#factchecking trump

[tomorrowusa]

Fact checking Donald Trump is a full time, even overtime job. He told over 30,000 lies just during his term.

The problem with live news coverage of Trump is that he gets to spew lies and that the factchecking has to wait until he shuts his porcine mouth or producers cut him off.

Low information voters are therefore likely to hear Trump's semi-coherent rants but miss any attempts to call out his lies.

Having said that, MSNBC on Super Tuesday night did a decent attempt at countering a few of Trump's main lies.

Joy Reid is pointing something out that Democrats need to do much more. Trump TOTALLY botched the US pandemic response right from the start. A reminder of what Trump said at CNBC on 22 January 2020 – the day the first COVID-19 case appeared in the US.

Of course it wasn't just fine under Trump.

The Obama administration, which limited the 2014-2016 Ebola pandemic in the US to under a dozen cases, had put together a pandemic playbook. You can read it here. Trump totally ignored it. He spent 50 days after the first US COVID case doing typically idiotic Trump stuff like criticizing 2020 Oscar Best Picture winner Parasites. And afterwards he became preoccupied with quack cures for COVID as it spread throughout the US.

People who claim they had it better under Trump are hoping that the memories of voters are as impaired as Trump's cognition.

We need to be prepared to offer clear fact checks to anybody hearing Trump's lies. Of course convincing MAGA zombies is a waste of time. But when around low information voters who may not be part of the Trump cult we need to be able to offer convincing short refutations. Pointing out that Trump did nothing for the first 50 days of COVID in the US is a good start. So speak up!

Trump's lack of a competent COVID response led to a cascade of acute economic problems which took several years to sort out.

[undergroundusa]

"…the most potent threat to free speech comes not from the communist Chinese or the Bolshevistic Russian oligarchs, the Marxist dictators of South America, or the Islamofascists of the Middle East. It is emanating from the far-Left of the Democrat Party…"

ORIGINAL CONTENT: https://www.undergroundusa.com/p/free-speech-under-attack-the-marxists

READ, SUBSCRIBE, SHARE & EDUCATE: PROTECT FREE SPEECH

Free Speech Under Attack: The Marxist’s March To Control Through Censorship

[factcheckdotorg]

Trump’s Latest False Claim About the U.S.-China Trade Deficit 

[alanfromrochester]

Fact checking during the Trump-Harris debate was good, calling BS on him in real time, to the point of rightwingers complaining that it was too easy on her. Is that true or does it just seem that way after factcheckers covering for Trump as this describes?

I have noticed nitpicking on something that's substantially true, and validating something substantially false because of weasel words, and I suppose bias could manifest that way.

Maybe it is a symptom of media playing both sides rather than portraying one negatively when they are being bad, or bending over backwards to avoid being accused of biased against him

PS

These problems with factchecking could be an issue with trying to regulate misinformation, though that sounds like a tempting idea

“Many of the purported “fact-checks” go beyond verifying Democrats’ statements and instead serve as political spin for Trump, giving him an unearned benefit of the doubt that almost ignores he actually was president and has an established record of deceit and malicious incompetence. The error that fact-checkers consistently make is taking Trump’s assertions and denials at face value. They still treat the convicted felon like someone who operates in good faith, which often results in wish-casting and the “sane-washing” of Trump’s blather. Democrats, meanwhile, are held to an impossibly literal standard where routine exaggerations and rhetorical flourishes are treated like whoppers. Trump’s statements are decontextualized, while those from Democrats are relentlessly scrutinized. The impact is a proliferation of false equivalencies that normalize Republican liars.”

— What’s wrong with the fact-checkers? - by Stephen Robinson

[lizardsfromspace]

The factchecking this cycle has been so profoundly incompetent that it's finally getting some real backlash, but the extent of it really should be clear. So much of factchecking is not based in reality, but in a kind of contorted moon logic that can find true claims to be false and false ones to be true based on wildly inconsistent reasoning.

