No doubt you’ve seen a story going around in the past couple of hours (let’s face it, you probably saw it on Tumblr) about a town called DeQuincy, LA, that allegedly made public displays of twerking a jail-able offense. Yeah, guess what? They didn’t, and it isn’t. Stop believing everything the Internet tells you.
According to the story, an imaginary mayor of DeQuincy, LA named Maynard Wilkens went onto CNN to explain, “Twerking is a defiant act against Jesus and his teachings[…] We will still allow dancing in DeQuincy, just no jigglin’, shakin’ and ‘dry humping’ anywhere in our city limits.” The real mayor of DeQuincy, Lawrence Henagan, did no such thing. It never happened at all. There is no such record on the books.
So where did this completely bogus tale come from? It first “broke” on a website known as the National Report, which you don’t even need to look at for more than three seconds to know that it is not at all a place for real news. First of all, its top graphic says it’s being written by Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin, which is definitely not true. Secondly, here are some of the site’s most recent headlines:
Clearly none of these things are actually true, either — so this is perhaps meant to be a satirical website in the vein of the Onion, but without any of the actual wit or humor (although the Mars casino joke is admittedly not too bad).
This is the third time that the small Louisiana town, which only has a population of about 4,000 people, has featured prominently in a completely made-up news piece. The first story, which claimed that the town was looking to ban Koreans from living there, came from a website called “Super Official News.” This site puts out many of the same stories as the National Report verbatim, including the twerking one and the Gay-to-Straight school curriculum one that we happened to mention above. The second story claimed that DeQuincy would be issuing handguns to all its students — this one also came from the National Report. It would appear that the writers of the National Report and Super Official News (who we suspect are probably the same people) have a weird bone to pick with DeQuincy. And with, you know, real information and truth.
The moral of the story here: don’t trust a sensationalist story you’ve come across just because it looks like it’s coming from an official source, because it’s probably not real. That’s what gets so many clowns in trouble with Onion articles in the first place, after all. Use your brains, guys!
(via KATC, image via Tim Baker)
- Twerk has been added to the dictionary, though. That actually happened
- Louisiana just can not catch a break, huh?
- What if these these websites were run by the Discovery Channel?
