Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label political lies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political lies. Show all posts

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Trump Lies Update

During his 4 years in office,
very credible sources
have estimated that Trump
mis-led
or
dissembled
or
Straight up fucking lied
over 35,000 times


The false claims that Trump keeps repeating

Tracking President Trump's false and misleading claims

The Fact Checker has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we're calling "Bottomless Pinocchios" – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.


Daddy State Awareness


THE BASICS:

  • The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
  • The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
  • Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
  • Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Today's Beau

An excellent point. Haley's not correcting the record because she's trying to co-opt the "issue" and make it her own.

They'll show Trump as a doddering old fool who may be on the brink of a total breakdown, rather than tell their base voters the truth about Jan6.


Wednesday, January 17, 2024

5 Immigration Lies

  1. They say Biden doesn't want secure borders
  2. They blame the drug crisis on immigration
  3. They claim immigrants are terrorists
  4. They say immigrants are stealing jobs
  5. They tell us to blame immigrants for crime

Friday, July 14, 2023

The Power Of Lies

... and the lies of the powerful.


Typical of the GOP:
  1. Spend 2 years shit-talking the FBI in order to drive down their approval rating
  2. Point at the "bad" ratings and tell the world how it's all the FBI's fault
There is no honor in the Republican Party.


Opinion
Republicans celebrate their successful deception of voters

An honest man visited the House of lies this week. He did not like what he found there.

“Insane.” “Absurd.” “Ludicrous.” Those are the actual words FBI Director Christopher Wray used to describe House Republicans’ crackpot conspiracy theories.

“The American people fully understand,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) informed Wray at Wednesday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, “… that you have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives.”

Right. Hageman, the election denier who ousted Liz Cheney in a primary, would have you believe that Wray — senior political appointee in the George W. Bush Justice Department, clerk to a noted conservative judge, contributor to the Federalist Society, Donald Trump-appointed head of the FBI — is part of a conspiracy to persecute conservatives. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” he replied.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), told Wray that his FBI “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on topics such as the unconfirmed theory that covid-19 resulted from a lab leak in China.

“The idea that the FBI would somehow be involved in suppressing references to the lab-leak theory is somewhat absurd,” Wray answered, pointing a finger, “when you consider the fact that the FBI was the only — the only — agency in the entire intelligence community to reach the assessment that it was more likely than not that that was the explanation for the pandemic.”

And several Republicans on the panel floated the slander that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was an inside job perpetrated by the FBI.

“This notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some operation by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous,” Wray responded, “and is a disservice to our brave, hard-working, dedicated men and women.”

Good for him. But here’s what’s especially insane, absurd and ludicrous: No matter how many refutations Wray and others provide, Republicans are persuading people to believe their lies — and they are proud of the deception.

Johnson, the leadoff questioner at Wednesday’s hearing, told Wray about a recent NBC News poll, in which “only 37 percent of registered voters now view the FBI positively,” down from 52 percent in 2018. “That’s a serious decline in the people’s faith, and it’s on your watch,” he told Wray.

Several other Republicans joined Johnson in gloating about the FBI’s poor standing in public opinion. “We’re seeing the polling numbers,” said Rep. Barry Moore (Ala.). “The FBI is tanking.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) taunted: “People trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place.”

Reps. Wesley Hunt and Nathaniel Moran, both from Texas, also needled Wray about the FBI’s popularity. “You’re not aware of those numbers?” Moran jeered.


The Republicans are well aware of “those numbers” — because they are the ones who assassinated the reputation of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Support for the FBI isn’t low among all Americans; it’s at rock bottom among Republicans — only 17 percent of whom had a positive view of the FBI in the NBC poll, compared with 58 percent of Democrats.

Now why would that have happened? Well, maybe it’s because they’ve been fed an endless diet of lies and conspiracy theories about the FBI by elected Republicans and their Murdoch mouthpieces. These lies — and similar ones told about the Justice Department, public health agencies, the IRS and even the military — serve Republicans’ short-term interest of discrediting the Biden administration. But the lies are also destroying the right’s support for the most basic functions of government that even conservatives long supported, such as law and order and national defense. Maybe that’s the goal.

Now, the arsonists are admiring the ashes.

When Wray walked into the House Judiciary hearing room this week, he entered a parallel universe. Awaiting him in the audience were three women wearing T-shirts saying “Ashli Babbitt, Murdered by Capitol Police.” A few seats down, next to the woman with the “Biden’s Laptop Matters” phone cover, Ivan Raiklin, a self-styled “Deep State Marauder,” rose to heckle Wray: “Sir, can you stop violating our First, Fourth and Fifth amendments?” Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) ordered a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, which ended in the women in the Ashli Babbitt T-shirts shouting, “Justice for all!”

A cellphone case that reads "Biden's Laptop Matters" is seen during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Jordan opened with an ode to paranoia: “American speech is censored. Parents are called terrorists. Catholics are called radicals. And I haven’t even talked about the spying that took place of a presidential campaign or the raiding of a former president’s home.”

Gaetz accused Wray of “protecting the Bidens,” of being “blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime,” of “whitewashing the conduct of corrupt people” and of operating a “creepy personal snoop machine” at the FBI.

“Amen!” called out one of the Ashli Babbitt women when Gaetz finished.

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) accused Wray of a passel of crimes: “unlawful surveillance of American citizens, intimidation of American citizens … potential coverups of convenient political figures and potential setups of inconvenient political figures.”

They invoked the “Russian collusion hoax” and the Steele dossier. Most sinister were the attempts to pin the Jan. 6 insurrection on the FBI.

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) invoked the conspiracy theory, popular on the far right, that a man named Ray Epps was an undercover FBI agent who instigated the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to discredit Trump. (Epps filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Fox News for promoting the “fantastical story.”)

“Shame on you!” Nehls said to Wray. Nehls called the Jan. 6 investigation a “political witch hunt against the greatest president in my lifetime.” Coming to the defense of people convicted for their actions during the insurrection, he claimed the FBI “is more concerned about searching for and arresting grandma and grandpa for entering the Capitol building that day than pursuing the sick individuals in our society who prey on our children.”

Before the hearing, the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri reported that Republicans planned to screen a video showing the “FBI planting the pipe bombs outside the DNC on Jan. 6.” Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) did screen the video, but he stopped short of fingering the FBI, suggesting only that there was some unspecified conspiracy involving law enforcement. (Massie, no legal scholar, at one point told Wray his behavior “may be lawful, but it’s not constitutional.”)

