Truth: Biden’s own website endorses the plan, as @guypbenson & others point out, and it pulls heavily from the GND (as @abcnews’s fact check makes clear).
(Also worth pointing out that Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, is a cosponsors of and frequent advocate for the Green New Deal.)
3. Trump & forest management
Claim: Trump said forest management is helping drive wildfires in CA & beyond.
Truth: Biden failed to address the rioting for months - including at the DNC - and only addressed it when polling flipped, as @baseballcrank has pointed out: google.com/amp/s/www.nati…
6. Slowest economic recovery
Claim: The economic recovery under Obama/Biden was the slowest in American history.
Truth: Beyond the obvious images and video of Antifa et al, recent research also makes Trump’s point clear: ncri.io/reports/networ…
Even more egregious were the checks that no one seemed interested in doing. This is a long list.
1. We’ll start with the one most likely to trigger a lawsuit: Biden’s allegation - without evidence - that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist.
Entirely baseless.
2. Trump & Wuhan.
Biden alleged that Trump made no effort to gain information about conditions in Wuhan following the coronavirus outbreak, out of deference to Xi.
Contemporaneous reporting from @nytimes, @abcnews & others details that he did (and even criticized him for it).
3. The ‘both sides’ slander
Biden & Wallace alleged that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people” in Charlottesville.
As has been pointed out repeatedly by RCP, @RubinReport & others, this isn’t true. Trump immediately went on to condemn white supremacists by name.
4. SCOTUS confirmations
During the debate Biden insisted that the Senate should wait to hear the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.
No one - other than the Trump Campaign - has called out that, in 2016, Biden castigated Senate Rs for exactly what he’s encouraging Senate Ds to do.
5. Hunter Biden
There were some fact checks on specifics around Hunter, and while we should all have more charity toward someone battling addiction, it’s patently false to suggest, as Biden did, that Hunter didn’t do anything wrong. (Cont.)
There was a full investigation by a Senate committee that unearthed plenty of bad, potentially illegal behavior from Hunter where he traded in on his family name to derive financial benefit from hostile foreign governments. Even @CNN’s @JohnKingCNN said so.
That’s wrong.
6. Efficacy of masks
I’ve had to repeat myself, over and over, on this one. Biden alleged that Trump didn’t do enough early on to support mask wearing.
The reality is that we had no idea whether masks would help. Here’s @CNN in March. @drsanjaygupta even did a thread.
Full thread on the rewriting of history related to masks for those interested.
As I’ve reiterated time and again, there’s no evidence to suggest that the Russians placed bounties on American military personnel. A recent report from the regional command found zero evidence to support this claim. Here from @NBCNews.
8. The existence of antifa.
Last night, Biden said that antifa wasn’t an organization, but an “idea.” This is absurd, and plenty of reporting and other monitoring has indicated that the group exists and is active and organized, including the ADL. adl.org/resources/back…
When fact checks become an opportunity not to observe what is true but to push a narrative, not only do they lose their value, they do more damage by hiding behind a veneer of objectivity to push commentary. It misleads the American people and creates an inaccurate narrative.
It should go without saying but...that’s really bad.
More than anywhere else, the real danger of having an overwhelmingly left-leaning news media is that it gives rise to this type of “fact-checking” and “media analysis” through a partisan lens.
We can’t hope to heal this country unless we’re all agreeing to the same set of facts.
Last night proved, yet again, that we’ve got a long way to go to get there.
When these get attention folks often ask but I don’t have anything to sell/subscribe to.
But with winter approaching, its a really difficult time for a lot of food banks. If you’re in the DC area, I’ve always found Capital Area Food Bank does a great job. capitalareafoodbank.org
And I am now losing retweets on this thread, thanks @Twitter
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I’m sure you’ve all seen the protests and attendant anti-Semitism at many elite American universities. What you may not be aware of is the hypocrisy in how schools have handled them.
Do you remember what these places said about protests in 2020? I’ve got receipts. ⤵️
We’ve gotta start with @Columbia, given their central role in this drama.
In 2020, the university pledged to change how campus police operated, and said protests were part of a “heightened state of consciousness” on race & were driving the “revitalization of American democracy.”
That, unsurprisingly, led @Columbia to embrace defunding the police on their website, citing a professor.
It’s hard to square that sentiment with calling in police in riot gear to rough up students on campus, @Columbia.
Want to see a media conspiracy, based on Biden admin propaganda to smear a GOP governor, come into existence?
If so, follow along. Let’s revisit the media claim that Texas “physically barred” drowning migrants from entering the country.
Another long one ⤵️
Back in mid-January, three people trying to enter the country illegally drowned in the Rio Grande. It happened while Texas & the Biden admin were fighting about security measures.
The Biden admin told the press a lie. The media ran with it, and most never corrected the stories.
The fraudulent story was advanced first by @CBSNews. On January 14, they claimed that the crossers had drowned b/c Texas “physically barred” rescuers trying to help.
The takeaway from CBS was clear: Texas had deliberately killed people, rather than allowing them to be rescued.
Do you remember how bad the media’s “Covid lab leak” - the hypothesis that the virus came from a lab - coverage was?
I thought I did. But it was a more dramatic example of uniform media malpractice than even I remembered.
So I revisited it. Buckle in, it’s long. ⤵️
It started in Feb 2020 when @SenTomCotton suggested looking into the CCP lab studying bats near the initial cases in Wuhan.
The media were outraged. In a since-updated piece, @washingtonpost said the idea was a “conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.”
It wasn’t just WaPo. Shortly thereafter, @nytimes trotted out a similar allegation, calling the lab leak hypothesis a “fringe theory” and a “tale” designed to inflame social media.
@CNN’s @ChrisCillizza said Cotton was “playing a dangerous game” with his suggestions.
The reason I take screenshots is that I'm always paranoid that an outlet or journalist will scrap the evidence of a bad take. Maybe I should be giving folks more credit for standing by their inaccuracies.
Every so often I check back in on this, perhaps my all-time favorite headline from @NPR, only to see that it still exists in its original form, from April 2020.
I launched a newsletter, called Holden Court, about the media, what they get wrong & why it matters. The goal is to reach beyond what my 🧵s have on Twitter & to build a better recent history of media & media criticism.
You can sign up at the link in my bio. More ⤵️
At that link you can read my launch piece and get a better idea of what it is that I’m trying to do.
The piece also walks through a recent example of bad media coverage that I worry we’re already forgetting about: the start of Covid.
My general premise for the newsletter is that media criticism could be a lot better; more driven by what the media actually does and says and more set in recent context, rather than an impressionistic sense that the media is hopelessly off-track.
I’m launching something new, so naturally I figured the best explainer was a 🧵thread🧵.
Introducing Holden Court, my Substack about the media, what it gets wrong, and why it matters.
You probably know the drill, but more details & links to sign up in the tweets below. ⤵️
Holden Court aims to unpack media failures, particularly when the media misses in unison on important political topics. But I’ll also have one-off content, Q&A opportunities, a mailbag and maybe virtual (or even in person) happy hours, too.
That doesn’t mean the threads are going away. But the amount of context and nuance I can capture in a thread is limited. So the Substack will (hopefully) provide that more robust analysis, aiming ultimately at *why* the media misses the way that it does.