Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

group called Cubanos por Donald Trump shared a photo of Biden kneeling while surrounded by people in native Haitian attire. The caption read, “Who wants a commander in chief that kneels before foreign leaders?” Except, Biden wasn’t in Haiti. He was in Miami, at the Haitian Cultural Center, and he was kneeling to pay tribute to George Floyd and the fight against structural racism. The Trump campaign ran an ad in the Miami media market that juxtaposed quotes from Biden with those from socialist leaders like Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela that ended with the very subtle tagline “Biden = Socialism.” A false Spanish-language ad from the Trump campaign, targeted at Florida’s Venezuelan American population, claimed that Venezuela’s socialist rulers were backing Biden’s election. According to ProPublica, the ad was watched more than one hundred thousand times on YouTube in the eight days before the election. These views of this faux-explosive revelation only increased with the organic sharing that occurred on Facebook, WhatsApp, and in family group chats. Carinés Moncada, a host on a popular Spanish-language Florida radio station, asserted that one of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter practiced ‘Brujería’ or witchcraft and that “whoever votes for Biden, unfortunately, is supporting that.” This absurd but powerful claim was taken directly from Punch, a right-wing news website known for pushing conspiracy theories.