I've been writing fake news for six months. It's way too easy to dupe the right on the Internet.

But the huge breakthrough came with the Public Policy Polling memo. When PPP released a poll showing a major Clinton lead in Florida, I downloaded their PDF, turned it into a Word document and edited it. Heavily.

All the polling mythology went into it. Trump was up by huge numbers. The more corrupt Hillary was, the more Democrats loved her, and so on. It was absurd. The spelling was iffy—I save time by not editing anything—but it had a section in it where the author, at wit’s end, complains about college pollsters, like Quinnipiac’s co-eds and Monmouth’s “Bernie-Grade Weed.”

It went super-viral. One of the most accidentally brilliant things I did was set up a Scribd document-sharing account. I had seen legal docs and such posted there so that was what I did. I could have hosted it natively—but it seemed more “authentic” to put it on the site and post a link.

What I didn’t realize was that people could and did find the Scribd document without going to RealTrueNews first—or, often, at all. This accidentally enhanced its credibility because it didn’t come from a clearly bogus website.