Dems celebrated the Chauvin verdict with religious fervor — and may have gone too far.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a new weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk that will provide readers with a roundup of false claims, exaggerations, and distortions proffered by the media and politicians over the course of the previous week. Let’s dive in.
Democrats’ Bizarre Reactions to the Chauvin Verdict
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s triple guilty verdict lowered the partisan temperature for some, but the celebration took on a religious fervor for several prominent Democrats.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), speaking at a press conference with the Congressional Black Caucus, said “thank you” to Floyd “for sacrificing your life” and “for being there to call out to your mom” as he died.
Speaker Pelosi at the Congressional Black Caucus presser after Chauvin verdict:
“Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice.” pic.twitter.com/JfapSsKdtX
— The Recount (@therecount) April 20, 2021
Pelosi attempted to clean up her comments with a follow-up tweet, but the damage was done. Black Lives Matter slammed the House Speaker, calling her remarks “so disrespectful.”
David Axelrod tweeted, and then deleted, the following line:
Don’t tweet shit like this pic.twitter.com/HCqfPtIiZy
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) April 20, 2021
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey claimed that the loss of Floyd’s life “will have bettered our city.”
George Floyd came to Minneapolis to better his life. But ultimately his life will have bettered our city. The jury joined in a shared conviction that has animated Minneapolis for the last 11 months. They refused to look away and affirmed he should still be here today.
— Mayor Jacob Frey (@MayorFrey) April 20, 2021
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California governor Gavin Newsom, tweeted that “today’s verdict offers a retribution on toxic masculinity.”
. . . What?
There was also this bizarre *pinned* tweet from the Las Vegas Raiders, which owner Mark Davis took responsibility for:
— Las Vegas Raiders (@Raiders) April 20, 2021
Unfortunately, the Chauvin verdict was only the beginning, as activists and the media immediately latched onto a police-involved shooting in Columbus, Ohio, and tried to tie the event to Floyd’s murder, despite a dramatically different set of facts.
Multiple camera angles, including the officer’s own body camera, show police arriving at the scene of a domestic dispute — which quickly devolved into chaos as 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant attempted to stab a girl who was standing nearby. A Columbus police officer, who told Bryant to “get down” as he arrived at the brawl, subsequently shot the teenager just as she pulled the knife back and aimed it at her would-be victim.
Though a neighbor at the scene later said that police had no choice but to shoot, the details of the story — including that the officer in question likely saved the life of a black girl — were completely thrown out the window as the hot takes proliferated. Some claimed, without evidence, that a 911 call made to police about someone “trying to stab us” was made by Bryant herself, while others dismissed the fact that Bryant was armed as unimportant.
Basketball star LeBron James took it a step further, tweeting out a picture of the police officer who shot Bryant with the caption “YOU’RE NEXT,” accompanied by an hourglass emoji and “#ACCOUNTABILITY.”
Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers
The Washington Post on Friday sparked intense backlash with a “fact-check” of Senator Tim Scott’s (R., S.C.) family history, published one day after he was chosen to deliver the GOP response to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress this week.
In the piece, titled “Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s more to that tale,” lead fact-checker Glenn Kessler implies that the senator’s claim that his grandfather dropped out of elementary school to pick cotton is dishonest, without ever offering evidence that it was fabricated.
Kessler, relying upon census records which he acknowledges are “historically questionable at best — and at times unreliable,” writes that his “research reveals a more complex story than what Scott tells audiences.” He added that “Scott’s grandfather’s father was also a substantial landowner — and Scott’s grandfather, Artis Ware, worked on that farm.”
The fact-checker wrote that the senator’s story is “missing some nuance” but declined to use the Post’s Pinocchio system to rate the statement.
Nikki Haley called the report “shameful” while others demanded the Post issue an apology to Scott over the “hit piece.”
Meanwhile, Huffpost this week seemed to adopt the new definition of court-packing that Democrats created during the 2020 election. Democrats, who are seeking to expand the Supreme Court from nine justices to 13 for political gain, have continually accused Republicans of “packing the court” by simply filling existing vacancies in district courts, appeals courts, and the Supreme Court.
The outlet attempted to fact-check Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), saying in a tweet that he “may have told his biggest lie yet with the claim that Republicans never engaged in court packing when they controlled the White House and Congress.”
Republicans “loved ramming judges through the system, including at least 174 district court judges and 54 appeals court judges,” the fact-check adds.
However, the outlet fails to clarify that Republicans never sought to expand the courts for political gain, and only filled vacancies by the letter of the law.
Nevertheless, Huffpost called Cruz a “master gaslighter” and accused him of telling a “whopper of a lie.”
The post was later deleted, though the outlet reposted the same video with a new caption.
Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a whopper on the courts. (Correction: An earlier version said that Cruz lied about court packing. The dishonesty lies in the claim that Republicans never "rigged the game.") pic.twitter.com/6JhLTmtVJj
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) April 23, 2021
The Headline Fail of the Week
The Associated Press: “1 verdict, then 6 police killings across America in 24 hours.”
“Killings”? The AP clarifies in the eleventh paragraph: “The circumstances surrounding each death differ widely. Some happened while officers investigated serious crimes. Police say some of the people were armed with a gun, knife or a metal pole. One man claimed to have a bomb that he threatened to detonate. In several cases, little is known about the lives of those killed and what happened in their final moments.”
Oh.
Under the Radar
- Politico repeatedly criticized the Biden administration in March over the situation at the southern border, including by running a mocking segment noting all the things the White House was willing to call a “crisis,” besides the migrant surge. But the outlet has now apparently taken up the Biden framing, with management instructing staff to “avoid referring to the present situation as a crisis, although we may quote others using that language while providing context.”
- Major League Baseball, fresh off the controversial move of its All Star Game after political pressure, confirmed to NR that it is now asking fans about their political affiliation in surveys about ballpark experience.
- Last week, The Guardian outed police officers and public employees who have donated to the legal defense fund of teenager Kyle Rittenhouse, who is facing murder charges for shooting two people during a riot in Kenosha, Wisc., last summer — killings he says were committed in self-defense. One of those officers, a veteran of the Norfolk Police Department, made a $25 donation, and was subsequently fired. But a local labor lawyer called the dismissal “inappropriate and illegal,” saying it likely violated the First Amendment.