Paul Horner is not a serious purveyor of fake-news. He’s a prankster, writing April Fools-style news spoofs that he gets a kick out of fooling people with. For example, he’s the guy who invented the story that Democrats had paid someone $3,500 to protest at Donald Trump’s rallies. Here is Caitlin Dewey’s interview:
Why? I mean — why would you even write that?
Just ’cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that’s just insane….I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].
….You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of ideas for satirizing Clinton and other figures, but that “no joke . . . in doing this for six years, the people who clicked ads the most, like it’s the cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans.” That makes it sound like you’ve found targeting conservatives is more profitable.
Yeah, it is. They don’t fact-check.
Donald Trump has broken a lot of things this year. Apparently he’s even broken the fake news business.
