Screenshots from a viral video showing a girl hitting a politician in the head with a water balloon
Video supposedly showing former vice president Mike Pence getting hit in the head with a water balloon has gone viral. Some people have even said the girl in the video should receive the Cy Young Award, given each year to the best pitchers in Major League Baseball. But that’s not Pence getting hit.
The video has over 1.2 million views on Twitter alone and has been shared by sports sites like SBNation. But if you take a closer look at the man who gets knocked in the head, it’s not the former vice president.
Who is the unfortunate soul getting clocked with a water balloon? It’s Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman who was taking part in a Fourth of July parade in New York where people with thousands of water balloons lined the streets.
The water balloons at the parade on Long Island are all in good fun and Blakeman himself even shared the video on Facebook with the caption, “The New York Yankees and New York Mets could certainly use her!”
There are plenty of images and videos with fake content going viral recently, including a Truth Social post where Donald Trump seems to call his Republican presidential opponent a virgin; a video where a man on an American Airlines flight said he saw a Reptilian creature wink at him; and an image where Ron DeSantis appears to give a rather awkward quote in his high school yearbook. But they’re all fake.
Even a viral story about boating deaths in Alabama spread far and wide this week, claiming that at least four people had died due to a TikTok challenge. In reality, none of the deaths had anything to do with TikTok, as the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency told me on Tuesday.
The real Mike Pence spent Friday fielding questions from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa. Pence, who’s running to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024, reportedly tried to walk a tightrope about the insurrection on January 6th, in an effort not to alienate supporters of Donald Trump.
“I’ve never used the word insurrection, Tucker, over the last two years, but it was a riot that took place at the Capitol that day,” Pence said, according to NBC News.
But it seems like Pence didn’t exactly illicit a strong reaction from the crowd in any way. Pence said that he supported Ukraine in that country’s fight against a Russian invasion, and paused awkwardly, apparently to get applause from the crowd.
As you can hear in the video, it sounds like one person clapped. Pence is currently polling at third place among Republicans, according to a national average of polls done by FiveThirtyEight, with just 7% of likely voters saying they want him to be president. Former president Donald Trump is in the lead with 49% of Republicans supporting him, and DeSantis is in second with just 21%.
