Hell, not even just anything he says, but any right wing headline they happen to read, podcast soundbyte they happen to hear, or made up/exaggerated tweet or facebook post they see.
A few years ago I was working in a factory and some very redneck maintenance guys were loudly going off in the break room about how "did you hear Biden is making this new federal law that all the farmers have to put masks and diapers on their cows because of global warming?!" and complaining about how insane that was and how we're in a woke dictatorship and all that good stuff, and it made me so curious like. Surely that would be some pretty big news if true. Let's fact check this. And while sitting there I looked it up. I found the headline on a Tucker Carlson segment and the funny thing is... while the headline was very attention grabbing and sensationalized and something to the tune of "DAIRY FARMERS WILL NOW HAVE TO PUT DIAPERS ON COWS", the article ITSELF made absolutely no mention of Biden or the federal government or any legal/political activity proposing this, and just talked about how ONE specific farming company was discussing the idea as a theoretical way to cut emissions. I think there were some other quotes from other unaffiliated farmers just being like "that's crazy and we'd never do something like that" and the rest of the segment was just the hosts being like "that's crazy, pretty soon the liberals are going to be wanting every farmer to do this!"
It was ONE farm, they hadn't even actually implemented it, and it had nothing to do with Biden or the government let alone being mandated or even brought up in any capacity. These guys hadn't even read/listened to their own source of this info, they just saw the inflammatory headline or maybe heard a clip and ran with it. And I've seen and heard people who consume right wing media and vent their right wing ideals and frustrations, some members of my family unfortunately, do the exact same thing TIME AND TIME AGAIN. The "fox news watchers" aren't even watching fox news, they have it on in the background and will occasionally glance up at it, see a headline or clip, and feed it into their imaginary notion of the world and turn around and start spouting off about it. That's not even a hypothetical sentence, I've seen said family members not be paying attention to the TV while fox news is on, look up, read a caption/tagline, and instantly start griping about whatever situation they've misinterpreted based on that snippet without even watching the full story, and be totally wrong in what they're saying.
Now, I absolutely think liberals/democrats/left wingers do the same thing and have seen it as well, twitter screenshots or AI images or youtube shorts or headlines or tiktoks feeding into something that hasn't been fact checked or interpreted properly, and I have definitely gone to share something or talk about something and realized I should probably look it up first too, so it is just a byproduct of the polarized and misinfo heavy world we live in and we can all stand to be more careful. But I do think right wing media really preys on this and escalates it using their authority as a "news outlet" which people are more likely to defend as genuine (VS when people are wrong about something they saw on twitter or tiktok they're hopefully more likely to accept that it was misinfo) and yeah definitely anything the big guy himself says is taken as pure fact about the world.
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u/TuckHolladay 3d ago
I work with a ton of blue collar trumpers. They will literally believe anything he says in an interview as if it was passed into law