Fox News host Harris Faulkner told a whopper of a lie when she claimed during a monologue that the U.S. didn't shut down schools during the Spanish flu, so she could attack the CDC and support anti-vaxxers.
Guest-hosting in Tucker Carlson's time-slot, Faulkner launched into an American exceptionalism soliloquy that stretched to WWII, D-Day and the Omaha offensive.
"We proved America is exceptional, and our exceptionalism belongs to each of us. It’s inside of us. It’s our shared history. We sacrifice and then we move on through our bravery toward freedom, over and over,” Faulkner huffed.
And then Carlson's ghost poked through and possessed her.
And sometimes we make dangerously bad decisions like pandemic lockdowns and keeping our own children home from schools when a virus was hurting them far less often than adults.
You know, we didn't actually close schools in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic.
We didn't even have penicillin back then.
We did sacrifice.
We suffered, but then we pressed on.
Our enemies hate us for surviving, but they would love to be like us.
A couple of items here: Penicillin doesn't treat the flu. And kids infect adults, who did suffer and die. But I digress.
Faulkner's Spanish flu lie was debunked almost as fast as she uttered the false words. In fact, her lie was so blatant that even Twitter added a fact-check to Acyn's tweet of the lie.
There is no excuse for this outrageous lie because in this day and age, an eight-year-old can take an iPad, do a quick Google search and find out the truth about the Spanish flu in ten seconds.
The Daily Beast reported: "In fact, a simple internet search reveals Faulkner’s error. A July 2020 PBS NewsHour column, for instance, notes that during the 1918-19 pandemic, “the majority of public schools were closed for weeks to months on end.”
An estimated 50 million across the globe and around 675,000 people were estimated to have died from the Spanish flu, Harris. Military bases were shut down and this was in the middle of World War I.
Why would Faulkner tell such a tall tale?
For one thing, Tucker Carlson hosted the most pernicious COVID deniers on his program and attacked all efforts Dr. Fauci and the CDC took to save lives, while lying through his teeth about everything COVID-related.
Second, the MAGA movement is so bankrupt that the only way to defend its actions and beliefs is to rewrite history with fiction, and substitute conspiracy for fact.
Harris Faulkner knows better, but the lure of Tucker's megabucks was just too much, so she lied. What a bankrupt enterprise Fox News is.
