It’s a difficult job with many moving parts to defend Washington’s ruling regime. To keep everyone on message and to make sure that only the regime’s message is the controlling one in the public square, you need committed politicians, woke multinational corporations, corporate media, and devoutly loyal followers who will echo that message far and wide.
These echo chambers may not be all created equal. For example, in the corporate media, some get to host to the fancy nighttime cable shows and make massive salaries while others have to handle the less glamorous and talent-demanding work, like pumping out endless “fact checks.”
These lower-level operatives serve their purposes in the service of the regime. They supply the committed masses with clickbait that can be amplified by those eager to believe that the regime’s message is not only preferable but is the absolute and only truth. They exist to make us believe that to be on the side of the regime’s message is to be on the side of the facts.
One advantage the current regime has is a seemingly endless supply of individuals and outfits dedicated to churning out “fact checks” of those who question the regime’s message. They have so many fact-checkers and people to fact check now that some outfits look like PolitifactWe have also taken to fact-checking random Facebook postings by nonpublic figures.
It would be a herculean effort for the conservative movement to scale up anything close to the left’s fact-check industry. The left has already captured the mainstream media, social media and most other media channels.
To be fair, conservatives are less likely than liberals to spend their time producing clickbait to use in Twitter warfare. It’s a tactic much more in vogue with the self-righteous left, who can’t imagine that anything but their preferred policy is the scientific truth above all else, despite what the actual truth may be.
We should give Hillary Clinton, the failed presidential candidate, a lot of credit for her insistence on fact checks during her debate against Donald Trump. When you aren’t winning a policy debate, it’s much easier to appeal to a supposedly “third-party” judge who is on your team already.
Nonetheless, it’s important to note some of the industry’s more representative fact-check trolls in order to understand who these people are who claim to be absolute truth-tellers and our betters.
If you head over to CNN’s fact-check landing pageThere are many headlines that charge conservatives as well as light touch articles about leftists. For example, after President Joe Biden made up that he met with Israel’s prime minister during the Six Day War of 1967, CNN’s top fact checker, Daniel Dale, let him off with a slap on the wrist with the headline “Biden tells inaccurate story about his 1973 meeting with Israeli prime minister.” Supposedly, one man’s “made up story” is another man’s “inaccurate story.”
Compare that to Dale’s treatment of Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. Scott accurately noted that a $1 trillion spending bill that contained small amounts of infrastructure spending was an example of wasteful spending that has caused inflation. CNN’s Dale sprung to action with an unbelievably twisted fact check, stating, “to blame rising gas and food prices exclusively on government spending is false.”
What? Notice the goal-post shift here: Dale inserted the word “exclusively” when Scott said no such thing. He then proceeded to “debunk” his own invented claim by citing experts who pointed to supply chain issues as another cause of inflation.
Even had Scott claimed that the infrastructure bill was the sole cause or the biggest cause of inflation, this wouldn’t have passed muster as a “fact check.” Instead, it would have been simply dueling opinions from two people with two economic theories.
Is Dale somehow in the divine position to determine which economic theory is correct? If he is then, his civic duty would have been for him to pick up a phone and call President Obama to inform them of the solution to their inflation woes.
Dale has some competition at the Washington Post with Glenn Kessler, who is unironically bylined as “The Fact Checker” for the Jeff Bezos-owned operation. Kessler has an advantage over Dale in the burgeoning fact-checking industry: he has credentialed himself by writing a whole book about it—“Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.” An unbiased and neutral observer, indeed.
Don’t take the head fake. If a woman dresses as a man, he is still male.
Kessler can list many lowlights. But, his is an illustrative example that he will go to any length to please the regime. “Four Pinocchio Rating” of a Tucker Carlson clip. Carlson played a clip with Biden, then vice president.
Unstoppable stream of immigrants, non-stop, un-stop. People like me, who are Caucasian of European descent and arrive in the United States for the first time in 2017, will be an absolute minority. Absolute minority. The white European-American population will make up less than half of all Americans by then. That’s not a bad thing. That’s as a source of our strength.
Carlson then added commentary, which talk-show hosts are used to doing, by saying:
An unrelenting stream in immigration. But why? Joe Biden just stated it, to alter the country’s racial composition. That’s the reason, to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World. … This is the language of eugenics, it’s horrifying.
Enter Kessler. Kessler probably knows that the strongest outrage must be reserved in defense open-borders policy or any other form of praise for mass immigration, legal and illegal. On his way to awarding Carlson four Pinocchios, the highest rating reserved for only those he determines to be “whoppers,” Kessler accused Carlson of “manipulative clipping” by leaving out the rest of the speech.
Kessler was disappointed that the rest of the speech did not convey the impression that Biden meant something else than what he said in the Carlson clip.
Kessler basically criticized Carlson for not giving more time to his Biden speech. Had there been anything in the video that suggested Biden didn’t mean what he said, then Kessler would have a point. But that wasn’t the case here. Presumably Kessler knew this, which would explain why he tried to quote two other portions of the speech that didn’t diminish or place into context Biden’s inflammatory, racist remark.
Obfuscation is a part of the playbook. The playbook also includes attacking commentary with more commentary. Kessler’s rant was really no different than Carlson’s clip: it was one person’s interpretation of what Biden said and its implications and meaning. That does not make for a “fact” check.
Although Dale and Kessler represent only two aspects of the fact-checking industry, they are representative of the entire industry. What they try to pass off as a public service instead seems to be public relations for their favored regime’s message.
Taking a look at their pattern of practice will give you a pretty good idea of what the industry really is all about and why you should be instantly skeptical when presented with a “fact check” from any corporate media source. They perform a dirty job that doesn’t require much skill or honesty, but it is nonetheless an effective one for advancing their left-wing causes.
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