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced that he was “going to make the assumption” that there were “more than 10” FBI informants in the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021. Wray had said no such thing.

Patiently, Wray tried to disabuse the Republicans of their fantasies. No, the FBI doesn’t investigate parents for attending school board meetings. No, there were not undercover FBI agents in the crowd on Jan. 6. Actually, the FBI has opened more investigations into violence by abortion rights supporters than by abortion opponents.

But each time Wray batted down a wacky accusation, Republicans popped up with another.

Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) spoke of a “tyrannical FBI storming the home of an American family.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (N.C.) accused the FBI of being the “agent of a foreign power.”

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) alleged that the FBI “interfered with the elections in both 2016 and 2020” and that Wray was in “denial” to say otherwise.

And Hageman saw Wray’s FBI doing the “dirty work” of “mass censorship” to “suppress the First Amendment” as part of a supposed “two-tiered justice system that has been weaponized to persecute people.”

It was, to coin a phrase, an “absurd” spectacle to watch this law-and-order conservative being attacked by MAGA lawmakers set on undermining the rule of law. Various House Republicans had already issued demands to “defund the FBI” (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia even sold T-shirts with the slogan), and on the day before the Wray hearing, Jordan, the Judiciary chairman, sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (Tex.) requesting that she “eliminate any funding for the FBI that is not absolutely essential.” (For good measure, Jordan also asked her to block some funds for the ATF.)

Were Republicans to succeed, Wray told the Judiciary Committee, they would leave Americans more vulnerable to fentanyl cartels, violent criminals, gangs, sex predators, foreign and domestic terrorists, cyberattacks and Chinese spies. This is where a government of lies will take us.

Robert Garry, left, a professor at Tulane University School of Medicine, and Kristian Andersen, from Scripps Research, are sworn in at a hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Tuesday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The pandemic, thank God, is in the past. But covid disinformation continues to spread unchecked in the House of Representatives.

No one knows for sure how the novel coronavirus came to be. Among the U.S. intelligence community, five agencies believe it emerged from animals, while two (Wray’s FBI, later joined by the Energy Department) think it leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Scientists tend to favor the animal-origin theory, but here, too, opinion is split.

Then, in a reality all their own, there are the Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. They have embraced the lab-leak theory as gospel. Some of them even claim it was a Chinese bioweapon, an idea resoundingly rejected by science. And they accuse U.S. public health officials of an elaborate conspiracy — involving coverups and bribery — to suppress these “facts.”

As I’ve noted before, there ain’t no cure for long covidiocy.

The select subcommittee held a hearing this week, “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up,” to prove their conspiracy theory. They hauled in two scientists (on whose work the National Institutes of Health relied) to accuse them of being involved in a coverup because they argued (and still argue) that the animal-origin theory is probable.

“We as a committee have formed what we feel is most important in understanding all the information that’s brought forward to us, and that information points directly to a lab leak,” Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), a dermatologist, told the virologists.

Greene, whose technical expertise is in Jewish space lasers, suggested that the virus was a Chinese bioweapon and falsely declared that “the [intelligence community] believes that the origin of covid-19 is from the lab. Most of the intelligence community believes that.” She accused the virologists of using “pro-China talking points” and told them “it’s more important to really recognize that it probably came from the lab.”

Next came Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), who as Trump’s White House physician was known as the “candyman” for his liberal dispensing of pills. He advised the virologists that their animal-origin theory was “ridiculous” and that it “sounds like engineering” was responsible for creating the virus — engineering funded by the NIH. “What a lot of people think is going on here is that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they’d been implicated in the production or in the creation of this virus, and they were doing everything they could, including getting both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles, to undermine that theory.”

Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.), too, blamed human engineering, saying “we can stop gain-of-function research when we admit that that’s where the disease came from.” And the panel’s chairman, Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), proposed that “scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Like Wray before the Judiciary Committee, the two scientists, Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert Garry of Tulane University School of Medicine, tried to rebut the wild allegations: “The scientific evidence for this pointing to a single market in the middle of Wuhan is overwhelming.” The grant with which they were allegedly bribed was awarded before the pandemic. The virus on which gain-of-function research was conducted “could not have led to” covid-19. Their own initial suspicion that the virus came from a lab was “unsupported” by the scientific process. Fauci and Collins had no role in the witnesses’ conclusions.

But once again, the evidence hasn’t stopped the conspiracy mongers from convincing the public. A Quinnipiac University poll in March found that 64 percent of voters — and a whopping 87 percent of Republican voters — believe the virus came from a lab leak.

Turn down any corridor in this House of lies, open up any door, and you’re likely to find a new conspiracy theory under development, a new fabrication taking shape.

Take the House Oversight Committee. This week, it emerged that Gal Luft, star “whistleblower” behind the allegations of corruption against President Biden and his family, was indicted on a charge of acting as an illegal arms broker and an unregistered agent for China. Republicans immediately alleged a new conspiracy theory: that the Biden administration was “trying to silence our witnesses” (Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina) and that the timing is not “coincidental” (Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky).

But there was a small problem with the new conspiracy theory: Though the indictment was just unsealed, Luft was charged all the way back on Nov. 1, 2022 — before Republicans even took over the House. It appears his “whistleblowing” came after his indictment.

Or take the National Defense Authorization Act, the sprawling, $886 billion legislation that sets priorities for the U.S. military. It sailed through committee on a 58-1 vote and was on its way to overwhelming passage on the House floor this week.

But then the conspiracy mongers intervened, demanding that the House vote on amendments designed to address all manner of conjured problems that they claimed were making the U.S. military “weak.”

Roy said military recruitment was “in the toilet” because of critical race theory, “a large-scale effort to impose … tyranny over the minds of man.” The Texas Republican, claiming the military had turned into a “social-engineering experiment,” alleged: “The American people I talk to back home don’t want a weak or a woke military.”

Republicans Ralph Norman (S.C.) and Matthew Rosendale (Mont.) each suggested that it was the handling of transgender people that is “weakening” the military. “That’s why we’re down 30 percent in recruitment,” Norman claimed.

And Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who has opposed the flying of the Pride flag, claimed the military is suffering a “loss of focus” because of “woke ideology.”

