I sometimes feel like Cassandra, unheard and unheeded, wailing into the void: the “political fact-checking” industry is a steaming pile of partisan garbage and everyone working in it should feel bad about their life decisions. The entire endeavor is an appallingly well-greased opinion-laundering racket where Democrats deposit their messiest mistakes with professional media scrubbing services to have them washed away with the words “Mostly False.”
So too it is today with the hopeless Politifact, providing a servile act of emergency cleaning for Randi Weingarten. You remember Randi Weingarten, right? The famously combative union boss for the American Federation of Teachers who was everywhere doing every possible media hit during the Covid crisis to not only encourage mask requirements and vaccine mandates, but also to fight as hard as possible to block any return to regular in-person schooling by making impossible safety demands?
Yeah, that Randi Weingarten. I’m asking because I want to make sure that Politifact wasn’t talking about some other Randi Weingarten who happens to be the head of America’s most powerful teacher’s union. Weingarten made the mistake of tweeting the other day about how “Republicans . . . want you think I wanted to keep schools closed. Here’s what I actually said” followed by a comically selective clip reel of her mouthing the vague piety of “I’m a big believer in reopening schools” and “we put out a plan!” a few times on TV. The insult to our intelligence did not sit well with the denizens of Twitter, who promptly fact-checked her using the site’s new “Community Notes” feature.
Politifact felt moved to write a “factcheck” in response to the community notes on this tweet. I have to start by pointing that curious fact out. They wrote not in reponse to Weingarten’s claim — which very much could be the subject of a factcheck! — but rather to answer the conservative rebuttal of it. And huh, that’s the sort of thing that makes a cynical man just scratch his chin.
What’s worse, Politifact’s defense of Weingarten adds up to nothing better than “she occasionally said a blandly acceptable line about reopening schools in public, so forget about what she might have actually done in private.” We are asked to believe that mouthing the proper pieties for a television hit absolves Weingarten of her actual deeds in the same way we would be asked to excuse a man covered in blood holding a smoking semi-automatic amidst a field of bodies because he claims he only just wanted everyone to get along and be nice to each other.
What of course must be understood is that even when Weingarten said she wanted schools to reopen, it always came freighted with an intentionally vague qualifier: “safely and carefully.” Her idea of that, as per the demands of the AFT’s various local unions across the nation, ranged from mandatory in-school child masking to massively expensive installation of plexiglass shielding, ventilation, school-infrastructure renovation, etc.: In other words, an insanely unrealistic demand-at-educational-gunpoint that America’s politicians and families accede to a fantasy wishlist before business could return to usual for our children.
In my own hometown, the Chicago Teachers Union went on a wildcat strike as recently as January of 2022, during the Omicron wave, cancelling classes for a week’s worth of school days in order to enforce what we already knew then to be pointless and harmful child masking requirements. Guess who was there to support the shuttering of the entire city’s school system? You guessed it: Randi Weingarten, manning the barricades. That linked New York Times piece, which inevitably attempts to valorize Weingarten, also commits actual journalism by pointing out that she not only publicly backed the CTU (the largest and most powerful local fiefdom of the American Federation of Teachers), she was intervening behind the scenes to force Mayor Lightfoot to give in to the union’s demands, and not the other way around. The Times tries to give her credit for recognizing that a situation where the largest local teachers’ union in the United States is shutting down the school system in what everyone recognized as a desperate cash-grab was untenable. But it only gently notes that she thought it was Lori Lightfoot – for once, wholly in the right – who needed to be pressed by the Biden administration, and not her own appallingly radical, recklessly selfish Local.
This is why Politifact’s attempted defense of Weingarten – I pity the author, and choose to blame her assignment editor instead – is so pathetically hand-waving. It is the ultimate act of political spin and special pleading from a site whose nominal ethos is to cut through spin and special pleading. Pay no attention to Randi Weingarten’s authentic track record! That’s unsporting! Instead, here are some nice things she said on MSNBC. (And they didn’t even bother creating their own spin; they just recycled hers, the ultimate confession of “I can’t even bothered to send this to ChatGPT for a fresh writeup.”)
Fact-checkers can’t quite promise to return Democrats’ bad opinions back to them stain-free, but by applying their own special treatment can turn some blood-red splotches into at least a vaguely yellowish tinge that might be confused for white from a distance by a squinting voter – who usually encounters it as an embedded link in some other article citing it as a “reliable authority.” Thus the surprising tenacity of an industry that sprang into being before the age of Trump but carries on even after so many other media institutions of the era have collapsed. The reason: They serve Democratic purposes by posing as neutral arbiters but almost always shading toward Democratic spin and messaging in any question of interpretation. But a “fact-checker,” however stubborn in deception, is no match for those of us with long memories of what actually happened.