But this one really shows off some of the base assumptions of modern factchecking, and also bc it got a community note which is funny:

Let's take this one by one

The idea that quotes have any options but "he said it" or "he didn't say it". It is a binary, maybe with a third option of "it was clipped wildly out of context", but something you see constantly now is the idea that quoting someone's direct words without deceptive editing or removal of context can somehow be false

Pointlessly noting that it's from 2016, and that it's not clear if he currently believes it. What the hell does that matter to the question of if he said that in 2016? People understood that the "dig up someone's tweets from when they were 17" thing was inane, but they counter-balanced by apparently deciding that citing anything someone said more than about six months ago is Misinformation if we don't have objective evidence they would say the exact same thing now, even if there's no evidence they believe anything else. Analyzing someone's high school tweets and analyzing something the literal President said seven years ago are not equivalent

Noting that he walked it back following criticism. You see this constantly, too. Again, what does that matter to the question of if he said it? But this is just taken as a given now: if someone gets blowback and says "whoops I didn't mean it", that should be taken at face value. Effectively, Politifact is letting Donald Trump self-factcheck Donald Trump: their only evidence (and I read the article too) this is at all false is that Donald Trump said Donald Trump didn't really mean the words he said, so they must agree with the judgment of Donald Trump that Donald Trump was treated so unfairly here.

A general confusion over what factchecking is. If you're asked "did Donald Trump say this in 2016?", your sole job is to determine if he really said that in 2016. It's not to divine if he, deep in his heart, still believes it now. That's completely irrelevant.

The two guiding principles of modern factchecking are this: one, it's strongly rumored - and also, obvious to everyone literate - that the major factchecking sites have either standing orders to find equal numbers of lies on both sides, or are staffed by people who think it's their job to hold both sides equally to account (the exception is Snopes, whose writers are just terrible at their jobs). In the name of this, Donald Trump can say something on camera only for it to be judged false, while a Democratic politician can be excoriated for mildly rounding down a figure in a speech. A factchecking website once determined that saying climate change was a threat to life on this planet was a lie, because climate change won't kill all life on this planet. Politifact's lie of the year one year was a Democrat saying a Republican plan would "end Medicare as we know it", which was judged to be a lie because it wouldn't literally end Medicare completely. Figurative language needs to be scoured, comments said directly on camera need to be made fuzzy. This makes factchecking sites worthless at factchecking, because what even is this?

It's not true that Donald Trump will refuse to accept the election results, because he's merely said he won't accept, and has said if he loses, it's only because the election was fraudulent. Okay, what, do you demand that people prove he said his plans in exact words? What is the actual, functional difference between "he said he won't accept it" and "he said if he loses it's because he won and they stole it from him, and he won't commit to saying he'll accept it"? What are you talking about, who is this for? When you go to the Logic and Reason Site for Debunking & end up having to puzzle out their convoluted logic and reasoning to understand anything, the plot's been lost a bit

The other is the idea that context is exonerating. Any context at all. If they said they didn't mean it, partially false. If they walked it back, partially false. If they said it was taken out of context, partially false. If they said it a certain number of years ago, partially false. If there's a longer video, even if it shows functionally the same thing, pants on fire, five pinocchios.

Again, we have footage of Trump saying this, and the footage in the ad is unedited, and the factchecking website is declaring something that OBJECTIVELY HAPPENED WITH HARD EVIDENCE IT HAPPENED didn't really happen bc we don't know his heart, maybe he believes something different now, we simply can't know for certain. But we do know for certain. Because "false" at least used to mean "didn't happen". But factchecking sites are now on those Beyond Belief definitions of "true" and "false" I guess

But the real problem here is that they just accept anything someone being factchecked says at face value. Because, and I can't believe I'm saying this

It seems like the people paid to determine if other people are lying...have forgotten that people lie sometimes

[odinsblog]

Imagine being the loser ass tool, Yisha Raziel, who made a deepfake of Bella Hadid saying she supports Israel. 🤮

If you’re reading this, I am telling you right now, you better second and third guess what you see and hear on social media and the news. Stick to reliable news sources. Vet them. Require multiple, trusted sources. Validate links to sources. In the last several months, I’ve seen the deepfake of President Nixon talking about the failed NASA mission that never happened. I’ve seen a deepfake of Joe Biden hilariously using profanity to trash talk Trump - Biden’s deepfake, however, was made to be intentionally obvious that it wasn’t his words, or something he would actually say.

