The worst variation of this is people inventing and subsequently refuting an argument that some group of people allegedly made. It's almost becoming rare for someone to refute a political argument in a direct discussion.
I wonder if there is a way to fix this problem, kind of like a software patch for the nodes in a cluster. In this case though, the nodes seem to be resistant to patching, even if they might desire it...like there's some sort of other software (or something) preventing it.