They seemed not to grasp that, perhaps, military recruitment was off because, as Democratic Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) put it, “a lot of Republicans are running around talking about how terribly weak our military is.”

Predictably, the debate turned ugly. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sought to ban “radical gender ideology books” from base libraries, in particular one that describes “pornography and masturbation.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) claimed his anti-diversity amendment “has nothing to do with whether colored people or black people or anybody can serve.” His reference to “colored people” was struck from the record.

A better leader would have rejected such attempts to besmirch the mighty U.S. military. But McCarthy couldn’t tell the conspiracy peddlers to take a hike. He needs their votes to keep his job. And so he gave them votes on a long list of poison pill amendments — abortion, diversity, transgender rights and more — that instantly turned the defense-authorization bill from a bipartisan triumph into a partisan donnybrook.

Running the House must be exhausting when even the easy things get tripped up by the never-ending lies. It would be so much easier just to tell the truth.

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Living And Dying On Lies

Try not to think about Marjie Greene and Rand Paul when you hear about techniques designed and deployed to mislead and deceive.

Republicans (mostly) are following the same playbook as the Kremlin.



Opinion
How Russia turned America’s helping hand to Ukraine into a vast lie

Information is the world’s lifeblood. It pulsates in torrents of facts and images. We are swamped with it.

But information can be poison, a dangerous weapon. Disinformation, or organized lying, can be used to wage political warfare. As the historian Thomas Rid wrote in “Active Measures,” his book on the subject, disinformation can weaken a political system that places its trust in truth. “Disinformation operations, in essence, erode the very foundations of open societies,” he wrote.

A disinformation operation now being waged by Russia shows in stark detail how this malevolence works. Taking a program by the United States that was intended to make people healthier and safer in the former Soviet Union, a program it had welcomed and participated in for 22 years, Russia twisted facts into a cloud of falsehoods. The campaign, rooted in decades-old traditions of disinformation by the Kremlin, has intensified during Russia’s ruinous war on Ukraine in the last year.

In a previous editorial in this series, we examined how young people who posted freely on social media have been wrongly arrested and sentenced to years in prison by authoritarian regimes. This editorial looks at disinformation as a tool of dictatorship. Disinformation is not just “fake news” or propaganda but an insidious contamination of the world’s conversations.

And it is exploding.

A helping hand

On Aug. 29, 2005, Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois, and Sen. Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, visited a laboratory at Kyiv’s Central Sanitary and Epidemiological Station in Ukraine. This facility was not well secured and, by the nature of its public health work, held dangerous pathogens. Andy Weber, a U.S. Defense Department official, showed Mr. Obama a tray of small vials: samples of Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. “I saw test tubes filled with anthrax and the plague lying virtually unlocked and unguarded — dangers we were told could only be secured with America’s help,” Mr. Obama recalled.

There was deep concern after 9/11 that terrorists could obtain such materials. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma asked the United States to check the security of his nation’s chemical and biological facilities, and Mr. Weber, who had helped uncover the illegal Soviet biological weapons system, spent two weeks with a small team scrutinizing Ukraine’s facilities in late 2001. The lab in Kyiv that Mr. Obama visited held pathogens that cause not only anthrax but also tularemia, brucellosis, listeriosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid and others.

Barack Obama and Andrew Weber, right, during a 2005 visit to a Ukrainian facility where the United States aided scientists working with dangerous biological materials. (Pete Souza/Chicago Tribune/Tca)

On the day of Mr. Obama’s visit, Ukraine signed an agreement with the United States to upgrade and modernize the labs. For example, cattle in Ukraine occasionally became naturally infected with anthrax and the Ukrainian scientists had been culturing the anthrax bacillus for diagnostic purposes, which meant they kept cultures of it, a potential target for terrorists. The U.S. assistance would help them move toward using safer molecular diagnostic methods, such as polymerase chain reaction and antigen testing. The United States also pledged to improve the locks on the doors and beef up capabilities so they could detect disease outbreaks sooner, as well as spot the cause.

The agreement with Ukraine grew out of the 1992 Nunn-Lugar legislation, sponsored by Mr. Lugar and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) to clean up the Cold War legacy of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet Union, an effort that became known as Cooperative Threat Reduction. In the 1990s, thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles were liquidated, followed by vast stocks of chemical weapons. Later, the Nunn-Lugar program expanded into reducing biological threats in Russian laboratories, as well as other former Soviet republics. Among other efforts, a public health reference laboratory — named the Lugar Center — was opened in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2011. Pathogens stored in a Soviet-era research institute in the center of Tbilisi were moved to a purpose-built, secure facility.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar, right, former senator Sam Nunn, center, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, listen as President Barack Obama speaks at the Cooperative Threat Reduction symposium at Fort McNair in Washington on Dec. 3, 2012. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

The Nunn-Lugar program was partially in the U.S. interest. But it was also an act of benevolence. The sole remaining superpower extended a hand to nations that were weak and struggling, providing about $1 billion a year to the former Soviet republics. Since 2005, the U.S. agreement with Ukraine has led to $200 million in aid for 46 biomedical and health facilities. The assistance was not forced on anyone — it was designed to make people safer and healthier. The recipients were eager for it. The aid to Russia was terminated by President Vladimir Putin in 2014 but continued elsewhere.

Turning the truth upside down

The Cold War never became a hot war between the superpowers, but the competition was fought intensely in the shadows. Disinformation was a Soviet tactic from 1949 to 1988. One major effort, carried out by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea during the Korean War, between 1951 and 1953, claimed the United States had released bacteria and infected insects into North Korea and China. The charges were fabricated but received wide circulation and were only proved false in 1998 by Soviet Central Committee documents published by University of Maryland scholar Milton Leitenberg. He obtained a copy of a cable to Mao Zedong, sent after Joseph Stalin’s death, that read, “The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.”

In another disinformation campaign, the Soviet Union pushed a false story in the 1980s that the United States had genetically engineered the virus that causes AIDS at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army biomedical facility. Another lie was added that the virus was released in Africa to kill Africans. The KGB planted the story in news media around the globe. Polls later showed that the campaign had been successful: A compilation of 20 public opinion surveys of African Americans between 1990 and 2009 showed that an average of 28 percent of respondents believed that genocide was involved in the origin of HIV.