But imagine a viral deepfake video of Biden announcing a nuclear strike on Russia within the next 20 minutes? Or a deepfake of Biden reintroducing the draft to support Israel? Or a deepfake of Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election and endorsing Trump…

These kinds of things are going to begin happening a lot more, especially with the proliferation of troll farms, and especially since YouTube, Twitter (I refuse to call it X), and Facebook have all eviscerated their verification and factcheck teams that used to at least attempt to limit disinformation and misinformation.

Pay attention, peeps.

Don’t get bamboozled.

[laundryandtaxes]

I think that maybe the worst impact that Trump's presidency made on the American landscape is that Trump Derangement Syndrome was 100% real and millions of American just never recovered- millions of liberals fully lost their minds and became incapable of reasoning along the lines of their own principles rather than according to sheer partisan reaction. They believed by the millions, and their serious journalists and talking heads regularly claimed to believe, that it made more sense that Vladimir Putin was holding a sex tape over the head of the US president than that liberals ran an election campaign against an embarrassingly bad candidate and lost. They became so allergic to disagreement itself that they regularly attacked the character of people generally on their side over minor and inconsequental political differences. They became so allergic to thinking and to the marketplace of ideas that many of them now legitimately believe that support for freedom of speech is itself a dogwhistle. They became so weak in their principles that they argued that any American, especially any conservative, who took issue with sending billions of taxpayer dollars into the black hole of a meat grinder of a war in Eastern Europe was a traitor and a lover of Vladimir Putin- being anti war, long one of the single best traits of American liberals, was tossed to the side largely just in reaction to Trump's personal desire to avoid new wars. They convinced themselves that feminists speaking up in defense of the ability of women to even discuss wanting to maintain some designated single sex spaces, facilities, groups, etc for women were not just similarly-principled women with whom they had disagreements on the definitions of basic terms, but actually fascists, purely in reaction to conservative dislike of gay, bisexual, gnc, and trans people. They became so accustomed to simply making the truth by speaking it into existence with their media heads and their factchecking bodies that mainstream media all but pretended there were no riots in the summer of 2020 when people could walk around and see them for themselves. They became so nostalgic for the platonic ideal of a president that they rehabilitated the image of George W. Bush despite his being a war criminal who outright lied to justify the illegal invasion of a country for oil that led to unthinkable amounts of destruction and death, and who grew the tendrils of the American security state until they reached into the personal email accounts of American citizens. They straight up forgot how to think and reason and even how to look at the world as it actually exists, and that's what we are stuck with.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Acc to spare, when does Harry actually claim he proposed to Meghan?? And when did he claim to have asked the queen for permission? I believe she said "I spoke I have to say yes then" to his question.

From whatever i had read so far, I thought the permission happened in Scotland, or just after the queen got back from Balmoral. So sometime late August or early September 2017. And the proposal happened in Sept 2017. So right around the time you say the BRF Archie page was forst set up. And when suits not being renewed rumours started. What do you think was happening there? Meghan finally got her claws all in and started flexing about how she will be one of the KP bosses soon?

So below the jump are excerpts from both Spare and Tom Bower's Revenge on Harry asking The Queen for permission and the proposal.

But essentially, both works contradict each other and the key dates mentioned don't line up to the September 4, 2017 date from the webpage.

In Spare:

Harry says that Meghan and The Queen met at the Royal Lodge "by accident" in October 2016 - he was taking Meghan to meet Fergie, there were no corgis, Meghan's curtsy was flawless, and The Queen asked about Donald Trump.

Harry writes that he asked The Queen for permission to marry Meghan at the end of October in Sandringham on a shoot. This would have been the weekend of October 27 - 29, 2017.

He proposed on November 4th shortly after Meghan officially moved to London. (It sounds like he proposed maybe between 1-3 days after she moved.) Harry writes that they kept the engagement a secret for about two weeks, but the way he wrote it, it's dripping with a kind of venom, in a way, that makes one wonder if the engagement was leaked or if they were forced to announce the engagement when they did.

But when you look at the calendar, two weeks after November 4th is November 18th - a whole nine days before the official announcement. So what happened to the missing week?

In Revenge:

Bower presents them going to The Queen for permission to marry as a kind of fait accompli - it sounds like they were engaged first, then went to see The Queen for permission at Buckingham Palace and that this meeting was also Meghan's first introduction to The Queen.

