The Washington Post’s obfuscation of truth fits right in with its motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
“Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors?”
Thomas Jefferson (1781)
The Washington Post has a celebrated so-called “fact-checker” who is in charge of the paper’s speech suppression department. You have likely never heard of Glenn Kessler, but he has mastered the fine art of obfuscation.
Kessler, who has been lurking around WaPo’s newsroom for the last 25 years, checks all the boxes for a seasoned Beltway “journalist,” a Brown- and Columbia-educated leftist who pontificates to the masses, then retreats to his wealthy Washington suburb. He is the prototypical generationally wealthy white privilege Demo — the great-grandson of an oil industrialist, the grandson of a steel industry magnate, and the son of a retail giant executive.
He is at the pinnacle of that ilk of Leftmedia scribes who, because of their media position, pose a significant threat to Liberty.
Kessler has been editor and chief writer of WaPo’s “The Fact Checker” since 2011, making him, according to his bio, “one of the pioneers of political fact-checking.” Actually, Kessler is really one of the pioneers of using “fact-checks” to obscure facts when they don’t comport with the Left’s political agenda.
He is a charter member of the Demos’ fact-check protection racket, one of the self-appointed “arbiters of truth” who have excelled at Jeff Bezos’s pet paper.
Kessler and his team assign one to four cute little Pinocchio figures to indicate their opinion of the severity of a lie, issuing about five of these assessments each week. The Wall Street Journal, which still has a stable of actual journalists and endeavors to distinguish between news and opinion, long ago declared, “The ‘fact check’ is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news.” Power Line’s John Hinderaker was also an early critic, asking, “Who Checks the Fact-Checkers?” He accurately asserted: “These ‘fact-checkers’ nearly always turn out to be liberal apologists who don a false mantle of objectivity in order to advance the cause of the Democratic Party.”
For the record, The Patriot Post regularly fact-checks the fact-checkers, but to no avail.
To be fair, some of WaPo’s fact-checks are accurately applied to instances of clear lies and deceptions. But Kessler and WaPo have certainly earned their share of Pinocchios for their fake fact-checks — or, equally notable, for the omission of fact-checks when doing so would undermine their most favored political agendas.
Of such omissions, they failed to call out the most egregious of mass media cover-ups in modern political history, the blackout of the corrupt Biden/ChiCom connection, ironically using phony fact-checks to suppress that information just ahead of the fraudulent 2020 election. They toed the Demo Party line on the January 6 “insurrection” and the subsequent false claims about the “murder” of Officer Brian Sicknick
Moreover, Kessler created a database of what he classified as Donald Trump’s lies, most of which, in fact, were just typical Trump hyperbole and bravado. But then three months into Joe Biden’s term, Kessler suspended his database of Biden lies. This, despite the fact that Biden has distinguished himself as an accomplished pathological liar over his 50 years in office, and those lies have accelerated exponentially since he became president.
More recently, RealClearInvestigations’ Paul Sperry awarded Kessler “four of his own Pinocchios” for his disgraceful and deceptive “updates” of coverage of Hunter Biden’s corrupt Burisma connections.
Frequently now, Kessler has refined his obfuscatory prose when covering for Demos. In effect, he now fabricates “lies” in order to divert from the truth.
A case in point last week was how he spun the murder of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student murdered while out on a morning jog in Athens, Georgia. After police were alerted by her roommate that she had not returned from her run, they found her battered body in a wooded area nearby.
Georgia investigators arrested 26-year-old Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Ibarra crossed our southern border on September 8, 2022, to take advantage of Biden’s “catch and release” policy.
In a column Kessler titled “The Truth about Illegal Immigration and Crime,” he diverted from the reality of violent assaults and murders by illegal immigrants by claiming to fact-check the assertion that illegal immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than American citizens.
That was a clever diversion that is now typical of his “fact-checks.”
Kessler’s assessment is so full of fallacious “facts” that it is hard to know where to start, but in the first paragraph alone, he attacks Trump for tying “the killing of a Georgia nursing student … to the surge of undocumented immigrants at the southern border under the Biden administration.”
Note that Kessler shamefully refuses to use the name of that murder victim, Laken Riley.
Furthermore, the fact is that EVERY violent crime committed by an illegal immigrant who entered the U.S. under Biden’s disgraceful open border policy — more than NINE MILLION illegal immigrants and counting — would NOT have been committed if that illegal immigrant were not in the U.S. That is the issue.
Regarding the data on violent crime committed by illegals, according to the ICE fiscal year 2023 report, agents arrested 73,822 noncitizens with criminal histories, and those arrested “had 290,178 associated charges and convictions with an average of four per individual [including] 33,209 assaults; 4,390 sex and sexual assaults; 7,520 weapons offenses; 1,713 charges or convictions for homicide; and 1,655 kidnapping offenses.”
But to be clear, those 73,822 arrests are also just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This data does not include the tens of thousands of state and local arrests of illegal immigrants for crimes in which the citizenship status of the assailant is not identified. Nor does it include all the unsolved crimes with prime suspects being illegal immigrants but who remain at large.
Memo to Glenn: Not a single one of those violent assaults, rapes, and murders would have occurred if that illegal immigrant were not in the U.S. Not one.
Kessler then asserts that there is “little evidence undocumented immigrants commit more crime,” but what he does not say is there is no national database of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. It is only in his closing paragraph that he acknowledges, “The battle over the numbers indicates how, with limited data to assess, the results can remain subject to dispute and interpretation.”
So, what was his point — other than obfuscation?
Let me reiterate again what is not “subject to dispute and interpretation.” Not a single one of those violent assaults, rapes, and murders would have occurred if that illegal immigrant were not in the U.S.
Kessler basically became an apologist for the murderer of Laken Riley. I dare him to say her name.
(For the record, regarding the commission of crimes in general, Ronald Mortensen, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, observed that once in our country, “virtually all adult, illegal aliens commit felonies” such as forgery, fraud, identity theft, and perjury, “to procure the documents they need to get jobs, to drive and to obtain other benefits that are restricted to U.S. citizens.”)
Kessler then digs a deeper hole of fake facts from there, with a plethora of assertions that are patently false.
For example, in the second paragraph, he asserts that “violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharply during Biden’s presidency.” That is just more smoke and mirrors.
As I detailed last week in “Joe Biden’s Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, Biden and his Demos deliberately unleashed a record surge in violent crime nationwide just ahead of the 2020 election, advocating for their ”Black Lives Matter“ rioters and simultaneously promoting their defund police agenda. Then, when the murder rate data dropped by a marginal 1.7% from the dramatic increases, Biden declared, “Our plan is working.”
And Kessler echoes that lie to protect Biden.
Glenn Kessler is a Demo hack whose fact-checks are, as noted previously, “opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news.” His operation is a pyramid scheme of Pinocchios, and his obfuscation of truth fits right in with WaPo’s motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
(Footnote: Laughably, below Kessler’s fact-checks, he notes, “The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles,” which links not to some “code of principles” but to Kessler’s self-assessment of his fact-checking. AKA, the Fact Check Cartel.)
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776