Drew Holden Profile picture
Sep 30, 2020 25 tweets 18 min read Read on X
🧵Thread🧵

After last night’s debate, I thought it was time to fact check the factcheckers.

There were a lot of bad claims - and more “facts” that went unchecked. I dive into them below.👇
First, the “fact checks” that weren’t.

1. Trump xenophobia comment from Biden

Claim: Biden called Trump xenophobic for his travel ban.

Check: False from @nytimes, @washingtonpost & @CNN

Truth: Biden *replied* to a tweet from President Trump about the ban. This is cut & dry.
2. Biden & the Green New Deal

Claim: Trump alleged that Biden supports the GND

Check: False from @washingtonpost

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.

Check: False by @washingtonpost

Truth: As @NPR & others have pointed out, a lack of good forest management is a major contributing factor to the fires.
4. Spying on the Trump campaign

Claim: Trump’s campaign was spied on in 2016.

Check: False by @CNN

Truth: Despite the consistent framing of ‘Spygate’ as a “conspiracy,” an FBI agent pleaded guilty to forging documents to spy on the Trump campaign.
And by “consistent” I mean everyone has talked about this issue in this way. Full thread here:
5. Biden & Rioters

Claim: Biden refused to condemn looting/riots

Check: False by @CNN

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.

Check: ‘Misleading’ by @nytimes

Truth: This is just bizarre. NYT even confirms that the recovery was, statistically, the slowest, then tried to muddy the waters.
7. No left-wing violence

Claim: Trump alleged that violent riots are driven by left-wing groups, such as Antifa.

Check: “Misleading” by @nytimes

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.
7. Russian bounties on US servicemembers.

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

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Drew Holden

Drew Holden Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @DrewHolden360

Sep 17
🧵Thread🧵

The media, focused solely on Trump, haven’t seemed interested in fact checking Kamala Harris. And not for lack of opportunity.

So I decided to. Below are some false and misleading statements from last week’s debate.

I could only fit so many. But give it a read. ⤵️
For starters, I think this image typifies how the media treat the two candidates.

Dale’s sentiment here applied broadly to the rest of the media, who had eyes only for Trump. Image
So let’s look at Harris, shall we?

1. She claimed that she was the only one on the debate stage with a plan for the middle class.

That’s the type of claim the media usually says “needs context,” as the Biden-Harris admin has failed the middle class, as even CNN acknowledged.

Image
Image
Image
Read 27 tweets
Sep 16
🧵Thread🧵

Look, I know there’s bigger news today, but with Biden’s “black jobs” quip on Friday, I’ve gotta revisit the media meltdown on the term, as stupid as it is.

Do you remember how insulted & offended the press were when Trump said “black jobs”?

I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
Some quick context: Biden in a speech on Friday, referred to jobs as “black jobs,” as in held by black folks.

If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because Trump said it at his debate with Biden a couple months ago.

The media went ballistic.
Just look at the indignation here from @axios when Trump used the phrase.

“Reality check.” I mean, cmon!

And so now what, Axios? Is Biden suddenly a monster, too?
Image
Image
Read 23 tweets
Aug 26
🧵Thread🧵

I was struck by the number of dubious statements and flat-out lies at the DNC.

It appears the mainstream media isn’t much interested in them, amid their jubilant, joy-full coverage. So I decided to do some fact-checking, focused on Biden’s speech.

There’s a lot. ⤵️
1. The first thing that jumped out to me was Trump’s alleged “very fine people on both sides” description of Charlottesville.

Haven’t we been over this, time and again? The context makes clear Trump didn’t mean the neo-Nazis. Even @snopes admitted it!

Yet Biden trotted it out.

Image
Image
Image
2. Biden claimed he and his admin “demonizes no one.”

What, then, about Biden’s remarks about Trump supporters? That they are “determined to destroy democracy,” practitioners of “semi-fascism,” and “a threat to the very soul of this nation.”

Is that not demonizing?

Image
Image
Image
Read 27 tweets
Aug 14
🧵Thread🧵

The media haven’t been interested in providing voters with much of a picture of Kamala Harris beyond “vibes.”

So I did the work for them and went back through what she’s actually said and done on policy and beyond.

It isn’t a pretty picture. Follow along ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than on immigration. Back in 2020, Harris was among the Dem candidates who supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

Now @politico claims she “promised to go tough on border security.”

Color me skeptical.
Image
Image
Especially considering she supported eliminating ICE, tried to stop production on the border wall, and otherwise unwind the Trump policies that actually reduced illegal immigration.

Image
Image
Image
Read 26 tweets
Aug 12
🧵Thread🧵

I know it’s difficult to keep track of all of Tim Walz’s “stolen valor,” exaggerations & false claims about his time in the military.

I tried to compile as many as I could, as well as a few egregious cases of the media spinning for him.

Buckle in, there’s a lot. ⤵️
First, the false claims. To avoid a sort of journalistic stolen valor, I want to be clear: others did this work.

I’ll try to source as well as I can, starting with the latest Walz whopper: saying he took part in the Afghanistan surge in a 2010 debate.

From @NoVA_Campaigns: Image
There’s been a lot of good reporting. Perhaps none better than from @ChuckRossDC of the Free Beacon.

His first is on that Afghanistan claim, citing Walz’s repeated description of himself as a veteran of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the gov’t name of the fight in Afghanistan.
Image
Image
Read 25 tweets
Jul 24
🧵THREAD🧵

The media are already hard at work to mislead about VP Kamala Harris.

The latest is an effort to memoryhole Harris’s role leading Biden’s disastrous immigration policy as “border czar.”

Who’s up for some side-by-sides, lest we forget? ⤵️
There’s no better place to start than with @axios, who made waves today when they claimed that Harris was never the “border czar.”

The problem?

Axios had called her exactly that back in 2021.
Image
Image
They added a truly Orwellian editors note after the backlash, claiming that they had misreported initially.

Really. Image
Read 24 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(