Bower says this happened at the end of October, 2 weeks after the Invictus Games ended on October 12th. This would be the weekend of October 27-29, 2017 - so at least the dates that the Queen was asked for permission align between Harry's version and Bower's version.

The corgis were there in Bower's version of events. (Which aligns with Harry saying the corgis were there the first time he introduced Meghan to The Queen in the engagement interview.)

Bower also suggests that The Queen felt she had to say yes because of Meghan's PR saying they had already met; ergo, that the Queen felt she couldn't say no because it would have been a Thing.

It is interesting that Bower specifically calls out the 2017 Invictus Games ending on October 12 when the official record has it ending on September 30. It's most likely a factchecking error, but it's surprising coming from Bower.

Quotes below the jump!

Quick note first - I cannot stand how they formatted Spare, so in the sections below, I'm using my own formatting to make it a much more sensical (to me, at least) read. If you read Spare yourself, you will see that the formatting is a tragedeigh.

In Spare, Harry describes Meghan meeting the Queen in Part 3, Chapter 15:

Meg came back to London a week later. October 2016. We lunched with [Mark Dwyer] and his family, and I introduced her to a few other close mates. All good. Everyone loved her. Emboldened, I felt the time had come for her to meet my family. She agreed. First stop, Royal Lodge. o meet Fergie, because Meg already knew Fergie's daughter Euge, and Jack, so this seemed a logical baby step. But as we neared Royal Lodge, I got word on my phone. Granny was there. She'd popped in. On her way home from church back to the castle. Meg said: "Fun! I love grandmas." I asked if she knew how to curtsy. She said she thought so. But she also couldn't tell if I was serious. "You're about to meet the Queen." "I know, but it's your grandma." "But she's the Queen." We pulled into the driveway, drove across the gravel, parked next to the big green box hedge. Fergie came outside, somewhat aflutter, and said: "Do you know how to curtsy?" Meg shook her head. Fergie demonstrated once. Meg imitated her. there wasn't time for a more advanced tutorial. We couldn't keep Granny waiting. As we walked towards the door, Fergie and I both leaned into Meg, whispering quick reminders. "When you first meet the Queen, it's Your Majesty. Thereafter it's just Ma'am. Rhymes with ham." (Quick aside: I'm pretty sure they did not say this. This is 100% the script from the movie, The Queen, and I'm pretty sure it's verbatim.) "Just, whatever you do, don't talk over her," we both said, talking over each other. We entered the large front sitting room and there she was. Granny. THe monarch. Queen Elizabeth II. Standing in the middle of the room. She turned slightly. Meg went straight to her and dropped a deep, flawless curtsy. "Your Majesty. Pleasure to meet you."

(Harry goes on to describe how The Queen asked Meghan about Donald Trump, since this was right before the 2016 election, and Meghan expertly pivoted to Canada and the Commonwealth. There are no dogs present in Harry's recollection of Meghan's introduction to The Queen.)

Harry describes the engagement beginning in Part 3 - Chapter 32. It takes place sometime after the 2017 Invictus Games. Harry calls Ed Lane Fox, his former private secretary, 'Elf.'

