Posted on 05/03/2023 8:14:57 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The “fact-checking” industry is a total joke.
A bad joke. Worse than a 5-year-old’s knock-knock joke. As bad as a Chelsea Handler joke.
Really, it is that bad.
Just when you think that they couldn’t get any lower, they prove you wrong. They really exist to do nothing but buttress Establishment lies.
https://t.co/NRHDSJONuy pic.twitter.com/LnJIVWeaBS
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) May 3, 2023
Randi Weingarten, for those of you unfortunate enough not to have read my article “Randi Weingarten is an evil liar,” is the President of the American Federation of Teachers. She is, perhaps, the single biggest reason that schools in the United States remained closed for so long. A year or more in many places.
Randi has been going on a propaganda tour claiming she was desperately trying to get schools open as quickly as possible, as it becomes clear that school closures may be the single-biggest COVID-related disaster and one of the biggest government missteps in recent history.
Kids are literally dying because of those school closures, and their mental health has taken a nosedive. Much of this transgender craze is related to all the TikTok time kids had during the pandemic.
AFT President Randi Weingarten: "We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools." pic.twitter.com/1qNL05VD3u
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 26, 2023
Weingarten testified before Congress that she was desperate to get schools open, and the floodgates of criticism opened up. The claim was so audacious that even Democrats called her out on it. Lori Lightfoot, herself no paragon of virtue or honesty, called out Weingarten. It just isn’t true that the union worked with government officials to get schools open. Instead, they attacked anybody who tried.
Weingarten did indeed keep saying during the pandemic that schools should be reopened as quickly as possible, but “possible” turned out to be totally impossible as she kept on piling up the barriers she insisted be surmounted before schools could safely be open. Congress wound up passing $190 billion in funding to meet her demands, and it still didn’t move her.
Every proposal put forth was viciously fought, and every proponent of opening schools was attacked for wanting to kill Grandma.
Teachers’ unions threatened strikes, attacked lawmakers, insulted everybody, and kept on insisting that no damage was being done because “kids are resilient.”
"Kids are resilient!" Weingarten bellows as she tosses them out of airplanes https://t.co/SRjNebIbQH
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) February 22, 2021
Weingarten has been losing the propaganda war, so she turned to the mega-propagandists to save her: the fact-checking industry and Politifact are coming to save her.
John wrote about the whole affair earlier today.
I won’t even bother going through their convoluted and deceitful “fact check.” It doesn’t even merit the name, as John rightly pointed out. Cherry-picking things Weingarten said and ignoring what she did is quite on-brand, and unworthy of analysis. It is as useful as believing Sam Bankman-Fried’s insistence that he was just an altruist saving the world.
Outstanding compilation of footage of teachers’ union leader Randi Weingarten calling for COVID school closures throughout 2020 and 2021, contrary to her now casting herself as a bold advocate for schools reopening.pic.twitter.com/UcWjfmqpno
— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) May 3, 2023
Liars are going to lie, and repeating their lies doesn’t make them true. Randi Weingarten spent two years attacking attempts to open schools. Everybody knows it. Because it is manifestly true.
The fact-checking industry serves one and only one purpose: to buttress the narrative. Since so few people take the press at their word anymore, the industry sprung up to add a “No we really mean it this time” exclamation point on stories they want to be believed.
Weingarten is important to save because she is so useful to their cause: she provides a river of cash, votes, and volunteers to the Democrat Party, and replacing her quickly would be difficult. She has carried a lot of water for the Party, so they owe her.
Hence the “fact check.” It is little more than an attempt to save her credibility. Teachers are an important constituency for Democrats because people like teachers. They are sympathetic, in the way that nurses are. We are grateful to them.
They are perfect foils for politicians. Having a teacher union be held responsible for one of the most destructive acts perpetrated against children is a bad look.
Will it work? Both yes and no. No, people on the inside know exactly what happened and that she is an evil liar. But yes, because the memory will fade and the “fact checks” will sow doubt that she really is that bad.
When was the last time a Democrat actually paid a price for the damage they have done to our country?
When have we not had to read carefully to see what is useful and what isn’t?
Conservatives have had to know how to pull the useful information out of the media for at least my lifetime, and I think well before that.
Conservatives have always had to read Soviet style and some of us are very good at it, when I could afford it I tried to read five daily papers and several dozens of magazines a month, the more one digests the easier it is to filter through, it is the same way some of us could learn military secrets just by vast amounts of reading public sources, for
example when Tom Clancy was investigated for his military knowledge he had to explain that he just read a lot of public sources and was good at filtering through them.
I call it Politifake.
Any person or group who calls themselves "Fact Checkers" are not interested in presenting the truth, but are "checking" the facts: as in the second definition of verb (used with object):
I analyze articles and even parts of articles on a case by case basis according to logic, sources and previous research. It’s stupid to generalize against a publication that offers at least some good information.
It’s even more stupid to allow yourself to react like a knee jerk to such generalizations and be sucked by autocratic crooks into a regime of crazy talk. And above all, resist confirmation bias, which is the way to being a member of the booby hatch class.
It is a fallacy to generalize the “’fact-checking’ industry” (all fact checking sites and every article on them) to the reputation of one individual (a teachers’ union head). By trying to rout every voter to conspiracy theory sites, you’ll lose most of the voters.
Most teachers in public schools can pound sand. I mean it.
Hot air isn’t much better
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