There’s an email going around which says “the White House is quietly using a little known provision of the [Obamacare] law to roll out a nationwide network of free gas stations for minorities and the poor.”
The email cites its source as an article titled “Government Opening Free Gas Stations in Poor Neighborhoods,” by an anonymous and unidentified author (always suspicious) on a website called The Daily Currant.
The article refers to its source as a column in The Detroit News written by Nolan Finley. But the Daily Currant piece does not provide an embedded link to its source — another suspicious sign.
Don’t fall for it. It’s a hoax.
How do I know?
- Go to the article’s site on Daily Currant. Look at the headlines on the right of your screen: “NASA Finds Message From God on Mars”; “Pope Benedict Comes Out As Gay”; “Selena Gomez says [Justin] Bieber Has ‘Tiny Weird Penis’”; “House Republicans Schedule Obama Impeachment Hearings.” Daily Currant is a satire website, like the more famous Daily Onion that Daily Currant clearly is trying to mimic.
- I went on the Detroit News website. Although there is a Nolan Finley, who is the editorial page editor of Detroit News, a search of the articles he’s written shows he has never written an alleged one on free gas stations.
Falling for hoaxes like this makes us conservatives look like fools.
While I understand that the news of Obama giving free gas to poor blacks appears plausible because of those free Obama phones, we need to exercise caution about such claims because they feed in to our preconceptions about Obama. And that is exactly what the unnamed cowardly Daily Currant author is exploiting.
So when you get that email about Obama giving free gas to poor blacks, send this post to your email correspondent and ask him/her to stop disseminating a hoax.
A big h/t to FOTM’s joworth for alerting me to this hoax!
~Eowyn
