Jim Hoft is heading for some kind of derp implosion, folks. He’s been posting fake stories nearly every day as the election gets closer, and today he fell for a scam from one of those fake news sites (“Your News Wire,” an obviously shady name if there ever was one) saying that Michelle Obama had deleted all her tweets about Hillary Clinton.

Of course, she didn’t. And Hoft could have discovered this if he’d done the bare minimum of fact-checking and actually looked at her Twitter timeline. Instead he ran with the story right away, with the screaming illiterate headline: Rats Jump Ship=> Michelle Obama Did Scrubs Hillary Clinton from Twitter History?

The rats are jumping ship.

Michelle Obama deletes Hillary tweets from her timeline.

Has @MichelleObama deleted her tweets for the past 3 and a half years?

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 1, 2016

Barrack Obama’s Husband Michelle Scrubs Hillary Clinton From Twitter History.

The tide has turned.#MAGAhttps://t.co/dmH239cdiv

— Spooky Halley ︻╦╤─ (@HalleyBorderCol) November 1, 2016

Michelle deleted Hillary’s tweets back to 2013.

And this time, Hoft’s ridiculous fake story (that came through Alex Jones crony Paul Joseph Watson) made it up to Fox News ranter Sean Hannity again: Fake story about Obamas, Hillary Clinton ensnares Sean Hannity.

Sean Hannity on Tuesday embraced a piece of fake news about President Obama deleting endorsements of Hillary Clinton from his Twitter account.

Hannity used the made-up news to claim that President Obama’s legacy might be “jail.” The deleted-tweets claim could have been disproven by a quick Twitter search.

The progression of events illustrates how fake news stories expand and spread from fringe web sites to nationally syndicated radio shows with millions of listeners. In this case, the fake news originated on a dubious site called “Your News Wire,” which publishes a mix of true, slanted and made-up news. Then, like a game of telephone, by the time the story got to Hannity, even the fake facts were wrong.

The site claimed that “Michelle Obama has scrubbed all references to Hillary Clinton from both of her Twitter accounts” and implied that it was the result of FBI investigations into Clinton.

A thicket of far-right-wing web sites picked up the story and ran with it. Red State Watcher said the news was “breaking!” and News Ninja 2012 said it was “suspicious.” “The rats are jumping ship,” The Gateway Pundit wrote.

Right wing bloggers and hacks like Hannity have now completely abandoned any pretense of caring about facts or reality, folks. They’re desperate, and going for broke. The truth about this story has been out for several hours, but Hoft has yet to correct his post. (And he probably won’t, because who cares?)

The thing is, the only people who are going to read and believe this stuff are loons who already hate Hillary and Michelle with the heat of a supernova, so it really has very little effect all on its own. But with Hillary Clinton, we’re seeing the cumulative effects of thousands of these fake stories repeated over and over for decades until even some people who should know better start semi-believing them.