If you’re a news junkie like me, eventually you’ll come across a link to a fact-check article. The link will read something like, “Little green men found on the moon, true or false?”
Once in a while I’ll take a gander because sometimes there are fake quotes and photographs floating around the interwebs, and some of them are good enough to fool even smart people, and I never want to be that guy who got suckered. One of the few ways fact-checkers are actually useful is in calling out this kind of misinformation.
Most of the fact-checkers are notoriously biased, however, and you can guess which side of the political spectrum they routinely favor, seeing as many of them are part of the corporate media complex. On Saturday, January 6, one link caught my eye: “Claim: In a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump told supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Joe Biden’s presidency.”
I clicked on it on the naive assumption that the fact-checkers, this time from Snopes.com, would be forced to explain the truth: that former President Donald Trump said no such thing.
Of course, I should have known better – there was no chance they would be fair. In fact, in their own analysis, they write on several occasions that Trump did not in fact direct anyone or anything to “storm the Capitol” – and yet their conclusion is that the claim is a “mixture” of truth and falsehood.
What a joke.
How did they squirm their way into such a tortured logic pretzel? By claiming it was a “subjective call” whether some people interpreted his words as a call to “insurrection.” We didn't ask for "subjective calls," Snopes, we asked for cold hard facts.
In short, the president called on supporters to "peacefully and patriotically" march or walk to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to urge members of the senate to defy the Electoral College vote in a constitutionally mandated procedure to affirm Biden's win, without using the words "storm" or "breach" or "break into" the federal building.
Put another way, the president encouraged supporters to descend on the Capitol grounds and "cheer" on senators who would break laws governing U.S. elections, but he did not explicitly tell people to commit crimes themselves. [Emphases mine.]
That's it right there, fact-check over. He didn't say it, end of sentence, time to continue my day.
Except noooo, not for these folks. Instead of a fact check, they decided to conduct a “maybe some people might have thought” check.
Furthermore, it was a subjective call on whether the phrases "you have to show strength" and "demand that Congress do the right thing" were actually messages condoning crimes and violence among extremists, without outright encouraging it. Such a rhetorical strategy is known to scholars of white nationalist and extremist groups, including the Proud Boys.
In sum, while Trump did not say the words "storm" or "break into" the White House, Trump indeed told supporters to gather at the U.S. Capitol and try to convince members of Congress to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Biden's presidency. For those reasons, and the ones outlined above, we rate this claim a "Mixture."
"You have to show strength" is now a call to arms? If so, about three-quarters of what politicians say would be considered prompts for violent action.
This is such hot garbage that it isn’t fit to print (even on the internet). They say quite conclusively that he did not utter the words that were the subject of the fact check, yet then immediately go into progressive la-la land where, well, ok, it’s a fact, but it’s not really a fact, because we’re liberal and we don’t like it.
Unfortunately, this is hardly an outlier, and you can find many similar examples at Snopes, factcheck.org, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, which is edited by the almost comically inept and misinformed Glenn Kessler, and the left-wing censorship machine, Media Matters, among others.
It's a scary time when most of our media is so in the tank for the Democrats that even fact-checkers, when faced with an indisputable fact, attempt to tell you that it’s “nuanced,” a “mixture,” or needs “to be taken into context.” The question was, did Donald Trump say those words? It’s a yes or no question, and it doesn’t need nuance, context, or anything else – either he said it or he didn’t. The answer, even for Snopes, was no.
Yet they’re so corrupt they turn what should be an easy fact check into an op-ed. Shameful.
Donald J. Trump, Jan. 6, 2021:
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard today.
