Even Snopes Is Exasperated With Dumb Mt. McKinley/Denali Conspiracy Theories

Today, in the Year of our Lord 2015, the heroically patient myth debunkers at Snopes.com have been forced to dismantle the rumor that Mount McKinley is now called “Denali” again because it means “black power” in “Kenyan.” If every word of that sentence made your bullshit alarm go off, congratulations, you have at least ten firing synapses in your brain.

As Snopes notes, the claim that “Denali” means “black power” started spreading via Facebook meme, always a reliable sign of news that’s not total bullshit. Specifically, we found, it spread via a Facebook page that is clearly the work of tireless and not too subtle trolls, Southern Baptists for Todd Kincannon 7. (Todd Kincannon, as you’ll recall, was the South Carolina GOP’s executive director, but is better known for being a hateful asshole on Twitter and getting arrested on domestic violence charges.)

Southern Baptists for Todd Kincannon’s tagline is, “We encourage Mr. Kincannon to continue to speak out on behalf of conservative Christians everywhere.” It’s composed entirely of ridiculous memes, meant to troll gullible conservatives into sharing them and gullible liberals into yelling about them:

The “Denali” one is more of the same:

Just to run through this real quick, for anyone still catching up: There’s no such language as “Kenyan,” Denali is the name Native Alaskans always used for the mountain, and re-naming it after William McKinley, who never stepped foot in Alaska and wasn’t much of a mountain-climber, was always a weird choice.

There are maybe five people tops who actually took the meme seriously:

But enough that Snopes felt moved to clear things up, and with a tinge of delightful exasperation (“This simply isn’t true”) that we, personally, really enjoyed.

Photo via AP Images