Most everyone apparently thinks Republican candidate for governor Walker Stapleton needs to say more about his great-grandfather and KKK leader. Denounce him. Apologize. Condemn the KKK. Express revulsion at racism. Slam white nationalists. Something.
Swirling on the fringe of Republican Walker Stapleton’s run for governor is the question of how, and if, he should address the fact that his great-grandfather, former Denver Mayor Benjamin F. Stapleton, was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado in the 1920s.
Denver congressional candidate Casper Stockham is accusing his Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep Diana DeGette (D-CO), of being a “white supremacist.”
Two 2016 GOP candidates, known for posting false and inflammatory information on Facebook, are running again in 2018.
If you read my columns, then you are probably familiar with Casper Stockham. He’s the former GOP congressional candidate who regularly posts 100% fake news on his Facebook wall and calls anyone who disagrees with him a racist.
I have to admit that it is hard to read what conservative officials post on Facebook sometimes. This morning was one of those days. I went looking for conservative reaction to the testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, in which she described warning Trump’s counsel that Michael T. Flynn was compromised by the Russians and had been lying to members of the administration, including the vice president.
Former GOP candidate for Congress Casper Stockham likes to lecture people about what is and isn’t fake news. Yesterday, he posted this on Facebook:
Casper Stockham unsuccessfully ran a campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Denver), and will likely run again in 2018. I’ve flagged a few of Casper’s more egregiously nutty posts, because if nothing else, he’s entertaining. Casper’s fake news beliefs are instructive, however, and represent a microcosm of how the GOP base consumes news. Here’s what he said on Facebook a few days ago:
State Sen. Vicki Marble (R-Ft. Collins) is no stranger to racial controversy. She came under fire in 2013 when she reinforced the stereotype of African Americans eating fried chicken as a reason that many of them live in poverty. In the same rant, she proclaimed that Mexican Americans eat vegetables until they move to the United States, despite the fact that Mexico has a higher rate of obesity than the United States.
The debate about false information on social media frequently bumps up against one question in particular: How are we defining “fake news”? And should that definition include “news” that can’t be neatly classified as either fact or fiction, but instead falls somewhere in the middle?