Fake MAGA hat story riles up Love Connection host
Conservative pundit and former game show host Chuck Woolery got his more than 600,000 Twitter followers fuming Monday with a tweet claiming that budget airline Frontier Airlines was booting innocent Trump supporters off their planes for wearing MAGA hats.
Woolery’s tweet inspired a wave of angry tweets at Frontier’s Twitter account, articles across the right-wing blogosphere, promises to boycott the airline, and vows to wear even more MAGA hats onto Frontier flights. As it turns out, the story Woolery is promoting is filled with inaccuracies.
In Woolery’s telling, a young man had been booted from a Frontier plane solely for wearing the red hat.
“So a kid wearing a MAGA hat gets on a Frontier Flight,” Woolery wrote. “He is verbally attacked by to (sic) passengers. Instead of them being thrown off the flight, Frontier decides he’s the bad guy? Thank you for not flying Frontier Air Lines.”
So a kid wearing a MAGA hat gets on a Frontier Flight. He is verbally attacked by to passengers. Instead of them being thrown off the flight, Frontier decides he's the bad guy? Thank you for not flying Frontier Air Lines.
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) September 9, 2019
The first thing Woolery’s tweet misses is that the alleged incident happened in January and already made the rounds on the conservative blogosphere once. Back then, a minor MAGA personality calling himself Kenny Cool complained in a video that he had been kicked off a Frontier plane.
In his video, Cool said he entered the plane and announced “MAGA, Trump 2020, Roger Stone is an innocent man.” Then Cool notes that this was the second time he’d been kicked off a plane over the hat—another sign that Cool’s hat might not actually be the problem here.
In January, Frontier told me in an email that Cool had been booted from the flight for not for his hat, but for “exhibiting threatening behavior.”
“A customer was agitating fellow passengers and being argumentative and disruptive to the point that our flight crew, and even other passengers, asked him to stop,” a Frontier spokesperson told me in a statement. “Frontier does not tolerate behavior that could jeopardize safety of flight. The passenger was deplaned because he was exhibiting threatening behavior and would not follow crewmember instructions to stop.” |
