Leftist phony “fact checker” site Snopes.com has been caught botching its review of a meme on the GOP and Obamacare, yet the website is so smug and secure of its position in the progressive universe that it refuses to climb down from its flagrantly erroneous conclusions.
The online meme shows a photograph of President Trump posing with Republican lawmakers and administration members after the House voted to repeal Obamacare in 2017. Thirty-three of the faces have a red “X” drawn over them. “Everyone with an X has since been voted out of Congress,” the meme reads.
Fact Fantasy Land
Nicholas Kitchel, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, shared the tweet in November. Negative feedback was immediate and overwhelming. The Daily Caller details the numerous errors within the photo, the most obvious being that the majority of people represented with a red X, in fact, went on to be re-elected in 2018. Hmmm, seems like a big mistake. Moreover, a few more decided not to run for re-election and a couple of those marked with an X weren’t even members of Congress in the first place. Kitchel himself deleted the tweet after acknowledging it to be filled with errors.
Yet despite all this, you can go onto Snopes right now and see that it has verified the meme as “True” (here is an archived copy, just in case the site eventually decides to get its act together). The website explains that since 33 House Republicans did go on to lose their seats in the 2018 midterms, that makes the meme factual, even though those specifically pictured were never X’d out by the American people.
The arrogance of Snopes keeping its patently false “verdict” despite widespread ridicule over the meme in question shows how supposed statements of “facts” are merely vehicles for leftist political belief. Snopes and fellow left-leaning “fact checkers” like PolitiFact have been caught twisting the truth as they see fit so many times that the Media Research Center has organized a concerted effort to keep tabs on their egregious falsehoods.
Psychological Need
So, why do obviously partisan groups try to portray themselves as unflinching champions of unalloyed truth? Yes, it is a normal part of the distorting “mainstream” fake news propaganda machine we see in operation today. But there’s even more to it. Progressives love expertism – not just as a political weapon, but as the way they want to see themselves in the world. They are the smart ones, the informed ones. They have the facts on their side. In reality, the phony fact checkers are as much about progressives deceiving themselves as they are about fooling unwitting readers.
No matter how much of a hack he may be, how can a man like Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, be so unaware of how foolish he appears when he writes that facts – not the interpretation of facts, but the facts themselves – have a left-wing bias? Krugman noted in his Dec. 2017 column that reviews have proven the existence of such a prejudiced universe. He cites a 2013 study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University, which found that online fact-checker PolitiFact “rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats.” Krugman is happy to accept the results while deriding The Weekly Standard for interpreting them as a flaw in the so-called fact-checking site.
According to the CMPA, PolitiFact assesses Democrat statements as true twice as often as Republican claims; conversely, Republican claims were labeled false three times more often than Democrat ones. Rather than suggest that his readers should question the impartiality of these hallowed “fact checkers,” Krugman, completely obtuse as to how shallow it makes him look, says… Yep, that sounds about right.
“There are, of course, individual liberals who say things that aren’t true, on all sorts of issues,” he generously concedes. “But huge falsehoods by major party figures – where by falsehood I mean something demonstrably false, not a view you disagree with – are far more common on the right than the left.”
What he wrote must be a fact because the fact-checkers back him up!
The Krugman example is a perfect example of how this sickness feeds on itself and grows. These fact-checkers are the journalistic equivalent of Bill Nye, the Not Quite Really a Science Guy, weaving progressive beliefs as scientific fact and hoping the bow tie and scientific bearing help him pull it off. With Nye, the role of expert is as important as the information that he is distorting.[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]That’s science? Who does he think he’s kidding here?[/perfectpullquote]
“It’s hard not to get frustrated with this,” Nye says in a video in which he is pushing a Planned Parenthood talking point on when human life begins. “Nobody likes abortion. But you can’t tell somebody what to do.” That’s science? Who does he think he’s kidding here?
This political fetish for expertism fits perfectly with progressives’ messianic and authoritarian impulses. If they have the facts on their side, and only want others to acknowledge what is inherently true (even as it clearly isn’t), then to oppose their will is to be a denier. Climate change is just the test run on how far they can push this weapon.
What progressives fail to understand is that those who do not share their beliefs have no reason to indulge them in their claims to expertism. You have to win people of goodwill over with the force of your argument and the proven substance of your claims. The fact that they go to such great lengths to play up their faux Wise King Solomon roles only goes to show that progressives themselves are fully aware of how weak their actual arguments are.
