If there is one night during the year when most of us usually think about scary stories, it is Halloween night. But this entire election season has been filled with Republicans telling tall tales meant to frighten the public without any basis in the truth. We’ve rounded some up to be on the lookout for, so you don’t get spooked.
SPOOK STORY #1: ISIS is collaborating with Mexican drug cartels to cross our borders. Georgia Republican Senate candidate David Perdue ran an ad claiming that ISIS would cross the border from Mexico and attack the United States. Tom Cotton, Republican Senate candidate in Arkansas, claimed that ISIS is collaborating with Mexican drug cartels to execute attacks in the United States. Numerous reviews have debunked these worries as “bogus” and “mostly false.”
SPOOK STORY #2: Liberals made up climate change to push their economic policies onto the American people. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal showed his Halloween spirit by claiming that climate change, a documented phenomenon that essentially all scientists agree is man-made, is actually a “Trojan horse” created by liberals to push their economic agenda.
SPOOK STORY #3: Common Core is a socialist conspiracy to turn your children gay. Republican Sen. Jim Bridenstine started the Common Core story competition by comparing the educational standards, which are supported by the American Federation of Teachers and dozens of other educational organizations, to socialism. Then Republican State Rep. Charles Van Zant claimed that Common Core will “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.” (For Rep. Van Zant, apparently, homosexuality is something to be feared as well.)
SPOOK STORY #4: Ebola in the United States can only be stopped by banning all travel from West Africa. Several GOP candidates for Senate and (haunted) House Republicans have ignored the advice of the nation’s top medical professionals and stoked Americans’ fear of the disease by pushing for travel restrictions between the United States and Ebola-stricken West Africa. Scott Brown, former Senator from Massachusetts and current candidate for Senator in New Hampshire, has run ads in his race warning that a porous southern border leaves the United States vulnerable to the disease.
SPOOK STORY #5: Beware of voter fraud. In pushing out voter suppression laws across the country — like the voter ID law in Texas that forced a judge to turn a 93-year-old veteran away from the polls — conservatives have stoked fears about voter fraud. The reality, however, is that claims of voter fraud are not supported by the facts.