In more recent years, the Nunn-Lugar program became a frequent target of Russia’s disinformation campaigns. Because the funding came partially through the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Russia frequently claimed that military research was underway in the recipient facilities. The Lugar Center was a major focus. In December 2009, an item in the Russian newspaper Pravda claimed “biological weapons are being secretly developed on Georgia territory.” The article contained no fewer than nine discrete false allegations.

In 2018, Russia aimed a fresh burst of disinformation at the Lugar Center. On Jan. 16, South Front, a website connected to Russian intelligence agencies, posted a 49-page document titled “The Pentagon Bio-Weapons.” It was a subtle mix of authentic historical documents describing the pre-1969 U.S. biological weapons program — before a 1972 treaty outlawed germ warfare — with falsehoods implying that the United States was continuing work on bioweapons at the Lugar Center. In September, a former KGB officer and onetime Georgian security official, Igor Giorgadze, appeared on Russian television channels RT and Sputnik with documents that he claimed showed the Lugar Center “could be a cover for a bioweapons lab” doing experiments on humans. He also alleged the U.S. government had granted patents for biological weapons devices. Soon after, a Russian Foreign Ministry official said the United States was using the Georgian people “as guinea pigs.” Then, Russian Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense forces, announced that the Lugar Center had been “testing a highly toxic chemical or highly lethal biological agent under the guise of treatments.”

These claims were fictitious, but they made headlines. On May 26, 2020, the Russian Foreign Ministry released a three-page statement about the Lugar Center containing no less than 16 false statements, some absurd, such as about the germ warfare “patents.”

The Lugar Center’s mission was to protect people from disease. Nine Russian scientists had visited it since 2016, and some of them had actually worked there. The Russian government knew its allegations were lies but used them to create a disinformation bomb about biological weapons. The Russian effort, Mr. Leitenberg concluded, “repeatedly displays a brazen, disdainful, spit-in-your-eye character.”

‘Firehose of falsehoods’

As Putin’s troops stormed into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia’s disinformation warriors used the same approach as they had in Georgia.

The Russian defense ministry announced on March 6 that it had obtained documents from workers at Ukrainian laboratories showing that dangerous pathogens were destroyed on the day of the invasion. Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the documents “confirm that components of biological weapons were developed in Ukraine bio laboratories in close proximity from the territory of Russia.” He said the pathogens, such as plague, anthrax, tularemia and cholera, were destroyed to conceal the U.S. involvement.

This was a total fiction. But thanks to social media, the claims raced around the globe at the speed of light. On March 8, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian repeated the Russian lies, saying the United States “has 26 bio-labs and other related facilities in Ukraine, over which the U.S. Department of Defense has absolute control,” and, “the biological military activities of the U.S. in Ukraine are merely the tip of the iceberg,” with 336 biological labs in 30 countries. He called on the United States to “fully clarify its biological militarization activities both inside and outside its borders.” Within hours, at least 17 Chinese state media outlets posted his accusations, and on China’s Weibo social media, the topic gained more than 210 million views.

On March 9, Fox News host Tucker Carlson picked it up, too. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland had told a Senate hearing that it was important the invading Russian troops not take over the Ukraine research facilities. A Russian spokeswoman said Ms. Nuland’s comment confirmed the United States’ “illegal and criminal activity on Ukrainian soil.” Mr. Carlson then pounced, saying the Russian account of the biological weapons laboratories “is, in fact, totally and completely true. Whoa.” He also said, “We would assume ... they were working on bioweapons.”

On March 10, Gen. Kirillov announced that the documents obtained by Russia showed that the United States was trying to “develop bioagents capable of targeting various ethnic groups,” such as ethnic Slavs. No such effort, of course, existed.

The next day, Russia called a meeting of the Security Council to air the lies it had concocted. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said, “There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories supported by the United States — not near Russia’s border, or anywhere.”

“Let me be clear,” said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines at a Senate hearing, “we do not assess that Ukraine is pursuing either biological weapons or nuclear weapons.”

On March 16, Mr. Putin made the disinformation charge directly. “A network of dozens of laboratories operated in Ukraine, where military biological programs, including experiments with samples of coronavirus, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases, were carried out under the supervision and financial support of the Pentagon,” he said, claiming that “they are now strenuously trying to cover up the evidence of these secret programs.”

On March 18, Russia again called a U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss its claims. But the U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, said the United Nations “is not aware of any such biological weapons programs.”

Surprisingly, a Russian biologist, Yevgeny Levitin, posted an open letter online, with some other scientists, titled, “Stop the lies on Ukrainian bioweapons!” The letter said the Russian documents were “obviously false” and do not describe biological weapons. Asked why he spoke out, Levitin said, “Because they wrote pure lies. This is a deliberate lie, which is not justified in any way. This will become obvious to any person who takes the trouble to simply carefully read the documents.”

Russia relentlessly stoked the lies. On March 31, it submitted formal statements repeating the bioweapons charge to the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. On April 4, the two houses of the Russian parliament voted to launch a special parliamentary inquiry into the Ukrainian laboratories. On May 13, Russia called for a U.N. Security Council meeting for a third time; a top U.N. official said there was still no evidence of biological weapons programs in Ukraine. On May 27, Gen. Kirillov delivered another briefing with wide-ranging allegations of U.S. and Ukrainian involvement in biological weapons. Russia charged that the Ukraine laboratories were preparing to send migratory birds and bats with disease into Russia, an echo of the false “infected insects” supposedly sent into China 70 years earlier. By summer, the claims reached bizarre sci-fi levels: Russian officials said in July that Ukrainian soldiers were subjected to “secret experiments” that “neutralized the last traces of human consciousness and turned them into the cruelest and deadliest monsters” and “the most cruel killing machines.”


In September, Russia kept up the drumbeat by triggering a formal review under the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, for only the second time in the treaty’s history. The overwhelming number of states involved in the review rejected the allegations. In October, Russia filed a long complaint, accompanied by a draft resolution calling for an investigative commission, with the U.N. Security Council. The resolution failed to gain enough support to pass.

At the Security Council on Oct. 26, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield admonished the Russians for calling yet another meeting that “is a colossal waste of time.”

“We all know these claims are pure fabrications, brought forth without a shred of evidence,” she added.

