Thread by @ghostofkt

take a wild trip with me. I want to go step by step through how a right wing narrative is engineered from embryo to playground. c’mon it’ll be fun! <it won’t be fun>

so about two weeks ago, bill anderson, owner of dale’s diner in waterville, ohio, gets a micro-burst of stories in the news on his diner’s pending closure; three different headline variants through the same outlet

now bill anderson is not just “a dude”. he’s an ex-corporate executive from a family in a long line of ohio agriculture & industry magnates.

bill also owns a second restaurant -dale’s bar & grill- in maumee, ohio

now there’s nothing wrong with any of this so far. lots of good people lost countless businesses in the last year and we should rightfully be both angry and sympathetic about that. but that sentiment is powerful, and attracts vultures

because in addition to not revealing that bill anderson is not just some random dude who got hammered by covid, what they don’t tell you is bill enjoyed turning his restaurants into covid petri dishes

bill also thinks the covid death count is faked

so, ok, fine, some local news shop fell for the “poor small business owner down on his luck” gag, it happens all the time. no big deal. but yesterday, two weeks later, bill’s tale of self-inflicted woe gets a second wind in the dispatch

yet again, the “who is bill anderson and what has he done to get here” element of bill’s story is mysteriously absent. bill blames stimulus payments for his downfall and not, you know, paying $11 an hour to bus tables inside a virus arboretum.

bill really, really, really wants us to know that the root cause of this tragedy is unemployment benefits & a $1400 stimulus

and as it always does, the dispatch story bleeds into the right wing ecosystem and is picked up by the nuttier fringe sites, where it continues to blossom into a cause cé·lè·bre. joe biden is ruining the little guy & his mom & pop shops!

A CONSEQUENCE OF GOVERNMENT COVID RELIEF CHECKS SWEET JESUS HAVE MERCY THE SOCIALISTS ARE AT IT AGAIN

ok so what, big deal, another outlet took the bait on poor regular ol’ bill. it happens, what are you gonna do, like, google the guy??? but see if you can guess what happens the next day

TA-DAAAAAA! (you totally guessed this, didn’t you, you jerk)

well at least it is not being repeated by actual congress people yet but ah you already saw this coming, didn’t you

and that’s how a dude who spent the last year trying to poison his woefully underpaid workers with a virus by purposefully violating basic safety measures turns “no one will work for me because I’m a crazy entitled dickhead” into “joe biden ruined my teeny tiny poor business”

and that’s how the gop media machine launders some random aristocrat from ohio into a policy platform of “government aid wrecks mom & pop”

wrapping up here, it took me maybe ten minutes of googling yesterday to unwind this whole thing. ten minutes. at any point along the way, any node of the right wing media system that adopted bill as their new pet cause could’ve just googled the guy. but that would ruin the fun.