For about a decade, I did PR consulting work for one of the leading fintech companies. I wrote and disseminated dozens of press releases touting its fraud stats. These stats were impressive, too — impressive enough to generate widespread media coverage (which was kinda-sorta the point).
It was all made up.
Not in a malicious way. To my knowledge, nothing was illegal or unethical. But the God’s honest truth is, nobody knows the true rate of fraud, because you can’t always quantify successful crimes. (Especially cybercrimes, which include theft, hacking, credit card misuse, and data breaches.)
So, we guestimate.
Almost all fraud stats are works of fiction — or more accurately, works of art: We’re painting a picture “inspired” by the data — plus certain (self-serving) assumptions, guesses, extrapolations, and biases.
If you’re gonna accuse me of cherry-picking data points and “artistically” creating statistics that benefited my client, well, you’re exactly right!
Everyone has biases. If you’re a fintech company, you’re incentivized to instill urgency for your services. It’s usually a straightforward calculation: The bigger you claim your fraud category is, the more valuable your fintech services are.
“Follow the money.”
But at least I’m being upfront about my bias. The mainstream media, however, is not.
The network TV giants, the New York Times, CNN, and others are still claiming to be fair, impartial, and right down the middle. We see this conceit in the New York Times’ original mission statement from 1896: “To give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved.”
Which is why it’s so awfully revealing to examine which stats the media elites accept at face value — and which stats they refuse to accept at all.
Take, for instance, President Donald Trump’s speech last night on voter fraud:
New York Times: Trump Exaggerates Claims About Election Vulnerabilities in Speech
The New Republic: Declassified Docs Expose Trump’s Made-Up Election Fraud Claims
USA Today: Trump’s Chinese Election Meddling Claims Face Skepticism
The Hill: Democrats Call ‘Bulls---’ on Trump’s Election Interference Claims
Washington Post: Trump’s Speech Stops Short of Offering Evidence of Vote Tampering
New York Times: Multiple Investigations Refuted Trump’s Claim That Fraud Altered the Outcome in 2020
Salt Lake Tribune: Trump Makes Outlandish Claims About Election Results in Address
Los Angeles Times: Trump Repeats Debunked Claims About Voting Vulnerabilities in Prime-Time Speech
Irish Star: CNN Host Brands Donald Trump ‘Delusional’ As He ‘Spews a Bunch of Lies’ in Election Rant
New York Times: Warnock and Ossoff, Georgia’s Senators, Ridicule Trump’s Election Fraud Claims
The Atlantic: Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China
The Free Press: The President Who Cried ‘Election Fraud’
The Hill: Senate Democrat Calls for Trump Impeachment After Election Claims
USA Today: Trump Overstates Election Weakness in Primetime Speech: 5 Takeaways
New York Times: Trump’s Obsession With Relitigating the 2020 Election Carries a Cost for Democracy
The mainstream media messaging was undeniable: Trump is exaggerating how bad the problem is! We demand more truth! We demand more evidence! Why, these unsubstantiated, unproven claims are doing more harm than good!
Fine. If media outlets want to demand strict scrutiny of sociopolitical claims, that’s entirely their prerogative.
In fact, good for them. We could use more skepticism in the media.
But why does the mainstream media have the EXACT OPPOSITE standard when it comes to covering global warming, allegations of Israel committing genocide, and the theory that socialism leads to prosperity?
It’s remarkable: Absolutely nobody believes there’s zero fraud in U.S. elections. (Hey, if Americans are willing to die to protest ICE, it’s pretty stupid to assume that NOBODY would lie or cheat to keep “literally Hitler” and an “existential threat to Democracy” out of the White House.) We might argue about how much fraud there is — or if it’s sufficient to swing an election — but it obviously exists.
If blue-state governors in California, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Maryland, and Massachusetts weren’t hiding their voter rolls from federal investigators, we could better quantify the fraud stats, but the Democrats are actively covering up the data. So alas, we can’t — because the Dems are quite literally playing hide-and-seek with election integrity!
And instead of demanding disclosure (“without fear or favor”), the mainstream media is pretending that withholding evidence is “proof” that the evidence doesn’t exist.
What a damningly inconsistent journalistic standard: Imagine if Israel refused to release death estimates in Gaza! Imagine if oil companies refused to disclose how much carbon they produced!
Would the media then assume there’s no genocide in Gaza and no global warming?