The Russian disinformation strategy is not to be ashamed or shy, but to pump out more. At Mr. Putin’s Moscow summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on March 21, the two leaders did it again, expressing “serious concern” about the biological military activities of the United States, both inside and outside the country.” In April, the Russian parliament commission is expected to deliver its report, another chance to spread the contamination. Russia’s authoritarian system is able to exploit many instruments — security services, cutouts, websites, diplomats and state-controlled media — to create an ecosystem for disinformation. Rand Corp., the think tank, a few years ago called Russia’s strategy a “firehose of falsehoods.”

The threat of biological weapons inspires public anxiety and fear, even more so after a catastrophic pandemic. Both Cold War superpowers researched biological weapons, which were outlawed in the 1972 treaty. The Soviet Union signed the treaty but then secretly built the largest biological weapons program the world had ever seen, including standby factories to create germ warfare agents in the event of war. The Soviet program was exposed after the Cold War ended. It was especially pernicious for Russia to throw this charge at the United States.

Why Russia does it — and how to strike back

The Kremlin’s disinformation casts the United States — and Ukraine — as villains for creating germ warfare laboratories, giving Mr. Putin another pretext for a war that lacks all justification. The disinformation undermines the biological weapons treaty, showing that Mr. Putin has little regard for maintaining the integrity of this international agreement. The disinformation attempts to divert attention from Russia’s barbaric onslaught against civilians in Ukraine. In 2018, the Kremlin may have been seeking to shift attention from the attempted assassination of former double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain, or from the Robert S. Mueller III investigation that year of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign.

The biological laboratories are just one example of Russia’s wider disinformation campaigns. Data shared by Facebook shows Russians “built manipulative Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages, created pro-Muslim and pro-Christian groups, and let them expand via growth from real users,” says author Samuel Woolley in “The Reality Game.” He adds, “The goal was to divide and conquer as much as it was to dupe and convince.” During the pandemic, Russia similarly attempted to aggravate existing tensions over public health measures in the United States and Europe. It has also spread lies about the use of chemical weapons, undermining the treaty that prohibits them and the organization that enforces it. In the Ukraine war, Russia has fired off broadsides of disinformation, such as claiming the victims of the Mariupol massacre were “crisis actors.” Russia used disinformation to mask its responsibility for the shoot-down of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014.

The disinformation over Ukraine, repeated widely in the Russian media, plays well with social groups that support Putin: the poor, those living in rural areas and small towns, and those being asked to send young men to the front. Mr. Putin so tightly controls the news media that it is difficult for alternative news and messages to break through.

A man walks in front of a building with a large banner reading "Russia does not start wars, it ends them. Vladimir Putin" in Yalta, Crimea, on March 15. (Stringer/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Does the disinformation persuade anyone outside of Russia? It is impossible to know how much is accepted or changes minds. But a survey in Germany suggests that the drumbeat of lies takes a toll. In a nationwide public opinion poll by CeMAS, respondents were asked whether they agree, disagree or partially concur with the statement: “Ukraine, together with the U.S., has operated secret biolabs for the production of biological weapons.” The poll in April found 7 percent agreed, 79 percent disagreed and 14 percent said some of each. By October, 12 percent said they agreed, 67 percent disagreed and 21 percent said some of each.

The pollsters called the results “quite worrying” and pointed out that “anti-democratic actors use disinformation campaigns not only to convince, but also to sow doubt among the population.”

This is the key point: Disinformation is a venom. It does not need to flip everyone’s, or even most people’s, views. Its methods are to creep into the lifeblood, create uncertainty, enhance established fears and sow confusion.

The best way to strike back is with the facts, and fast. Thomas Kent, the former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has pointed out that the first hours are critical in such an asymmetrical conflict: Spreaders of disinformation push out lies without worrying about their integrity, while governments and the news media try to verify everything, and take more time to do so. Mr. Kent suggests speeding the release of information that is highly likely to be true, rather than waiting. For example, it took 13 days for the British government to reach a formal conclusion that Russia was behind the poisoning of Mr. Skripal, but within 48 hours of the attack, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told Parliament that it appeared to be Russia, which helped tip the balance in the press and public opinion.

In Ukraine, when Russia was on the threshold of invasion, government and civil society organizations rapidly coordinated an informal “early warning system” to detect and identify Russia’s false claims and narratives. It was successful when the war began, especially with use of the Telegram app. In a short time, Telegram use leapt from 12 percent adoption to 65 percent, according to those involved in the effort

Also in Ukraine, more than 20 organizations, along with the National Democratic Institute in Washington, had created a disinformation debunking hub in 2019 that has played a key role in the battle against the onslaught of lies. A recent report from the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy identified three major efforts that paid off for Ukraine in the fight against Russian disinformation as war began. One was “deep preparation” (since Russia was recycling old claims from 2014, they were ready); active and rapid cooperation of civil society groups; and use of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help sift through the torrents of Russian disinformation and rapidly spot malign narratives.

Governments can’t do this on their own. Free societies have an advantage that autocrats don’t: authentic civil society that can be agile and innovative. In the run-up to the Ukraine war, all across Central and Eastern Europe, civil society groups were sharpening techniques for spotting and countering Russian disinformation.

Plain old media literacy among readers and viewers — knowing how to discriminate among sources, for example — is also essential.

Open societies are vulnerable because they are open. The asymmetries in favor of malign use of information are sizable. Democracies must find a way to adapt. The dark actors morph constantly, so the response needs to be systematic and resilient.

In a world that connects billions of people at a flash, the truth may have only a fighting chance against organized lying. As an old saying has it: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

Call Him "Wedge"

... the simplest tool known to man.


There's nothing worse than Stolen Valor.


Among the hats Ron DeSantis wore in the Navy: Assistant Urinalysis Coordinator.
Not among them: Fighter pilot.


Assistant Piss Checker.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Wingnuttery

This is probably not a real thing:


What's troublesome though is that given some of the weird shit that comes from these clowns, it's easy to see how people could take it at face value.


Even the debunkment at Reuters waffled a little on it:

News outlets have previously reported that Perry has amplified claims that Italian satellites were involved in manipulating U.S. election results, a charge that Department of Justice (DOJ) officials dismissed as false.

The claim about Chinese thermostats used to manipulate election results has been linked to a Perry associate, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official.

According to the Washington Post, Clark submitted a request in December 2020 for an “intelligence briefing about an allegation that the Chinese were controlling U.S.-based voting machines via internet-connected smart thermostats,” but the Justice Department dismissed the request as “not credible.”

