I saw the following posting pop up on Facebook where it is being promoted as fact …
It comes across as horrendous, crass, and an incredibly stupid thing to say. It very much panders to the reputation she has as somebody who is very religious and is often quoted as saying some truly silly things, and so those familiar with that reputation will immediately accept it as a factual claim and proceed to comment about how daft she is (that’s my toned down translation of some of the comments) and also share it.
One ever so small flaw
It is not actually true at all.
Now please don’t misunderstand me here, I do not support her politics, but I do feel rather strongly that if we are going to deploy criticism, then it should be for the things she actually said and did, and not on the basis of stuff that has simply been made up.
So where does this claim originate?
On 23rd Aug the Newslo website ran the story … here is an image of that …
I’d recommend not going to Newslo unless you have a safe sandbox for doing so, because most virus checkers should stop you from doing that, mine came up with this …
- Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/FBJack-A has been found on this website.
But no need to so so, because snopes has “safely” looked into it all and verified it for you. As explained there …
Like all articles published by Newslo (and its companion sites Religionlo and Politicalo), the piece employed a fact-based introduction before introducing counterfactual information. It is true Bachmann spoke to the outlet Breitbart on 21 August 2016, an interview from which much of the first paragraph’s quoted material was drawn. And like all articles on those three fake news sites, it included a “show facts” or “hide facts” button (all items displayed by default in “hide facts” mode, obfuscating the untruthful aspects):
Although Bachmann was somewhat accurately quoted in the first paragraph of the piece, subsequent purported comparisons between the Obama administration and years during which slavery was legal were embellishments typical of Newslo and its sister sites. Bachmann did not claim “‘not even slaves’ suffered as much as [the] white people [who] are being targeted nowadays'” amidst racial unrest, nor did she describe slavery as “terribly inconvenient” for black people.
Indeed yes, the source for this is a satire site.
Michele Bachmann
There is much that is fact-based and warrants appropriate criticism, for example …
- Her homophobia and anti-gay stance – she wants gay marriage to be banned.
- Her vigorous stance against pro-choice
- Her opinion that Nuking Iran should be considered
- Her belief that the US should opt out of the global economy
- etc…
Political Myths
There exists in these times rather a lot of wholly appropriate criticism deployed against Trump for his promotion of political myths as part of his political theatre. Many of these myths are deployed against Hillary Clinton claiming she is dishonest and a crook, and yet none of it is factual in any way, not one jot.
So the question you need to ask yourself is this?
Do you want to be part of the stream of myth-information that masquerades as political dialogue, or would you rather stand back, rise above it all, and deploy fact-based criticism of absurd ideas, regardless of the actual source?