Reform leader on Huntingdonshire District Council Ryan Coogan has been caught in a race-baiting lie about a French woman who went viral after trying to stop looters. Or, for those in the mood to be generous, he fell for a race-baiting fake that he thought he could exploit to fan hatred of refugees and propagated a lie instead of coming up with it himself.
The woman tried to turn away the thieves from a FranPrix supermarket in Nice, France. But Coogan then tried to claim she had also participated in anti-racist protests in the UK, concluding that her ‘welcome’ for immigrants had come back to bite her by raiding her “posh boutique”:
Lie 1 – as already noted, the “posh boutique” was a supermarket and doesn’t belong to the woman. Lie 2 – Coogan’s supposed ‘gotcha’ image is obviously AI-generated, as it shows the woman with her headband and glasses in exactly the same position as the supermarket footage. Thanks to the magic of the internet, it’s even possible to identify the 2016 original that the fake image was made from, which is for sale on Alamy and is shown in its watermarked form below:
Unsurprisingly, the far-right is so desperate to whip up racism to hide its billionaire-licking reality that lies trip from its collective tongue.
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Cllr Coogan – who has previously argued against solar panels by claiming they stop the earth sweating – is, allegedly, not exactly a novice when it comes to political lies – or getting caught out. Just a couple of weeks ago, he was arrested on suspicion of making false statements on election papers. He has been bailed, freeing him up to tell porkies about French women and British anti-racists. He’s not alone in his use of the faked image, however. Dim racists around the world have been sharing it to make similar, and similarly easy to debunk, points.
Huntingdonshire District Council declined to comment on Coogan’s arrest.
Well, I never! A Deform council leader who’s a racist and a liar.
What would his leader think?