We've reached a pretty bad place when the liars are telling us that the people reporting on their lying are lying.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

That Old Feelin'


I get a sneaking suspicion about George Santos and the GOP - and the Dems too.

Maybe they didn't vet him properly, and maybe they did.

Maybe he's a Kremlin stooge and maybe he's not.

This is where I say I kinda hate myself when I start thinking a little too much about the 'maybes'.

With (some) Republicans coming out seemingly to take a giant dump on George's head, they're speaking in some pretty generic terms - the passive voice (ie: mistakes were made). So there's a fair probability they're taking this opportunity to shit on Trump using George as a surrogate, while maintaining a little cover - they'll play those very reasonable and down-the-middle comments in their ads come 2024 when they need "the undecided" voters to think kindly of them.

"But what about the Democrats?"

First, fuck that noise. Democrats are not to blame for the shitty behavior of Republicans.

Second, maybe they did vet old George, and they figured on slamming the GOP for it all along. That doesn't make a great deal of sense because the district was up for grabs, but a Dem win in NY03 wouldn't have changed the overall outcome, and it's way more fun to sit here idly speculating.


The talented Mr. Santos: A congressman-elect’s unraveling web of deception

Even by the low standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of the falsehoods from the newly elected House Republican has been breathtaking


The Republican who won a congressional seat on Long Island before his claims of being a wealthy, biracial, Ukrainian descendant of Holocaust survivors were debunked had, for a while, been generally consistent about two details in his improbable life: He has long said his first name is George and his last name is Santos.

But not always.

Before George Santos, 34, made a name for himself in politics, he had insisted on being called Anthony — one of his middle names — and often used his mother’s maiden name, Devolder, eventually incorporating a company in Florida with that name.

“He hated that we called him George,” a former friend and onetime co-worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid being associated with him publicly. “His whole family called him Anthony. He wanted to be called Anthony. He would use the name Anthony Devolder.”

With echoes of the fabulist protagonist at the heart of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” book and movie, Santos has spun an elaborate web of lies and deceptions about his identity and his past, according to acquaintances, public records, media reports and, in some cases, by his own admission. He also claims to have suddenly come into millions of dollars in wealth over the past 18 months, even as the financial data company Dun & Bradstreet estimated in July that his private family firm, the Devolder Organization, only had $43,688 in revenue.

He said he is part Black. He said he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. He claimed he helped develop “carbon capture technology.” He claimed to have worked at companies that never employed him. He claimed to be a graduate of two universities, only to admit that he has no college degree at all. He even said his parents’ financial hardship forced him to leave the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx “months” before he could graduate. But that claim and numerous others have either been shown to be false or lacking evidence by The Washington Post and other news organizations.

Even by the low standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of Santos’s falsehoods has been breathtaking. It has surprised Democrats who researched him and missed so many details, as well as Republicans who vouched for him.

In an unsuccessful House race in 2020 and his successful race for New York’s 3rd Congressional District in November, Santos pitched himself as a gay man of Brazilian descent at home in the Republican Party of Donald Trump. He spoke at a rally in D.C. on Jan. 5, 2021, telling the assembled crowd one day before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol: “Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald Trump?”

In interviews as a congressional candidate, he described himself as “the American Dream.”

He told Lara Trump in an interview this year, “I’m a business guy. I’ve done private equity for 11 years in New York,” adding that he “had the privilege of doing business” with the Trump Organization. He told another interviewer, “I’ve gone up the chains of Wall Street. I’ve developed many companies. I’ve opened my own business.” His campaign website said he had previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and had degrees from Baruch College and New York University.

On Dec. 19, the New York Times reported that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Baruch College and New York University had no records of him. On Monday, Santos spoke about the revelations for the first time, telling WABC he was guilty of “résumé embellishment” but insisting the larger story about his life is true: “I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up the fictional character and ran for Congress.”

Rep.-elect George Santos acknowledges 'résumé embellishment' but offers few answers on finances

Later, Santos’s claims of having Jewish ancestors who fled persecution during World War II were challenged by a report in Jewish Insider. An undisclosed marriage, and divorce, to a woman was revealed by the Daily Beast. He also wrote on Twitter that “9/11 claimed my mothers life”; she actually passed away in 2016.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Gerard Kassar, chair of the Conservative Party of New York State. “His entire life seems to be made up. Everything about him is fraudulent.”

Santos and his representatives did not respond to numerous telephone, email and text messages seeking comment for this article. On Wednesday, Santos wrote on Twitter that he is looking forward to working in Congress.

But even before his scheduled swearing-in on Jan. 3, Santos has already spawned new proposed legislation in Congress. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said he will introduce legislation requiring that when candidates for federal office provide details of their education, employment and military history, they do so under oath. Torres calls the bill the Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker (SANTOS) Act.

The offices of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly (R) and Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz (D) each said they are examining whether Santos broke any laws in their jurisdiction. ABC News reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Long Island, was also examining Santos’s activities; spokespeople for the office declined to comment when contacted by The Post.

Last week, Santos gave a handful of interviews that only raised more questions. Still unknown is the exact source of the $700,000 he claimed to have loaned his campaign in 2022, just two years after filing a financial disclosure report that said he had no major assets or earned income. The Times also reported suspicious spending by Santos’s campaign.

A spokesperson for the House Ethics Committee declined to comment when asked whether the committee will launch an investigation into Santos if he is sworn in next week.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body that reviews ethical complaints from the committee, could also scrutinize Santos if the office is reauthorized by the Republican-controlled House. Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the office, said he would expect an investigation.

“They are not going to let something like this just happen,” he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters on Wednesday that Santos is now “tattooed” on Republicans in Congress.
House Republican leaders, as well as Reps. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who endorsed Santos, did not respond to messages seeking comment about him. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told the Washington Examiner that he is not supportive of Santos joining their conference.

Rep.-elect Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) said in a statement that Santos should be investigated by the House Ethics Committee and “if necessary, law enforcement, is required.” Rep.-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said in a statement that Santos should “cooperate fully” with the investigations. And Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman (R) told CNN that Santos needs to address the “emotional issues” that led to his lying.

“A normal person wouldn’t do that,” Blakeman said.

