Post Politics Now: Warnock and Walker to square off in highly anticipated debate in Georgia

Someone is “teaching pornography”? That’s an evolution from when I was in school, certainly.

But Cruz, who has a robust track record of sharing incorrect information online, couldn’t resist the implication. Here was another lefty media loser trying to conflate white supremacy and the far right! He was exactly the sort of person for whom the fake article was meant to serve as bait, and he bit.

That he thinks this is useful is a phenomenon on its own. A large segment of the political right in the United States sees memes and online chaff as part of the political debate. It’s a space in which cultural supremacy is still evolving — or, really, that’s big enough that one can perceive broad success even if you’re only carving out an objectively small portion of the conversation. The left can’t meme, the rallying cry goes, and the expectation is that the right can. That the most effective voices are the ones that can play in the social media space.

When his mistake became obvious (after it was pointed out to him, it seems, not after he decided to actually see if the article was too good to be true), he deleted the tweet. And then he rationalized having shared it in the most cliched way possible.

“Didn’t know it was fake,” he wrote in a subsequent tweet, as though he should not be expected, as a United States senator, to verify information he shares with his 5 million Twitter followers before doing so. And then: “You guys are so insane, it could easily have been real.”