Supposed fact-checkers over at PolitiFact have once again proved that they actually need a whole different site dedicated to fact-checking their fact-checking after they screwed things up concerning Rep. Maxine Waters and her comments that clearly incited violence.
Facts.
A report from Bongino.Com reveals that Tom Kertscher, one of the site’s fact-checkers, who has a well-earned reputation for being less than accurate, was recently taking a look at a claim that Maxine Waters said Trump supporters aren’t “welcome here” and “we must welcome everyone who crosses our borders.”
Kertscher said, “No, California Rep. Maxine Waters didn’t say Trump supporters are ‘not welcome here.'” He gave the claim a “mostly false” rating.
No, Rep. Maxine Waters didn’t say Trump supporters are "not welcome here" https://t.co/KaWVqnA8PH pic.twitter.com/HVQMb6deR1
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) February 8, 2021
“There are two quotes from Waters here, but the relevant one is the one saying that Trump supporters “are not welcome.” Kertscher’s laughable explanation for why the quote isn’t accurate is as follows: ‘…While Waters did make statements suggesting Trump Cabinet members should be singled out in public, she did not direct her comments at Trump supporters broadly, as this post suggests,'” the Bongino report says.
Kertscher was quoting comments Waters made back in 2018, which you can see in the tweet below:
It’s literally on video, you lying lunatics! pic.twitter.com/ivW0ybu5Ms https://t.co/z5zhufGLT6
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) February 9, 2021
https://twitter.com/Widebrimgamer/status/13589988254158438
So the reason this is considered “mostly false” is because Waters encouraged violence against a very similar, but still different group of individuals. The real question at this point, given the fact that the mainstream media will latch onto any empty threat that a liberal politician receives, why is Waters allowed to make a statement like this at all?
“Kertscher then noted that future posts on Facebook quoting Maxine as saying this would be flagged. The specific Facebook post that Kertscher was ‘fact checking’ was from November 2018, meaning he likely literally just decided to ‘fact check’ information he wanted censored,” Bongino report notes.
Perhaps if Kertscher had put in a little more effort he would have come across the statements where Waters defended her remarks by mocking those she offended. She actually went on to say that she threatens Trump supporters all the time.
“I did not threaten [Trump] constituents and supporters. I do that all the time, but I didn’t do that that time,” Waters said as the crowd burst into laughter.
Folks on Twitter took Kerstcher to task for the ridiculously bad “fact check.”
Pretty funny when normal citizens have to fact check Politifact 😂🤣😂
— 🇺🇸🇺🇸Doug🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@DPH_78) February 8, 2021
Back in August of 2020, Kertscher did a fact check that claimed New York and New Jersey have five times more coronavirus deaths per capita than the state of Florida, stating the claim is actually, in a very literal sense, true, just before he gave it a “mostly false” tag. What logic led to this choice? The fact that “things could change in the future.”
And you know what? Things did change. But Florida still only has half of the COVID deaths as both of those states.
“Another one of his notably lazy “fact checks” was of the claim that violent crime in South Bend Indiana had effectively doubled under Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s tenure. Kertscher rated the claim false because South Bend changed the way that police counted assaults by including cases “where a weapon was shown” as aggregated assaults. Kertscher then did no actual work to quantify the extent to which this influences the numbers, he just says that the numbers then get tricky. That’s it,” the Bongino report points out.
To liberals in the ’20s, it seems truth and facts are malleable.
Let the term Fake Fact Checking takes its rightful place alongside the term Fake News.
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