The good news is that popular vote loser Donald Trump has sources other than Fox & Friends for keeping up with what's happening in the world. The bad news is his other source is conspiracy-theory loving One America News Network (OANN), and it's leading to potential disputes with our allies.
Trump got on the tweet machine Friday morning to spread some fake news, courtesy of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
That's minutes after OANN ran a chyron which read, "Report: U.K. Crime Rises 13% Annually Amid Spread Of Radical Islamic Terror." Which is very much fake news. Here's The Guardian on the story:
The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), in its quarterly update on crime on Thursday, reported a 13% increase in all police-recorded offences across England and Wales.
The ONS said police had recorded 5.2m offences in the year to June, including gun crime, knife crime, robberies, sexual offences, stalking and harassment, burglary and car crime.
The report barely mentions terrorism other than to refer on one occasion to the impact recent terrorist attacks in Britain had on the headline murder rate. Thirty-five people were killed in the incidents in London and Manchester.
Trump's tweet immediately was amplified up by far-right nationalist commenters in the U.K. "The newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins quoted Trump's tweet with a reference to 'child rape squads' which was in turn retweeted by Paul Watson, the alt-right conspiracy theorist." Meanwhile Liberal Democrat, Labor, and Green Members of Parliament challenged Trump, calling him "ignorant" and blasting him for "misleading and spreading fear" which is causing hate crimes to increase, "fuelled by the kind of populist xenophobia you peddle." Another demanded that Prime Minister Theresa May "publicly condemn this outright fearmongering."