Joe Kovacs credulously writes in a Jan. 5 WorldNetDaily article:
In the wake of Minnesota’s Somali daycare fraud, Craigslist has now removed a post advertising for child actors to help prove to government officials a Minneapolis daycare center is an actual business.
Liz Collin of Alpha News highlighted the posting Sunday evening, with a purported offer of $1,500 per day for three days.
The ad, which features poor English grammar in places, specifically stated:
“My family runs day care here in the city and have for over 5 years, until Monday when funding was cruelly ripped away without cause.
“Due to this insane poor decision clear in white supremacy, we had to close our doors immediately. We must prove we are a function day care to get the funding back. The issue is, the ENTIRE client base has already found new daycare services so we need to find new clients base quickly.
“To help hurry this state vetting processes, we are looking to hire 20 child actors for 3 days, while state is present on site.
“We pay up to $1500 actor, per day. If you are interest, please send your child’s age and a note of what makes your child a special actor. Submit phone number as well, as we will be doing quick phone interviews as part of hire proce
The extent of fact-checking Kovacs did on this ad was mostly limited to asking “X’s artificial intelligence Grok,” which said that “This aligns with MN daycare fraud probes.”
You will not be surprised to learn that this ad is a prank. From a more trustworthy media source:
The ad, which was posted Jan. 1 in Craigslist’s Hennepin County, Minnesota, section for general labor jobs, was bait for an online prank show, its cohost Joey LaFleur told The Associated Press.
“The show’s called Goofcon1 and it is a funny show,” LaFleur said. “We do pranks and stuff like that.”
He added the show received a “ton of responses” to the ad and said he and his two cohosts will be doing a live show Saturday where they will call people who expressed interest.
Screenshots of the ad were used in social media posts on multiple platforms, cited as proof of fraud at Minnesota day care centers. The posts gained tens of thousands of likes, shares and views.
[…]LaFleur said that in addition to being a prank show, Goofcon1 wants to protect against predators and call out conservatives who “don’t care about fact checking.”
Count Kovacs as among those right-wingers who don’t care about fact-checking, though he did cite a few anonymous social media commenters “suggesting the post itself is fraudulent.” Kovacs has yet to do a follow-up article declaring that the ad is, in fact, not real.
Kovacs has a bad habit of falling for content that adheres to his far-right agenda. We’ve caught him repeating claims in online videos of black people purportedly taking advantage of the welfare system that he made no apparent effort to find out whether the videos were actually AI-generated.