Last week, President Obama made a historic trip to Cuba and the right-wing went absolutely insane. Republicans were outraged that our president had the audacity to reestablish a relationship with the country more than fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. After the trip to Cuba, The Onion, a satire website, decided to post a fictional article about his trip home; but, in a hilarious turn of events, paranoid conservatives didn’t get the joke and Snopes actually had to debunk the article.
On March 23, The Onion shared a doctored picture of Air Force One flying low with a bunch of people on its wings and the photo was captioned,”Hundreds Of Cuban Refugees Clinging To Air Force One On Flight Back To U.S.”:
The comment section under the article soon filled with people who thought it was real:
I’ve chosen not to blur out their names because the comments were all made in a public forum.
You’ll notice that a lot of them blame Obama for bringing more “illegals” into the country. Well, apparently, the outrage didn’t extend only to The Onion’s Facebook page, people actually emailed Snopes en masse asking the fact-checker website if the picture was real.
This flood of emails forced Snopes to actually debunk an article by the well-known satire site. Snopes gave an example of one of the emails the received:
There is a posting of a photograph with people on the wings of a plane and falling from the sky. “Hundreds of Cubans clinging to Wings of Air Force One on the way to the US” Reference Onion.com I find this very hard to believe. I believe it was photoshopped.
We shall call them Captain Obvious.
When you read the comment section of the original article, you realize that Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican Party makes a whole lot of sense. The people who thought Cubans were actually clinging to the wings of Air Force One are probably the same people who think Drumpf is a real smart man who is going to turn this country around. They suffer so greatly from Obama Derangement Syndrome that they are falling for obvious satire. And as hilarious as it is, it’s also really, really sad that our country is filled with this many stupid people.
From Snopes:
A humorous item published by The Onion led many readers to believe that Cubans actually attempted to flee their country by grabbing onto President Obama’s departing plane.