The North Shore Leader, a small paper on Long Island, had raised questions about Santos in September, but those threads were largely ignored by other outlets. Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat whom Santos defeated in November, and whose campaign spent thousands of dollars on research, told The Post that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story.

A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal but no one paid attention

Kassar, the Conservative Party of New York State’s leader, said he spoke with Santos soon after the first Times story was published. “When I spoke to him, he clearly told me he had no intuition of running again and I told him that was a good idea and the Conservative Party would have a hard time endorsing him,” he said.

When Santos’s mother died on Dec. 23, 2016, he collected money from people at a church in Queens after saying he had no money for a funeral, according to a priest who spoke with CBS News.

Around this time, Santos asked the former friend and co-worker to set up a GoFundMe page so that he could raise money for the funeral, telling the person he was too distraught to submit the necessary ID and bank record requirements for the crowdfunding service.

The page shows that several hundred dollars was raised, and the friend said it went directly to Santos, who at the time was using the name Anthony Devolder on Facebook and with acquaintances around New York. The friend said they believed the money had been used for the funeral, which they attended in late December that year. Then on Jan. 6, 2017, the friend said Santos contacted them to ask if they wanted go skiing in the Poconos, where he had just rented a room. The friend declined.

In June 2020, Santos wrote on Twitter that he is the “grandson of Holocaust refugees.” This month, Jewish Insider cast doubt on that claim, noting that the dates Santos cited for his grandparents departure from Belgium to Brazil do not line up, nor do immigration records support his version of his family’s history. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which featured Santos as part of its annual November conference in Las Vegas, denounced his false claims about his heritage and said that “he will not be welcome at any future RJC event.”

In March, Santos said in a podcast interview that he was “raised Catholic, born to a Jewish family — very, very confusing religious background.” Last week, he told the New York Post: “I never claimed to be Jewish.”

Even early parts of Santos’s life story were fabricated by him.

In an October 2020 interview, Santos recalled an allegedly painful childhood experience. He said of his parents: “They sent me to a good prep school — which was Horace Mann Prep in the Bronx. And in my senior year of prep school, unfortunately, my parents fell on hard times.” Santos went on to say that at the time, his family couldn’t “afford a $2,500 tuition” and “I left school [with] four months till graduation.”

After the school was contacted by The Post and provided with several variations of Santos’s name that he has used in public, Ed Adler, a spokesman for Horace Mann, wrote in an email: “George Santos or any of the aliases you [cite] never attended HM.”

In that same March podcast interview, Santos also said, “I’ve been to Moscow many times in my career.” He also referred to “carbon capture technology” as something “that I’ve helped develop and fundraised for in my career. I’ve had a very extensive role in gas and oil in this country.” Santos and his representatives have provided no proof of those claims.

The only time Santos provided a specific defense about his falsehoods was during his interview on WABC. When asked why Goldman Sachs and Citigroup had no record of him as an employee, as he had previously claimed, Santos admitted to both lying and being sloppy in describing his actual work in the industry.

“[A] lot of people overstate in their résumés or twist a little bit,” he said. He said he worked with Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, just not as an employee at those companies. “I did extensive work on the LP side with Goldman Sachs in my time at LinkBridge,” he said, referring to a one-time employer. “I did extensive work with Citigroup, in my time in the LP position in LinkBridge Investors, just like I did work with firms on the GP side of things like Blackstone, and Deloitte, and Robbins, Geller, Dowd and so many other big firms in the industry of private equity.”

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup declined to comment on this latest explanation. Deloitte and Blackstone did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, a law firm that sues corporations, told The Post, “We cannot verify this claim. We have no record of Mr. Santos or his business having any business relationship with our firm.”

Tuesday, June 07, 2022

Reason

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

David Pakman, with Daniel Levitin, psychologist, neuroscientist, Professor Emeritus at McGill University, and author of:

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method

and

Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era

Sunday, December 26, 2021

2021 Fact Check Wrap-Up


WaPo deserves a Pinochio of their own for starting the piece with a paragraph that seems aimed at Both-Sides-ing this thing.

Notice how they tell us straight up that they've scrutinized Biden more than anyone else, which is kind of understandable - POTUS takes the lead, so POTUS takes the heat - but they also falsely equate one Joe Biden with all the lyin'-sack-of-shit "conservatives" put together - an entire rogues' gallery on the Republican side is basically either ignored or lumped together.

Notice also that most of these are about COVID-19 or Jan6 - one massive Republican fuck up, and one massive GOP assault on Congress - while the Biden item is one mis-statement about one smallish aspect of an even more massive GOP attempt to tear down the democracy itself.

Once again, we present a list of our most popular fact checks of the year.

In compiling the top-10 list, we focused on full fact checks of specific claims. Thus, we did not include roundups of speeches or announcements.
If we had, our detailed accounting of every false or misleading statement made by President Biden in his first 100 days and a roundup of a March address to the nation would have made the cut.

Strikingly, only one fact check on the list examines a statement made by the current president, even though we fact-checked Biden more than any other person.
By contrast, during the Donald Trump and Barack Obama presidencies, fact checks of those presidents dominated the annual top-10 list. Four of the top fact checks concerned the coronavirus pandemic — and two other fact checks were of claims made by Trump, even though we fact-checked him infrequently this year.

1. No, the Taliban did not seize $85 billion of U.S. weapons

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August, Trump picked up on a claim circulating on right-wing social media and gave it wide circulation — that the United States left behind $85 billion of weapons during the chaotic withdrawal. As usual, we determined that Trump’s statement was poppycock. The $85 billion number reflects all spending appropriated for Afghanistan Security Forces since the U.S. invasion in 2001. But even that is high; a smaller figure, $75 billion, actually had been disbursed.

Moreover, a 2017 government report estimated that about 29 percent of the funds spent on the Afghan security forces between 2005 and 2016 went to equipment and transportation. In theory, that means as much as $24 billion of equipment was given to the Afghans. But given the passage of time, some of this equipment may be obsolete or have been destroyed — or soon may not be usable, given the shortage of maintenance crews. (Note: This was the most popular article in The Fact Checker’s 14-year history.)

2. Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible

Technically not a fact check, this also was one of the biggest hits in the history of The Fact Checker. Our timeline of key events, including important articles, helped readers understand why a theory once dismissed as nonsense — that the coronavirus that killed millions came from a lab in Wuhan, China — had gained new credence among scientists. Shortly after this column appeared, Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct a new review of the evidence. Without China’s full cooperation, however, the truth may never be known.

