The closer we get to the election the more desperate conspiracy nonsense seems to be erupting on the left. Last week I wrote about the progressives who were wondering aloud whether Trump was faking illness with the coronavirus to change the news cycle. That same conspiracy made a rebound briefly on Monday when Trump left the hospital. Yesterday there was a claim circulating on social media that Chris Christie was in the ICU on a ventilator because of his coronavirus diagnosis. Politifact pointed out that was false.
Today, we had a new bogus claim pop up which also involved President Trump and which some hinted might be the result of COVID-19. According to a bunch of blue-check progressives on Twitter today, a video of the president on the White House lawn was actually a fake. They claimed the clip was clearly shot in front of a green screen:
Is that a green screen?
— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) October 8, 2020
This idiots using a fucking green screen, now. That’s how dumb he thinks his followers are. https://t.co/Bd6qRlfJeC
— devon sawa (@DevonESawa) October 8, 2020
If we did green screen work this bad on a TV show our DP would resign in disgrace. https://t.co/Za3XD8OMCI
— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) October 8, 2020
Does this look like green-screen footage to anyone else, or is that just me? https://t.co/aaeRTgRMYS
— William LeGate (ig: @legate) (@williamlegate) October 8, 2020
Some suggested a reason for the use of green screen, i.e. Trump was too ill to go outside:
2/ Trump faked this video released today. It’s shot in front of a green screen, the background is fake & on 3-second loop. Is Trump so unwell that he can’t even step outside to film a video?
Attached is zoomed in video of the bushes to the right. On loop. pic.twitter.com/cVIUTu3qSk
— John Aravosis 🇺🇸🇬🇷🏳️🌈 (@aravosis) October 8, 2020
Why is the president filming in front of a green screen? https://t.co/gU3BuvRHB0
— Andrew Kimmel (@andrewkimmel) October 8, 2020
I think it's pretty clearly a green screen. The sharpness of the outline and the lighting. Also it's a very long way to bring a sick president to shoot something when you have the Rose Gardenl. https://t.co/bBZyb2m0Fs
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 8, 2020
This was so widespread that Mother Jones wrote about it: “Did Donald Trump Record His Latest Twitter Video in Front of a Green Screen?”
One of the people they noted was a believer in the green screen theory was Atlantic film critic Christopher Orr who wrote: “Why the digital background? It’s a sunny day in DC. This could have been filmed on the actual White House lawn.”
But eventually there was some pushback, in particular this guy who pretty convincingly proved there was no green screen involved:
And here's the whole video sped up to about 3 seconds. You can see the movement is continuous. The sun is moving across the sky for the whole duration of the video – as it tends to do. pic.twitter.com/3nNU3IXTd7
— Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) October 8, 2020
Another way we can tell it's very unlikely to be a green screen is the lighting.
He is lit with a high, very strong, hard light source with a fairly parallel beam… Like the sun.
Do to this with electric lights would require a very power source quite high up and far away. pic.twitter.com/Y2gydsBooT
— Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) October 8, 2020
So if they shot a real background, and shot the President in front of an outdoor green screen with similar lighting, they could still be green screening it.
But they're not.
Look at the motion blur here – it's heavily compressed, but is the same over his jacket and the BG pic.twitter.com/XGkbctspKx
— Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) October 8, 2020
I'm sure the keying and compositing teams from major VFX houses could pull together a pretty convincing "President on the White House lawn" shot, but I have zero faith that the White House staff could.
Nor is there any reason to think they would need to.
— Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) October 8, 2020
He went on to say that this was the left-wing equivalent of claims made by Sandy Hook deniers.
Also the compression glitches, lens distortions and perspective issues that people point to in these videos to prove Trump is faking this, are EXACTLY the same as the things Sandy Hook and Boston Bombing deniers point to in order to "prove" those events were faked.
Stop it.
— Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) October 8, 2020
That was enough to convince the Atlantic’s Christopher Orr:
As someone who thought the video looked bizarre and artificial, I appreciate this explanation for why that was. https://t.co/SxI9dkKQFb
— Christopher Orr (@OrrChris) October 8, 2020
As for Chris Hayes, he retweeted a link to this Buzzfeed story debunking the claim. And yet, despite having fallen for this just a few hours earlier he was confidently tweeting this (hat tip Just Karl):
I'll say what I've said many times: liberals and conservatives have all the same cognitive equipment, biases and hueristics. But for a bunch of cultural/political and institutional reasons one side got custody of the more reliable sources of knowledge in the epistemic divorce. https://t.co/IAhBwnDzFE
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 8, 2020
This isn’t the first time Hayes has fallen for a false claim that tickled his biases and it won’t be the last.
