Texas governor embarrassingly fooled by fake article attacking Garth Brooks

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) appears to have been fooled by a parody article that said country singer Garth Brooks was “booed off stage” for defending LGBTQ+ people. The fake article didn’t even refer to a real city in Texas.

“Garth Brooks Booed Off Stage at 123rd Annual Texas Country Jamboree,” Abbott wrote, sharing the headline of an article in the Dunning-Kruger Times, a parody website. The website is named for the Dunning-Kruger effect, “whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge,” according to Wikipedia.

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“Go woke. Go broke,” Abbott continued. “Garth called his conservative fans. ‘as**oles’ Good job Texas.”

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The tweet has been deleted but Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) caught it.

Brooks did not call conservatives “as**oles.” What Abbott is referring to is comments made by the country music star earlier this month in which he said that he would serve Bud Light at his new bar in Nashville, Tennessee. Anti-LGBTQ+ activists have attacked that brand of beer for months because of a 50-second Instagram video made by trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney where she showed off a custom beer can.

“I want [my bar] to be a place you feel safe in. I want it to be a place where you feel like there are manners and people like one another,” Brooks said in a panel discussion at Billboard Country Live. “And yes, we’re going to serve every brand of beer. We just are. It’s not our decision to make. Our thing is this: If you [are let] into this house, love one another. If you’re an as**ole, there are plenty of other places on lower Broadway.”

The Dunning-Kruger Times has several parody articles attacking Brooks. The article in question refers to the “123rd Annual Texas Country Jamboree in Hambriston [Texas].” Snopes could find no evidence that such an event exists, that there is a city in Texas called Hambriston, or that Brooks recently participated in a similarly-named event.

There are a few signs that the article is a parody beyond the fake event and the fake city. It quotes Nashville Mayor “Art Tubolls” – the mayor of Nashville is actually John Cooper (D) – as saying that “leftists” want to “flash their fake breasts in front of children.” It also says that San Francisco is a city “where drug addicts poop on veterans regularly.”

Abbott has built a career on attacking LGBTQ+ equality, going so far as to sign a law protecting Chick-fil-A from “religious discrimination” because of their previous stance against LGBTQ+ rights. This year alone Texas has banned transgender people from participating in college sports and accessing age-appropriate gender-affirming care. Last year, Abbott tried to use the power of the state to investigate the supportive parents of trans kids as child abusers.