I told Elf and Jason that I wanted to propose. Congratulations, both men said. But then Elf said he'd need to do some fast digging to find out the protocols. There were strict rules governing such things. Rules? Really? He came back days later and said before doing anything I'd need to ask Granny's permission. I asked him if that was a real rule, or the kind we could work around. "Oh no, it's very real." (Harry describes how self-absorbed he is and recaps some plot points from The Crown.) And so, heart full of fear, mouth full of dust, I turned to the calendar. With Elf's help I circled a weekend in late October. A family shooting trip at Sandringham. Shooting trips always put Granny in a good mood. Perhaps she'd be more open to thoughts of love? (Harry talks about how he thinks Charles and William would talk him out of asking The Queen to marry Meghan if they knew he was going to do it and he recaps how William had been "pretty discouraging" about the relationship. Then he blathers on about how Charles told him there's no money to support Meghan and how Charles doesn't like anyone taking attention from him. He describes the shoot and how anxious he is to get time alone with The Queen.) After the final drive the party scattered. Everyone finished picking up their birds and returned to the Land Rovers. I saw Granny jump into her smaller Range Rover and drive out to the middle of the stubble field. She began looking for dead birds, while her dogs hunted. There was no security around her, so this looked to be my chance. I walked out to the middle of the stubble field, fell in alongside her, began helping. (blah blah blah, interior monologue, my heart cannot go on without Meg but I can't disobey my Queen.) I realized that I needed to get to it, without one second more of hesitation, so as Granny lowered the tailgate, as the dogs leaped up, as I thought of petting them but then remembered I had (description of dead birds and more interior monologing about how much he loved The Queen)...I saw her waitingf for me to speak--and not waiting patiently. Her face radiated: "Out with it." I coughed. "Granny, you know I love Meg very much, and I've decided that I would like to ask her to marry me, and I've been told that, er, that I have to ask your permission before I can propose." "You have to?" "Um. Well, yes, that's what your staff tell me, and my staff as well. That I have to ask your permission." I stood completely still, as motionless as the birds in my hands. I stared at her face but it was unreadable. At last she replied: "Well, then, I suppose I have to say yes."

Harry goes on to describe how offended he is by her reaction and admits he's so self-absorbed he doesn't realize it was permission granted.

Chapter 34 is about a time Harry and Meghan hosted William and Kate for dinner. William had a cold, Meghan offered her homeopathic "cures" and William found it charming while Kate was rude, and describes Meghan being in ripped jeans while Kate is dressed up. Chapter 35 is Harry's narration of Meghan moving to London and his description of how he proposed: outside in the garden because he wanted it to be like when they were in Botswana:

We hurried inside, finished our celebration in the warmth of the kitchen. It was November 4. We managed to keep it secret for about two weeks.

From Revenge, Tom Bower writes in Chapter 19:

To please Harry, the Queen agreed to ditch centuries of tradition. Meghan would be fast-tracked into the Royal Family before the wedding. Two weeks after the Invictus Games ended on 12th October, Harry introduced Meghan to the Queen in Buckingham Palace. Over tea and sandwiches, the monarch formally approved her grandson's engagement. The 91 year old had no choice. Apparently, she had already met Meghan in Windsor Park. In a fleeting, unexpected encounter, Meghan would claim to have performed an unrehearsed botched curtsey. During the formal meeting in the Palace, Harry would describe how the Queen's corgis, who had for the previous 33 years barked at him, lay at Meghan's feet and wagged their tales. Meghan described the scene as 'very sweet.' (Meghan moves to London. Bower talks about how the institution isn't welcoming to married-ins. They ran off Diana, Fergie, and Anne's first husband, and threatened to do the same to Kate till William laid down the law.) Meghan was the beneficiary of those misjudgements. In anticipation of the engagement's formal announcement, Palace officials agreed that to ease her transition into the family she needed guidance about the restrictions accepted by all members of the Royal Family. Harry would claim that he had forewarned Meghan: 'You know what you're letting yourself in for. It's a big deal and it's not easy for anybody.' If so, no one directly asked Meghan whether she understood that the British monarchy had only survived - with the support of 70 per cent of Britons - by seaking to remain soberly uncontroversial. No one spelled out to her that monarchists were unaware that most of the changes made to ensure the Crown's modernisation and survival had been imperceptible. But then, no one recalls that Meghan asked any detailed questions before the engagement was officially announced on 27th November, 2017.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Does it even matter that the Haitian immigrants who have flocked to Springfield, Ohio, are in the country legally? Does it matter that Springfield, once a depressed post-industrial Rust belt town like so many others, has been economically revitalized by their arrival? Does it matter that the immigrants from Haiti fled violence and economic deprivation in their own country that are the outcome of American policy? Does it matter that none of the bizarre lies that have been peddled about them by Donald Trump, JD Vance and others on the right, telling lurid tales of the migrants capturing and killing local pets, are true? But even though the stories are made up, the threats now facing Springfield’s population of roughly 80,000 souls are very real. After last week’s presidential debate, when Trump railed about how Haitians in Springfield were “eating the dogs, eating the cats … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there”, life has been transformed in Springfield. Ordinary life has yielded to a barrage of media attention, nationally broadcast lies and threats. Two elementary schools in Springfield had to be evacuated because of threats of violence. Think about that: someone contacted Springfield authorities and made threats against grade-school children that were credible enough that the buildings had to be evacuated for the sake of safety. Classes at Wittenberg University in Springfield had to be held online because multiple threats of violence targeting Haitian students and staff there – including a bomb threat and a mass shooting threat – were deemed credible. Two hospitals in the town, Kettering Health Springfield and Mercy Health, had to go into lockdown after receiving threats. Government buildings in the city also had to be closed. Haitian immigrants in Springfield told news outlets that they were afraid to leave their homes. There were reports of broken windows and acid thrown on cars. There is a word for this kind of large-scale, organized violence against a local ethnic enclave. That word is pogrom. [...] The episode is typical of Trump’s cynical cycle, one which the rightwing media and his many Republican imitators have almost perfected over the course of the past decade: an outrageous lie is told that provides cover for a racist resentment among Trump’s supporters – and, more importantly, gins up attention for Trump himself. Because the lie is fabricated and because it has no basis in reality, it can exist entirely at the level of fantasy and projection: lurid tales of pet-eating are not true, but because they can’t be proven or disproven, they can propel days’ worth of imaginings, condemnations, hoaxes and frantic factchecking by the media class. That this particular lie evokes longstanding racist imaginations of Black people as brutal and bestial – something more akin to coyotes than to hardworking small-town families – it reaffirms Trump’s particular appeal to the white Republican id.

