I have a pretty low opinion of TV news people, but even I was surprised at how hard they swung at this obviously outside pitch. I had a whole master plan that I envisioned unfolding over the course of a couple months, one that would ultimately culminate in a group of dipshits showing up in real life to protest something that doesn't exist. But all these air-headed TV "journalists" started salivating as soon as I sent them the fake press release below.
Vegan-friendly "lgBBQt" barbecue picnic? Hell yeah. News stations couldn't wait to get that shit online and start raking in the hate clicks. Without doing ANY fact-checking whatsoever, at least three statewide news channels posted the story on social media and two of them included it in their TV broadcast. Please look at this insanity...
They've since scrubbed a lot of it from the Internet, but here's some of what's left.
Of course, Facebook warriors on both sides went bananas and some posts on the Rainbow Flock Ministry page ended up reaching about 500,000 people. I'd overhear people in town talking about it and Magic Mart (like a worse version of K-Mart, if that's possible) had to issue an official statement. I laugh about that part the most. Some guy is just trying to ride out his last days at a bankrupt retailer in peace and all of a sudden strangers are telling him he's going to burn in Hell. That's comedy.
Since things went off the rails so fast, I started sending Facebook messages from the Rainbow Flock account to all the maniacs that had been making especially foul comments. I told them the whole thing was a Facebook sting operation to root out extremism on the platform and that their accounts would be monitored and censored from now on. They got all paranoid and started posting things like, "This is bullshit! Facebook is removing conservative free speech! Share and comment if you can see this post!"
So that was pretty funny.
LGBTQ Nation did a little story about the hoax after the dust had settled. Check it out...