The Democrat 'fact check' scam

Andrea Widburg:

John Adams famously said, "Facts are stubborn things."  Democrats, finding this reality troublesome, rely upon a more Orwellian approach, which is to insist that facts are what they say they are.  Never is this more obvious than with the army of professional Democrat fact-checkers, all of whom were hard at work after the first night of the Republican convention.  In ways both big and small, they confused facts with opinion or stated with certainty that their take on legitimately contested issues is the only "true fact."

There isn't room in this post to fact-check all the so-called fact-checkers, but I can offer a few representative examples of how they work.

The bias appeared before they even begin fact-checking.  Take Daniel Dale, who describes himself as a "[r]eporter for CNN, fact-checking the president and other politicians."  For this professional fact-checker, however, "other politicians" does not mean Democrats.  His bias was so blatant that even the Trump-haters caught on....

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PolitiFact, a leading fact-checker, is heavily funded by leftist institutions (the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Omidyar Network Fund, etc.), and it gives its funders bang for the buck.  While it has on occasion criticized Democrats, its worldview is decidedly leftist.  In the past, for example, it's stated that it is a fact that people can change their sex just because they feel that they are not their biological sex.

When PolitiFact purported to correct factual errors on the first night of the Republican convention, it showed its biases clearly.  It was unable to distinguish between objective facts and subjective opinions, and it gave the Democrats plenty of wiggle room in order to counter Republican statements.  Here are a few examples.

Nikki Haley said Democrats "want massive tax hikes on working families."  PolitiFact disagreed.  Its first tactic was to look only at Biden, although Haley was talking about the Democrats as a whole.  In that way, PolitiFact could focus only on Biden telling ABC news recently that he wouldn't impose new taxes on people making less than $400,000.  (That's a U-turn from what he said a year ago, when he promised to repeal the tax cuts.)

However, when you look at Democrats generally, not just Biden, you see that Democrats have been itching to repeal Trump's tax cuts.  Moreover, that recent $400,000 Biden promise does not appear in the platform.  The only reference to $400,000 in the platform is the promise to increase the Social Security tax on incomes above $400,000.  In addition, by raising the corporate tax rate, Democrats will raise costs for all consumers, including working families.  After all, corporations don't actually pay taxes.  They either pass on the cost with higher prices or leave America, increasing the number of unemployed workers forced to drop out of the working and middle classes.  So no, Nikki didn't lie.

Patricia McCloskey said the Democrats and Biden "want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning."  PolitiFact disagreed in an exceptionally disingenuous way by saying Biden and the Dems never said those specific words.  All they want to do is the wholesale reinstatement of Obama's Affirmatively Further Fair Housing policy.

PolitiFact then wrote at length about how AFFH is just meant to prevent discrimination in the suburbs and that the government promised not to use it to force high-density housing.  Except, as Stanley Kurtz writes, that's exactly what a Democrat-run HUD will do, with Democrats, from Biden on down, champing at the bit to end single-family housing.  Tucker Carlson had something to say on that subject, too....

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There is more.

The tendentious nature of the fact check scam is shown by their arguing that Biden never supported defunding the police.  What Biden did say was that he supported reallocating police funding to other areas which most sane people would recognize as a method of defunding the police.