Moira Donegan at The Guardian on the right-wing's racist anti-Haitian pogrom as a result of waging a hoax about "eating cats" in Springfield, Ohio (09.18.2024).

The Guardian's Moira Donegan wrote a column worth reading on the right-wing's racist anti-Haitian pogrom led by JD Vance, Donald Trump, and various conservative media talking heads who fueled the Springfield cat-eating hoax.

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

I've read about the US having more Zionist Christians than the world has Zionist Jews. Trump is one of them and he has attacked Jewish people many times. Chistians zionists are attacking anti zionist jews right now on twitter and real life. This is about US imperialism.

I'm not gonna look up this stat right now but just the fact that I read years ago in college that the state of Israel supports USA christians makes me believe you're right.

Also I know that the politifact for trump has some choice statements of his https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=donald-trump

mod ali

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ Daniel Dale of CNN was almost breathless from reciting and refuting all the lies which Trump told at his Wisconsin rally a couple of days ago. Being a fact checker in the age of Trump is steady work.

Donald Trump is simply a diarrhea torrent of lies. He told 30,573 lies just during his administration. He's likely has told many more than that since leaving office in disgrace.

Washington Post counts 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years by Trump

One thing Trump didn't talk about at his lie-encrusted Wisconsin rally was his Foxconn fiasco near Racine.

Foxconn mostly abandons $10 billion Wisconsin project touted by Trump

Yet another business failure, this time with taxpayer money, by the frequently bankrupt "stable genius".

[marta-bee]

So, about last night's VP debate.

J.D. Vance lied over and over again. Where he didn't lie it was a technicality that amounts to much the same thing- ex. the nationwide abortion ban, you could make the argument he wants a state-level approach but where each state still bans it vs. a federal-level action, so perhaps not a lie but in practice not one bit better. The trouble is he lied so smoothly and calmly, he doesn't come across as ripped from the pages of The Handmaid's Tale. Not too surprising when you look at his biography: the man's made a career of packaging and marketing his image.

The lack of truth baked into the format (you know, the whole no factchecking thing) helps with that, too.

Thinking more broadly about this... Look, a lot of people struggle to acknowledge a crisis. It's easier to say Vance isn't so bad and things are exaggerated about him and Project 2025, than to accept the man clamoring for a dictatorship looks like the guy you'd meet at the Elk's Club pancake breakfast. Denial is so much gentler sometimes.

So yes, I do worry the debate may give a lot of people space to think they can vote for him, that he's not so bad and they basically like old-school conservative principles, don't like how the country's going, all that. The good news is there's a month left where Vance will continue being Vance, and more importantly Trump will continue being Trump. Which will hopefully keep that bitter taste in those people's mouths, as it should.

