How a Satire Becomes a Hoax

On Friday blogger Kurt Nimmo, in a post entitled "Opposing Bush: A Form of Mental Illness?," picked up an item from the satirical Swift Report and treated it as a genuine news story:

"When the 109th Congress convenes in Washington in January, Senator Bill Frist, the first practicing physician elected to the Senate since 1928, plans to file a bill that would define 'political paranoia' as a mental disorder, paving the way for individuals who suffer from paranoid delusions regarding voter fraud, political persecution and FBI surveillance to receive Medicare reimbursement for any psychiatric treatment they receive," writes Hermione Slatkin, Medical Correspondent for the Swift Report. "Rick Smith, a spokesman for Senator Frist, says that the measure has a good chance of passing–something that can only help a portion of the population that is suffering significant distress."

"If you're still convinced that President Bush won the election because Republicans figured out a way to hack into electronic voting machines, you've obviously got a problem," says Smith. "If we can figure out a way to ease your suffering by getting you into therapy and onto medication, that's something that we hope the entire 109th Congress will support."

Nimmo, author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, connected the alleged bill to other political uses of psychiatry, citing an article of mine (which is how I happened to notice the post in the first place). Although he noted toward the end that "I could not find mention of Frist and the classification of 'political paranoia' after a lengthy Google news search," and "Rick Smith's above quote returned no results," he added: "This does not mean that Bill Frist and the Republicans do not consider the opposition–including more than a few Democrats–as mental cases and tinfoil hatters. Rush Limbaugh calls us nutters every day and millions of gullible Americans take what he says as gospel."

Gullible Americans clearly are not limited to Rush Limbaugh fans. This week Nimmo's little essay was reposted at Infoshop News and sf.indymedia.org. (Alan Cantwell at Conspiracy Planet also seems to have taken the Swift Report joke at face value.) I'm not sure whether the propagation of this unintentional hoax says more about 1) psychiatry, 2) Republican rhetoric, or 3) the leftist opposition.