>Despite aiming to write stories no-one would believe, James McDaniel found Trump supporters who believed that Barack Obama had been plotting a coup from a secret bunker near the White House, and that the British singer Adele had demanded he be jailed for such treachery.
>He decided to come clean after seeing the furious, unquestioning reaction when he falsely alleged that actress Whoopi Goldberg had said Carryn Owens, the widow of a dead US serviceman, had been “just looking for attention” when she attended Donald Trump’s speech to Congress.
>“When I started this site I had no idea that the stories would garner this much attention.
>“While writing them, I was aiming for stories that no one would believe, but rather would be satirical in an age where disinformation is so prevalent.
>“Just for fun, I decided to post some of the stories in Trump fan groups on Facebook to see the reactions.
>“To my surprise, the Trump masses embraced my stories as fact, almost universally. It seemed that there wasn’t anything I could write that was too wild or outrageous to be believed by this particular audience.
>“If I wrote about CNN being fake news and connected to ISIS, readers would agree wholeheartedly with my fabricated article. If I wrote about a black liberal or Obama supposedly saying something controversial, the response was unbridled racism and hatred. When I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s new emails that proved she was a child sacrificing maniac, people screamed for her head.”
>Writing after Mr Trump has himself accused mainstream media outlets including CNN of being “fake news” and “enemies of the people”, he added: “It’s truly a frightening time when a group of people screaming, “FAKE NEWS!” at the top of their lungs, live, eat and sleep falsehoods.”
