Claims That Paid Anti-Trump Protesters Were Bussed into Austin Are Totally False

Okay, let’s debunk!

Here is a tweet that has, at post time, gotten 17,000 retweets:

Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI

— erictucker (@erictucker) November 10, 2016

The person behind the tweet, who seems to go by Eric Tucker, wrote that the anti-Donald Trump protests that have been sweeping the country were not necessarily organic — at least not in Austin, Texas.

He claimed the buses were full of protesters who were brought in to make it look like the anti-Trump sentiment in Austin was strong. Too bad those busses were full of people heading to the Tableau Conference, which has about 11,000 attendees this year.

Tucker himself seems to have accepted this…

I strongly value the truth. There’s a pretty good case those busses were for a conference by @tableau. @fox7austin https://t.co/dHxRg8GNZJ

— erictucker (@erictucker) November 11, 2016

…but has yet to delete his original tweet, which will continue picking up steam in spite of his amendment.

That tweet has 19 retweets compared to his original, false one, which you already know sits at about 17,000. He doesn’t seem to be very remorseful.

@katherine_wei25 @fox7austin There’s a lot of fear out there. It’s too easy for us to believe many things. Why? So many are playing dirty.

— erictucker (@erictucker) November 11, 2016

The original tweet was picked up by The Gateway Pundit, which is probably how it gained so much traction. (This is not at all the first time Gateway Pundit fell for a totally fake tweet and blasted it out as some sort of scandal, although at least ths time, the person who made the tweet seems to have been being sincere.)

Snopes, which did a thorough debunking, slipped in this savage Gateway Pundit burn:

We will update this post if Tucker decides to take down his tweet or if we can figure out how an eight-year-old account with 913 followers and 62 previous tweets was able to get so many people (like Gateway Pundit‘s Jim Hoft) to notice a set of far-away pictures of some buses.

[image: screengrab]

Lindsey: Twitter. Facebook.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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