Claims that two busses were stopped near the Texas border full of illegal immigrants carrying Beto signs are spreading across Twitter.
The claim seems to have emerged after a conservative New York Times bestselling author and former history professor Larry Schweikart tweeted the below message –
Hearing two busses near TX border stopped with “Beto” signs, full of illegals, each had $100 and were headed to the polls.
At the time of writing, Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke is locked in a midterm election battle for the US Senate against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz.
Despite the claim, Schweikart failed to provide any sources to back-up this claim, and any online search fails to provide any reputable sources reporting on what would be a significant incident to occur on Midterm election day.
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When contacted by Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News about where he heard the story, Schweikart reportedly responded –
You gotta look on freerepublic.com to find that, that’s where I found it… It was a header of an article
And then
Well, it’s just a report. Hey, fake news, right?
Schweikart then claimed he was only “countering” fake news coming from “the other side”, quoting The New York Times as never retracting any of their articles.
A search of the website freerepublic.com doesn’t turn up any articles confirming the story.
Schweikart has over 57,000 followers at the time of writing, and at the time we went to publication, his tweet is still up and has accumulated over 2,700 retweets.