The imbeciles in question aren’t randos plucked from obscurity for a man-on-the-street interview.

They’re the former chief anchor of a major broadcast news network and a member of the editorial board of the country’s most esteemed newspaper.

This travesty began with a tweet, as so many modern travesties do, circulated to guffaws as the returns came in on Super Tuesday:

this is the funniest thing i've ever seen pic.twitter.com/FxqqMbcuk9 — Ex-Tank Mechanic (@Oliver_Stacks) March 4, 2020

The crack MSNBC news team caught wind of it too, although evidently they didn’t realize why it was circulating.

If you’re reading this right now and you’re six years old and a little dazzled by the Big Numbers, let me simplify. Bloomberg spent $600 million or so on the campaign; if instead he took that money and wanted to give a certain number of people $1 million each, all we’d have to do is divide 600 by 1 to see how many people he could gift.

What do you get when you divide any number by 1?

If you’re still struggling with the answer, either you haven’t reached that lesson yet in your first-grade math textbook or you’re a halfwit. Guess what the answer is with these two. Watch:

“Mike Bloomberg spent enough on his campaign to give every American $1 million.” @BWilliams on @11thHour @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/iBsWvqEIHf — Bad Econ Takes (@BadEconTakes) March 6, 2020

Suddenly the NYT’s endorsement of Elizabeth Warren makes sense.

I agree with Charles Cooke that it simply cannot be that Brian Williams and Mara Gay are organically this stupid. They know what 600/1 is. But their brains shut off because they were offered this elementary math problem in the context of a narrative both yearn to believe, that the mega-rich like Bloomberg have so much wealth that they could afford to make literally everyone else rich if they wanted to.

I rdon't want to pile on about the Bloomie Gives Everyone a Million thing, but I am fascinated by the fact that, totally disregarding the maths, it *sounded intuitive* to them. Makes me understand the wealth inequality debate more to know some people think that seems plausible. — Mike Bird (@Birdyword) March 6, 2020

Says Cooke:

For Bloomberg to give $1 million to each American, he would have to be worth $327 trillion (in cash), which, for context, is around 17 times American GDP and about five-and-a-half thousand times what he’s actually worth. The scale of the error here is galactic. It’s also extremely telling. This, right here, is why so many left-leaning Americans think that “the billionaires” can pay for everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren was enthusiastically boosted by the media despite her ridiculous pretense that she could pay for a series of gargantuan initiatives without raising taxes on anyone but the extremely rich. It’s why Democrat after Democrat promises not to raise “middle class taxes” while promising programs that require the raising of middle class taxes. How did this bad tweet make it onto TV to be endorsed? Why did Mara Gay agree with it? Why didn’t Brian Williams notice? Because the people involved in this clip thought it was true. This is how they see the world.

If you liquidated Bloomberg’s total fortune of $60 billion and spread it across 330 million Americans, how much would we each receive? Answer: $181.82, a decent-sized grocery bill for a small family for a single week. God only knows what number Williams and Gay would spitball if you put that question to them.

The genius who got this ball rolling didn’t immediately give up on it, by the way, despite the viral mockery:

i lied this is the funniest thing i've ever seen https://t.co/NqCdUtw7qn pic.twitter.com/eZuaVlnFir — Ex-Tank Mechanic (@Oliver_Stacks) March 4, 2020

Here’s the real question. Why was this tweet on television? How did it inspire a conversation on MSNBC? The person who wrote it isn’t some well-known expert on finance or economics, obviously. It’s not a hot-take opinion either of the sort that might be seized upon for some idle chatter during a lull in an hour-long cable news program. It’s an embarrassingly false assertion of fact. And no, I don’t believe that Williams and Gay promoted it knowing it was false. Some of their dimwit viewers might have accepted their read at face value but the vast majority of us have in fact completed first-grade math and are windmill-dunking on them for their idiocy today. They wouldn’t have willingly subjected themselves to humiliation on this order just to push disinformation that serves The Cause.

They did, mercifully, correct the error before the program was over. Exit question: How did this happen?