Consider the case of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, subject of a House hearing in New York City on Monday. The media was quick to circle the wagons and “debunk” actual truths.
First up, it’s “false,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler claimed, that billionaire George Soros “funded Alvin Bragg.”
Except an anti-police group called the Color of Change PAC announced in May 2021 that they wanted to back Bragg’s candidacy for DA with $1 million. Days later, Soros cut Color of Change a check for $1 million.
Anyone can see exactly what happened here — yet the fact-checkers were more than happy to further demolish their credibility in arguing the contrary with pure semantics. The fact-checker’s case that Soros didn’t fund Bragg amounts to nothing more than “Soros didn’t fund him — the PAC did!”
Meanwhile, at PolitiFact, fact-checker Amy Sherman absurdly argued that because Soros’ contribution to the PAC wasn’t earmarked, then the “contributor and the candidate have no connection.”
Speaking of connections: Soros has donated $300,000 to the International Fact-Checking Network, which is owned by the Poynter Institute, of which PolitiFact is a subsidiary.
That settled, the “fact checkers” moved on to the fact that crime has increased under Bragg’s watch.
Glenn Kessler Glenn Kessler works as a fact checker for the Washington Post. Washington Post CNN’s Daniel Dale attempted to downplay actual statistics by blaming a supposedly “complicated mix of factors” that included, among other things, the weather!
If that’s to be believed, it sure is odd that the weather disproportionately brings out the worst in people in Democrat-run cities.
While this sort of logic is laughable, the true goal of the fact-checker is not to convince, but to censor.
As I explain in my forthcoming book “Fact Checking the Fact Checkers: How the Left Infiltrated and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry,” large social media sites like Facebook partner with various fact- checking organizations that are given the status of “final arbiter of truth” on their platforms.
As such, they have the de-facto ability to censor by slapping a “fact- check” on any content they don’t like. Anyone who posts political content that’s “fact-checked” even once every couple of months can expect to see a massive drop in engagement on their Facebook page as punishment for posting supposedly false or misleading content.
And because of that power they’re afforded, there’s no limit to the lengths fact checkers are willing to go to achieve the goal of censoring their political opposition.
In 2012, Republican Ron Paul said that the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0% until 1913, PolitiFact rated his claim “half true.” When Democrat Jim Webb in 2016 said there was no federal income tax in the country until 1913, PolitiFact rated it “mostly true.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaking. Bragg is the subject of a House hearing in NYC. The Washington Post via Getty Images Daniel Dale Daniel Dale is employed as a fact checker by CNN. CNN The only difference here was their party affiliation.
Even being 99.99% correct isn’t enough when you’re a Republican. When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that Lee County (population: 787,976) wasn’t inside the forecast zone of Hurricane Ian, PolitiFact’s Yacob Reyes rated the claim “mostly false” on the basis that a largely uninhibited barrier island with fewer than two-dozen residencies fell inside the storm’s path.
Fact checkers have allowed the Biden administration to rewrite the truth by decree.
Ahead of the release of economic numbers that showed two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth in early 2022, meeting the technical definition of a recession, the fact-checkers immediately followed the White House in pretending that hadn’t been the widely-used definition for recession for decades.
The reason why was simple; so that any publication reporting that the U.S. economy fell into recession would be slapped with a “fact-check” claiming otherwise.
Amusingly, some of the fact-checkers were apparently unfamiliar with even their own past writings on the topic. PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson wrote an article to defend the White House’s spin, calling defining recessions a “confusing topic,” and noting that the two-quarters definition is “informal.”
Yet it wasn’t so confusing back in 2015, when Jacobson debunked Donald Trump’s false claim that there was a recession Obama’s last year in office, because “the general rule of thumb is that it takes two quarters of negative growth to signal a recession.”
All that changed was the person in the White House, at which point fact checkers didn’t want facts to get in their way.