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The Sad State of ‘Fact-Checking'

Townhall Media

How did we get to this point, exactly?

Remember when the internet was hailed as a triumph for free speech? The advent of the World Wide Web promised a brave new world fueled by freedom of expression in the proverbial marketplace of ideas. As a teenager when the internet exploded and was widely available to the average consumer, I remember quite well just how exciting the promises of the internet were, even in the crude form it took in its infancy. Remember when you were constantly getting a free CD-ROM to install America Online?

Ahh, those were the days. Back then, we couldn’t even fathom the internet’s potential. Heck, Paul Krugman famously predicted in 1998 that the was just a passing fad that would eventually go away. “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other!” he said. “By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” Boy, was he wrong.

Related: Biden’s Cabinet Plays Critical Role in Covering Up His Corruption

The years of free expression on the internet were wonderful but are sadly behind us now. In an effort to combat “disinformation,” we have seen the internet become a platform rife with censorship, as left-wing gatekeepers have been given the power to use their subjective determination of what constitutes fact or fiction.

These days, even a Democrat scandal is cause for fact-checkers to flip the script and somehow make it a Republican problem.

In recent weeks, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been hard at work exposing the corruption of Joe Biden. Supported by financial records and eyewitness testimony, the mainstream media has taken little interest in the story. Even those who report on it do their darnedest to explain it away, all with the help of supposedly objective and thorough fact-checkers, whom Big Tech relies upon to be the ones who determine what the public can read and what gets suppressed.

We recently learned that Joe Biden used various pseudonymous emails while he was serving as vice president to communicate with his son Hunter and his business partners. There are reportedly roughly 5,400 of these emails in the hands of the National Archives, if not more.

And so steps in Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s in-house fact-checker, who manages to find a way to “report” the scandal not by making the story about Joe Biden’s shady use of multiple pseudonyms, but by criticizing House Oversight Committee James Comer’s characterization of the pseudonyms.

“Joe Biden was using a pseudonym and he copied his son about a shady, shady transaction where Joe Biden was going to leverage American tax dollars to save his son’s butt,” Comer told Newsmax last month. “Along the same time period, we found a pseudonym where he copied Hunter Biden and it would lead one to believe that this was Joe Biden’s way of copying Hunter Biden to say, okay, send it to the Burisma owners and tell them help is on the way, and five days later, Joe Biden flew to Ukraine to begin the process of firing the prosecutor in exchange for America tax dollars in the form of foreign aid.”

Kessler manages to spend the bulk of the fact-check pretending that Biden’s use of pseudonyms to talk business with his son (something Biden previously claimed never happened) is no big deal. The real deal is Republicans who have dared to investigate it. Kessler’s lack of concern or curiosity about Biden’s need to use a pseudonym while communicating with Hunter and his business partners is extremely revealing.

Remember that these fact-checkers are the ones who are effectively dictating what stories you can and cannot read because stories flagged as disinformation are demonetized and suppressed. Remember the Hunter Biden laptop that the media decided was “Russian disinformation?” Same thing.

This is how it all works. The story is never the Democrats and their corruption; it’s always the Republicans and their audacity to expose it.

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