Early on Monday, Breitbart News and Fox News put out a story that the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team “disrespected WWII veteran before send-off match.” How did the entire U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team accomplish this feat? According to the braintrust that is Fox News, the entire team “turned their backs” to a 98-year-old WWII veteran Pete DuPré, who was playing the national anthem on a harmonica, before the start of an Olympic “send-off” match against Mexico. Whoa! You would think that having a war veteran playing the national anthem would insulate the fragile flag of our country from the slings and arrows of liberal protests. The story, which sounded terrible, and frankly makes no sense as a form of protest, wasn’t true. At all. It was in fact 100% false. Another way to say that would be to say it was one hundred percent false, and a final way to write that would be to say it was a lie. 

You see, when the national anthem plays, most sports team members do various things. Some mouth the words of the national anthem, some put their hands to their hearts, some people face a flag. In a stadium there are a lot of flags, and signs with flags on them. In fact, in virtually all modern stadiums there is no less than one enormous video screen that usually shows an image of said flag as the anthem plays. As U.S. Soccer Federation Chief Communications Officer Neil Buethe tried to explain to right-wing misinformation machine the Daily Caller, “Some of the players were simply looking at the flag flowing on a pole in the stadium in that direction. They were not looking away from Pete as he played the national anthem.”

Right-wing outlets, having gotten a boatload of clicks out of their incendiary claims, didn’t apologize for painting members of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team as disrespectful ingrates. In fact, they strung out the lie they had created as long as possible, and then justified their lie by saying people believed the lie because it could have been true.

Former Acting Director of the United States National Intelligence under Trump Richard Grenell tweeted “Every woman on the Mexican Soccer Team faced the flag & sang the Mexican National anthem. Several woman on the U.S. Soccer team turned away from the US flag - while a 92 year old Veteran played the anthem on a harmonica. Why didn’t @USWNT show the women turning away?” This is the former director of National Intelligence? Grenell’s Twitter bio says he is an “imperfect follower of Christ.” Somehow saying that makes you more of a failure in your following of anything.

As CNN’s Daniel Dale covered very well, the evolution of how right-wing outlets tried to squeeze out their misinformation as it became more and more clear that their story was entirely bogus, shows the true scope of their dishonesty.

Most importantly, the two players of color sort of called out in those images, happen to also be two members of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team who were facing veteran DuPré. One might even wonder if conservatives’ misreading of this situation was a touch … racist?

Then, Tuesday morning, Fox News decided to cover the response, and instead of saying that reports were entirely wrong, Fox News host Dunderhead gave a wishy-washy response saying it’s hard to tell what happened, and while it seems like nothing at all happened, maybe it’s okay that right wingers are racist and have knee-jerk reactions to easily debunked and irrational conspiracy theories. Clay Travis, a conservative radio host, came on to explain that while the story was absolutely a lie: “I think that this is emblematic of where we are in sports now. Where a huge percentage of American sports fans totally think it’s believable” that this would happen.

He goes on to say that he watched the video and it was “a little bit confusing,” but “unfortunately,” that’s the perception. This perception, created entirely by the right, for the right, based on disinformation is definitely unfortunate. But let’s be clear on what Travis and Fox News are saying here. The original report, that the “entire” U.S. Women’s Soccer Team turned their back to, in some vague form of protest, a 98-year-old World War II veteran, was simply the result of confusion and oversensitive snowflake-type right-wing folks’ belief that such a thing can happen. At the same time, the confusion as to whether or not the “entire” team distracted the DuPré was confusing as the video, which you can watch below in under two minutes very clearly shows that this isn’t a thing that is happening at all.

Gotcha. The phrase “drink the Kool-Aid,” means to drink poison knowingly. It also means to drink down poison without critical thinking simply because someone told you to. While false stories like this one about the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team will not kill anybody, don’t fool yourself, it is poison.

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