Many scientists continue to think the most likely explanation is that the virus emerged from nature. In 2020, the Fact Checker produced a video that looked into possible explanations for the origin of the virus; it had more than 2 million views on YouTube.

Did coronavirus accidentally escape from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful. | The Fact Checker
In the absence of crucial evidence of how the new coronavirus began comes many theories — one is that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. (Sarah Cahlan, Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

3. Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding

A Capitol Hill showdown in May between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, quickly went viral. We used this fact check to help readers understand a growing debate about whether “gain-of-function” research played a role in the coronavirus pandemic. The debate over such experiments predated the pandemic, but it has gained new urgency as scientists investigate the origin of the virus that has killed more than 5 million people around the world.

We ended up giving Two Pinocchios to Paul for his remarks. We concluded that there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if a National Institutes of Health connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive.


4. Lauren Boebert’s tall tale about a man’s death that led her to pack heat

We’re often interested in the “origin stories” of politicians — regular lines that they use over and over to explain their political motivations. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) arrived in Congress this year after leveraging her fame as the owner of a restaurant, Shooters Grill of Rifle, Colo., where the wait staff often have open-carry firearms as they serve customers.

Over and over, Boebert says she started allowing her staff to carry guns after a man was killed outside her restaurant. But we obtained police and coroner reports that show her story is mainly fiction. Police briefly considered it a possible homicide but quickly concluded that the man died of a drug overdose. She earned Three Pinocchios.

Lauren Boebert tells this story when talking about guns. Here’s what really happened.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R- Colo.) has repeatedly told a misleading story about a fatal beating discussing her support of open-carry laws. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

5. Trump falsely claims he ‘requested’ 10,000 troops rejected by Pelosi

In a March speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump mostly replayed golden oldies from his long list of falsehoods. But in an interview with a Fox News reporter, Trump claimed that he “requested” 10,000 troops to guard the Capitol on Jan. 6 but that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blocked the order. That new claim caught our attention.

Upon inspection, it fell apart as quickly as many of his other statements. Acting defense secretary Christopher Miller said that Trump had assumed 1 million people would gather to hear him the speak — in reality, Trump’s Jan. 6 rally attracted only thousands of people — and he tossed out a 10,000 figure as an offhand remark during a meeting on Iran. Miller and other senior Pentagon officials never relayed the 10,000 figure to anyone outside the Defense Department, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the matter. So Pelosi had no request to reject. Trump, as usual, earned Four Pinocchios.


6. The false claim that the fully approved Pfizer vaccine lacks liability protection

Robert Malone, a physician who bills himself as having played a key role in the creation of mRNA vaccines, is a prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines that have been crafted using the technology. Shortly after the Food and Drug Administration fully authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, he appeared on a program hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, a one-time Trump adviser, and claimed that the full authorization was a bait-and-switch game played by the FDA. In essence, his argument was that the approved vaccine, Comirnaty, would no longer have liability protections so Pfizer would simply keep distributing in the United States the product that had been authorized for emergency use.

But Malone was wrong — the liability protection for Comirnaty is the same as the vaccine that was previously approved under emergency authorization. Malone quickly conceded his error when we contacted him, so we did not award Pinocchios.

7. Biden falsely claims the new Georgia law ends voting hours early

In condemning a new Georgia election law that imposed new restrictions on voting, the president made a claim that puzzled us: “It ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.”

Many listeners might assume he was talking about voting on Election Day. But Election Day hours were not changed. The law did make some changes to early voting. But experts say the net effect of the new early-voting rules was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them. Biden earned Four Pinocchios.


8. The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about ‘gain-of-function’ research

Readers had been asking for an update of our May fact check of the Fauci-Paul spat (#3 on this list) ever since a top NIH official sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 20 saying that the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance — which received NIH funding to do the research on the potential for bat-specific pathogens in nature to jump to humans — did not report an experimental finding that indicated a spike in viral growth. Two senators, Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) cited the NIH letter to assert that Fauci lied to Congress.

But we saw no reason to change the Two Pinocchio rating we awarded Paul — and we gave Two Pinocchios to Cruz and Cotton for spinning the letter as confirming what it does not say. There is a split in the scientific community about what constitutes gain-of-function research. To this day, NIH says this research did not meet the criteria — a stance that is not an outlier in the scientific community.


9. ‘Good-looking Marines’: Video misrepresents Biden at inauguration

This was one of the strangest conspiracy theories of the year — a viral tweet claimed that on Inauguration Day, “someone in Biden’s earpiece told him to salute the Marines, and Biden just repeated the words ‘salute the Marines,’ because he is so used to just repeating what comes from his earpiece.”

After multiple viewings of the C-SPAN clip, we concluded that Biden did not utter the phrase “Salute the Marines.” Instead, Biden remarked, “Good-looking Marines,” as he passed through the Capitol doors. About six hours after this fact check was published, the tweet and the user account associated with it were removed from Twitter.

10. Rep. Jim Jordan’s false claim that Pelosi denied a request for National Guard troops

In a tweet, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) claimed: “Capitol Police requested National Guard help before January 6th. That request was denied by Speaker Pelosi and her Sergeant-at-Arms.”

Jordan tweeted this without being able to offer any evidence to back it up. Instead, public testimony showed Pelosi did not even hear about the request until two days later. Jordan also tried to pin the blame on the House sergeant-at-arms, but testimony shows the Senate sergeant-at-arms also was not keen on the idea. Jordan earned Four Pinocchios.


Top columns in 2021 - that were published before 2021

Many readers discover old fact checks when searching the Internet for information. Here’s a list of fact checks that ranked among the top 100 in 2021 — even though they were first published in 2020 or 2019. The first story on this list even made it into the top 30, even though it was published more than two years ago.

1. Are U.S. women’s soccer players really earning less than men? (July 8, 2019)

2. Mitch McConnell got ‘rich’ the old-fashioned way (June 2, 2020)

3. Joe Biden’s claim that ‘almost half’ of Americans live in poverty (June 20, 2019)

4. Joe Biden’s worst-ever campaign moment, revisited (July 27, 2020)

5. The ‘very fine people’ at Charlottesville: Who were they? (May 8, 2020)

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