Tim Walz was a little too flustered, not nearly as polished. I think he seemed at least as normal as Vance, with the added benefit of being truthful and decent. I do wish he could have been more forceful in shedding light on Vance's lies, but then he's America's coach not our debate teacher.

Bottom line: not great, and yes it does make me nervous in a way I wasn't before. But also not, like, apocalyptically bad either. Veep debates usually don't shift the needle on opinion too much anyway.

There was one interesting thought on the MSNBC this morning: that Trump psychologically can't stand to let someone else have the last word. Mr. Trump, on the off-chance you're reading this: yes, your running mate did so well last night and you should absolutely agree to debate Harris one more time so you can show you can do it even bigglier. It's your legacy at stake after all.

Or to put it another way:

[terriwriting]

It's good, actually, that Trump said that crazy shit in public. Previously these batshit claims were confined to weird propaganda "news"sites and Russian-backed far right networks that normal people avoid. If you tried to tell an ordinary US voter that MAGAs believe it's legal to kill newborns, that liberals force-trans people, and that immigrants eat pets, you looked like the crazy person who believed in conspiracy theories about MAGAs. Now their candidate has said all that bizarre shit in a live debate and was factchecked in real time. You can tell people that MAGAs believe the dumbest shit in the world and point to Donald Trump's comments as proof. He's their boy and he was talking to them.

[lizardsfromspace]

"Trump didn't say Nazis were very fine people at Charlottesville, he said both sides had very fine people and one side just happened to be Nazis" is already a wild factcheck, but also "he said he didn't support Nazis, so it's false to say he does" is. It's like people who insist there wasn't Islamophobia after 9/11 bc Bush said he didn't support it.

Snopes actually does this all the time: they rely on the person who said a controversial quote to decide if it's true or not. Sure, Nazis loved his speech but he said he didn't support Nazis, so FIVE PINOCCHIOS to anyone saying he supports Nazis.

Marco Rubio mistaking someone's name for the name of a dam is a mixture bc he said his mistake was just a mistake. A football coach calling Hitler "a great leader" is partially false bc he said sorry and said he meant to say "a bad leader". Snopes essentially takes any context at all as exonerating: if someone says something embarrassing and walks it back later, they don't see that as someone trying to walk it back, they see it as proof that pointing out someone said the thing they objectively said is somehow at least part misinformation. Modern day Snopes isn't biased against conservatives, it's excessively deferent towards them, and often lets them essentially factcheck themselves by accepting that any explanation at all is worthy of it being dubbed a Mixture of True and False

I think the Lou Holtz one is the worst one bc their main evidence it's a "mixture" of true and false is that he apologized. Saying you're sorry for saying something now retroactively renders it 50% misinformation to say you ever said it. "He likely misspoke and apologized" so it's true? It's true that he said it? Whether someone said a quote is a binary proposition: either they said it, or they didn't. "True" or "false" are the only real options. But modern Snopes routinely accepts that apologizing, saying you misspoke, or saying you didn't really mean counts as unsaying a quote. The factchecking and skepticism website has forgotten people can lie

Like, look at that "very fine people" post, whose main evidence is "well Trump said he didn't really mean it". This a website that used to do exhaustive deep dives into obscure claims about cookie recipes and now their approach to factchecking the Actual President is "well, he said he didn't mean it like that, so"

[samueldays]

You may remember from the past decade how Russia attacked Ukraine and conquered Crimea during Obama's presidency, then held back during Trump's presidency, and then attacked Ukraine again during Biden's presidency.

If you remember this, you are ahead of the factchecking apparatus of Norwegian Nettavisen and the "Russia expert" of some Swedish expertise center, who write:

Selvfølgelig vil Putin utsette så mye som mulig i håp om at Trump vinner det amerikanske presidentvalget.

"Obviously Putin will stall [the war] as much as possible in the hope of Trump winning the american presidential election."

"Obviously".

🙄

Expert doesn't bother to say what Trump will supposedly do, or maybe the newspaper didn't bother to print it, it's taken for granted that a Trump presidency would be favorable to Putin.

What is going on in these people's heads? Is it Left-American "trump is a russian puppet" propaganda from 2016? That's what it sounds like to me.