Oh, my dog.
Ron DeSantis’ publicist Christina Pushaw was ridiculed on social media this week after tweeting fake news about a homosexual and anti-gay dachshund.
On Monday, the conservative spokeswoman shared on Twitter a screenshot of a story, allegedly written by Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, titled “This dog is the new face of online homophobia.”
The article, dated May 13, included blurb that “internet trolls” have turned the dog “into a viral homophobic meme — and its gay owners don’t know what to do.”
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“More cutting-edge journalism from the 49-year-old Washington Post activist infamous for showing up masked at random people’s doorsteps and slipping into teenage tiktok DMs,” Pushaw wrote.
She was likely referring to a story written by Lorenz last month, in which she exposed the woman behind Libs of TikTok, a social media account seen as a driving force in the anti-LGBTQ movement in the United States.
The story, however, was wrong. And the sweet dog in the photo was a white dachshund named Whitney Chewston, according to the Know Your Meme website.
In an interview with the website in March, Whitney’s owners Ben Campbell and Logan Hickman said she was definitely “not homophobic in real life.”
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Pushaw, whose Twitter bio reads “here to debunk fake stories about Florida and @GovRonDeSantis,” apparently didn’t get the joke and used the fake post to poke fun at Lorenz.
It didn’t go so well.
The Washington Post’s senior political reporter Aaron Blake retweeted Pushaw’s post, explaining that none of it was true. “This is a title cut and pasted onto our template from another website,” he wrote.
Other Twitter users were less forgiving.
Lorenz joined in the fun, writing on Monday that she would “actually write this article” if she could hit 500,000 Twitter followers.
On Tuesday, she realized that Pushaw had apparently been duped by the fake news.
“Oh my god, she thinks it’s real”, she tweeted. “I laugh so much.”