Of course not. When it comes to Israel, Hamas is considered a credible source. If they call it a genocide, that’s good enough.
Even though there was no genocide. None, nada, zilch.
Well that ends the debate on deaths in Gaza.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 22, 2026
Hamas itself is admitting that 80% of casualties were combatants.
There was never a genocide.
You have been lied to and manipulated. pic.twitter.com/yOaUC2MqkJ
About 72,000 Palestinians died in a war that Hamas started on Oct. 7, 2023. The Gaza population was 1.6 million in 2010; today it’s over 2.2 million, due to the sky-high birthrate of Muslims.
Which means, this was the first “genocide” in world history where the birthrate was roughly double the deathrate:
[A]t any given time in Gaza, there are about 60,000 pregnant women. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) spokeswoman Tess Ingram claimed that 20,000 Palestinian babies were born over the first 105 days, with a Gazan baby born every 10 minutes. After 720+ days, that’s approximately 140,000 new Gazans.
And [checks watch] the Gaza War began 1,014 days ago. It’s an indisputable mathematical fact: Not only was there no genocide — but the Palestinian population has actually INCREASED!
Fun fact: In 1922, 9.5% of the Gazan population was Christian — over 73,000 people. But today, Gaza’s Christian population is just 600. They went from 9.5% of the population to 0.02857%. Despite their population plummeting by an astounding 99% (!!), not one Western media outlet has called it a genocide.
Isn’t that strange?
The same media that believes Gaza’s Muslim “genocide” was real insists that voter fraud is fake.
That’s awfully strange, too.
Same goes for manmade global warming. There’s no “proof” that's real, either.
There’s supporting evidence. (Mostly in the form of temperature/carbon emissions, plus climate projections.) But it’s similar to cyberfraud stats: We don’t know what the Earth’s temperature would be without the industrial revolution, so it’s beyond our scope to know how much — if at all — human activity has contributed to global warming.
Could be some. Could be none. It’s all guesswork.
Climate change projections are (largely) conjecture from people incentivized to exaggerate the problem — i.e., scientists, researchers, green energy workers/investors, and environmental groups — because the bigger the problem, the more valuable their solution. Hundreds of billions of dollars in endowments, careers, investments, funding, and media attention are at stake.
“Follow the money.”
But the mainstream media is so insistent that global warming is real that if you disagree, you’ll be labeled a “climate change doubter,” a “climate change denier,” or someone “who rejects mainstream climate science.” According to AP style, journalists cannot call you a climate change skeptic anymore because — and I’m being 100% serious — it’s considered offensive to skeptics!
Scientists who consider themselves real skeptics — who debunk mysticism, ESP and other pseudoscience, such as those who are part of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry — complain that non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science have usurped the phrase skeptic. They say they aren’t skeptics because “proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.” That group prefers the phrase “climate change deniers” for those who reject accepted global warming data and theory.
You see, manmade global warming is a scientifically verified, irrefutable fact — so much so that we must shield the reputation of “skeptics” from the scourge of climate deniers — yet election fraud is still a mysterious theoretical. The former is “settled science” and beyond public questioning; the latter is an unknowable mystery.
Why, nobody knows for sure! (Which is why President Trump shouldn’t even talk about it.) For shame!
Pretty weird, huh?
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I’ll go one step further: There’s far more reason to believe in election fraud than in socialism leading to prosperity.
Socialism has been tried in lots of different places. And it’s failed in lots of different places, too. We have hundreds of case studies, test groups, and empirical evidence: Albania, Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burma, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Chad, Congo, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, East Germany, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Ghana, Guinea, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Madagascar, Mali, Moldova, Montenegro, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Soviet Union, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Venezuela.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
We’ve seen the free market versus socialism experiment in East and West Germany; in North and South Korea. Each time, the result was the same: Free markets led to far more prosperity and opportunity than socialism.
It’s why India, Israel, and other countries have moved away from socialism. And it’s also why countries that moved towards socialism, including the United Kingdom, have suffered financially. (If the U.K. were a U.S. state, it would now rank dead last in wealth.)
Yet that’s not how the mainstream media sees it. They see socialism as superior to capitalism. (It just hasn’t been done right.) Israel is guilty of genocide. (Hamas says so.) Manmade global warming is settled science. (If you disagree, you’re a “climate denier.”)
But election fraud?
Jury’s still out. Nobody knows!
Which means it doesn’t exist.
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