David is right about the fact-checkers.
PolitiFact is straight-up garbage, as I know from personal experience. Here is PolitiFact “fact-checking” a piece of mine by ignoring what I actually wrote and “fact-checking” some claims I never made, an act of pure intellectual dishonesty and journalistic malpractice.
And here is a footnote from The Smallest Minority:
PolitiFact California challenges me [on California’s LGBTQ Bill of Rights], not on the facts but on my disinclination to deploy the word “Orwellian” so frequently. The intellectually dishonest fact-checking feature proclaimed that conservative commentators criticizing the California bill on the grounds that it would criminalize “misgendering” and send speech criminals to jail were “misleading” their audiences about the legislation’s content. The fact-checkers also wrote: “Violations of the bill could, under limited circumstances, be treated as a misdemeanor with punishment of up to one year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.” Which is to say, the purported fact-checkers deployed an outright lie as a weapon against an incontrovertible fact. This is part of what I mean by antidiscourse.
PolitiFact is the worst. I hope that Snopes does not follow them all the way down that sorry road.
But that is the state of our public discourse. The lies and intellectual dishonesty aren’t just coming from anonymous Twitter randos. It’s coming from NARAL (of course NARAL lies; we knew this) and from Bloomberg’s Noah Smith, and from the people who hand out Pulitzer Prizes. And the same people wonder why there is so little trust in our institutions, particularly in the news media and other channels of discourse. They have no one to blame but themselves.