communists took over.
Trump, however, used the term in its figurative and more common usage, to indicate an economic disaster. In that sense, “bloodbath” is defined in the dictionary as “a period of disastrous loss.” It is often used for a rapid economic decline, such as a sudden downturn in the stock market, or for a sudden political reversal.
Trump had been talking about how much of our auto manufacturing now takes place in Mexico, and warned that China is opening car plants in Mexico with plans to sell them in the United States. Trump said that China hopes to sell those cars without any taxes on them, but promised that if he’s elected he will place a 100 percent tariff on them to protect American car manufacturing.
“If I get elected,” he added. “Now, if I don’t get elected it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole (industry)…that’ll be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
That is exactly the right way to use the term. He’s predicting that the influx of cheap Chinese cars would result in a disastrous loss for U.S. auto makers, or a “bloodbath.”
Quickly Debunking the Hoax
It took only minutes after the first headlines reached the public for people on X to start posting the video of Trump’s rally, showing that he used the word bloodbath correctly in the context of his speech. The media rebutted that the use of bloodbath in any context still shows a person is an authoritarian dictator with a lust for blood. Soon thereafter, posts appeared showing mainstream media reporting that Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had all used the term bloodbath.
The most telling, and delightfully humorous, was the post of a two-minute montage of members of the mainstream media using the term bloodbath to describe political losses, economic downturns and even Taylor Swift ticket sales. Many of them were the same people decrying Trump’s use of the word.
In the past, before the internet, the media rarely got called out for false reporting. Unless it was a live event on TV, we had no way to see the original footage to double check that the video clip wasn’t taken out of context.
We also couldn’t check what had been said before. To do so, one would have had to keep old newspapers and make copies of newscasts. Not only was that hard to do, even if you had a stack of old newspapers like I did, it was too time consuming to dig back through them to find the right paper with the right item.
But now it’s fairly easy to find those things. Enter the right search word into your browsers and within a second you can find the full video. You can quickly check what had been said or written before. You can even find where past media hoaxes had been debunked by the same means.
The swift debunking in real time of the media’s attempt to pull off another hoax about Donald Trump this weekend is why they hate X so much. It was a devastating loss for them. You could even call it a bloodbath.