The fact-checkers wield immense influence over what you’re able to see on social media. Sites like Facebook partner with a number of fact-checking organizations, who have the authority to slap a “fact-check” on any posts they see fit. Once an article is slapped with a fact-check, the number of people who see any posts of it are limited. In many cases, fact-checkers will nitpick a single claim from an article, or fact-check an opinion within it, to justify censorship of its contents entirely on social media.
In this case, they apparently didn’t want the embarrassing news going around that Stormy Daniels had been ordered to pay Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fee, so they fact-checked an opinion.
It all began when a website called Political Insider reported on Daniels being ordered to pay Donald Trump an additional $122k in legal fees as a result of her failed defamation lawsuit against him, bringing the total fees she owes to about $700k. The article is clear that this is not the case that DA Bragg brought against Trump, but Stormy’s. Yet, all it took for Facebook to censor the article was the caption Political Insider added to their article when sharing it, that "This makes the New York case even more absurd and fake."
That line alone was enough for the USA Today fact-checker to see fit to publish an entire article declare the DA Bragg’s case was not in fact “absurd and fake,” which is clearly an opinion statement. “The case is unrelated to Trump's Manhattan indictment, numerous legal experts said,” continues the fact-check of an article that already acknowledged these were two different cases.
This is all pointless of course, because the caption clearly says “more absurd and fake,” implying that the author already believed DA’s Bragg’s case to be absurd regardless of the latest development with Stormy.
If DA Bragg’s case against Trump were legitimate, it raises the obvious question as to why it took so long for these charges to be brought. Anyone who turned on CNN or MSNBC during the Trump presidency (which I wouldn’t have recommended) was subjected to a barrage of “the walls are closing in '' stories about Trump that never materialized.
What is more likely; that everyone hell bent on taking down Trump during his presidency somehow missed this angle hiding in plain sight, or that a DA who said his number one priority was convicting Trump twisted the facts to fit his agenda?
This is just the latest bad fact-check relating to DA Bragg, which comes not long after the fact-checkers decided to pretend that Bragg isn’t backed by George Soros. For reference, Soros donated $1 million to an anti-law and order PAC called Color of Change a mere six days after they announced the desire to spend $1 million towards Bragg’s bid for DA back in May 2021.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler argued that “Republicans are being slippery here. Claiming Soros ‘funded’ Bragg is simply false, but many rely on the more ambiguous phrase of ‘backed,’ which is technically correct by several degrees of separation. But it’s still misleading and worthy of Three Pinocchios.”
Kessler’s only argument is semantics over what the word “backed” means, clearly signaling a high level of desperation to distance Soros from the rogue DA.
And in an unrelated note, PolitiFact continues their quest to set new records for “dumbest fact-check of all time,” with their latest being of Governor Ron DeSantis saying that when he sent illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard, they were “deported within 24 hours.” DeSantis is clearly using the word “deported” to mean “removed from the island” in this context, but PolitiFact’s Amy Sherman rated his statement false on the basis that they weren’t deported from the country.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that migrants on Martha’s Vineyard in September were deported within 24 hours. That’s False. They were relocated to a military base on Cape Cod, but they were not removed from the U.S. https://t.co/Ca1P0TLU9m
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) April 11, 2023
There truly is no straw they won’t grasp at.
And today is only Wednesday - what else will the fact-checkers come up with this week?Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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