Thousands of idiots re-Tweet a 50 year old KKK photo linking it to recent Trump rally

I remember a line from one of those really terrible Men in Black films where I think it was one of the agents said "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."

This is on full display when a really old picture of a billboard in Smithfield, North Carolina was presented right around the time that DJT did a rally near there and I don't care enough to look into who originally posted it, but it was shared far and wide on the internet as if it was taken in the same week that Trump was visiting the area.

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I think that a person with some level of intelligence would ask, why is the picture in black and white and why does it look really old? Unfortunately that is not the level of smart we are dealing with when it comes to social media and the way in which people consume it without even bothering to see if any of it is factual.

One user posted the photo with the caption

"This is Johnston County NC where trump held his rally last night, Explain how the gop is not a safe haven for white supremests" (sic)

Others posted a potentially photoshopped image of a similar sign and tried to convince their followers that this was a sign that was still standing there now, even though it was taken down at least 45 years ago.

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This Tweet, which has since been deleted but thanks to the waybackmachine.com internet archives we can still be privy to the lunacy that is a lot of people out there. There were comments such as "Why is this still legal in the United States" and then they tagged the Justice Department as if they were going to respond.

The amount of widespread sharing that this achieved was even enough to force the hand of various fact-checking websites to state the obvious about how while this billboard did in fact stand in the same county as the recent Trump rally, that the photo was taken nearly 50 years prior to the event. It must have given whoever was forced to write this at USA TODAY to have a migraine the entire time since it wasn't possible for the reporter to link this to Trump or any other conservative.

Thankfully, I can find no media outlet that covered the viral Tweet in any serious manner probably because it would have shown what I have felt for a very long time: That Twitter and most other mainstream social media sites are just a dumpster-fire of stupidity.

If you or anyone you know is getting their news from Twitter or FB/IG, I think it might be time for an intervention. However, I do realize that someone that actually does this, is probably too far down the political allegiance wormhole to ever reverse course. They see what they want to see, and nothing else.

_{More like "a lot of people"}