I have made it a minor hobby to study the Soviet methodology of “fact checkers”, who have raised political lying to a fine art. I even now use the word “snopesing” for one such technique, which I discussed long ago on my old personal blog.
Anatomy of a False Snopes Debunking
Today I was happy to discover a textbook Google/Snopes false debunking, yet also with some interesting new elaborations that made it…
https://wolfmoon1776.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/anatomy-of-a-false-snopes-debunking/
That post was actually a fun re-read right now. I encourage you to check it out. Snopes basically took a huge victory for our side, and reframed it as “untrue” by using a misleading strawman.
REALLY. Y’all are so obvious, Snopes. “Nopes, Snopes.”
Basically the “Snopes” technique amounts to “disproof of an adjacent strawman”. In that technique, a FALSE COPY of what is to be disproved, is either found or constructed and then disproved. The disproof is headlined OVER-BROADLY, so as to appear to show that the truth was “debunked”. It leaves the liars’ enemy – truth-tellers – babbling “Bu-bu-bu-but that’s not the actual case – THIS OTHER THING is the real story.” Maybe so, but the truth didn’t get out ahead of the LIARS – nor did it come back FAST and EFFECTIVELY, making the liars “bleed from their eyes like furies”. The technique puts the truth on DEFENSE, even in the case of a WIN, like the example I gave.
Today we look at something similar in principle but different in what is lied about, which involves disproving not a similar strawman scenario, but instead a conveniently accusatory piece of fake evidence, in such a way that it looks like the larger thing which was supported is what is disproved.
In the same way that we condensed the Snopes example to “disproof of an adjacent strawman”, we can call this one “disproof of false shilled evidence”.
One could likewise call today’s technique “disproof of Judas facts”.
Getting the “Judas facts” picked up by a MARK for the other side is KEY. I’ve watched this in action before, so I know what to look for.
Here is today’s example.
ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/Y3l8s
This technique is actually a GREAT WAY of not just taking something down, but of negating something on its strongest point.
Allow me to explain how this works, from the Donkey Com perspective.
- you are confronted with a Trump rally which was arranged fairly quickly, and was extremely well-attended. People are noticing. How do you get the Dem base not to notice that their peers are turning out for Trump, and to make sure they sneer at the NEXT Trump rally? How do you keep MAGA voters thinking THEY are a minority? How do you actually turn the facts around?
- using different mechanisms and compartmentalization, you do the following
- you have somebody tweet an even larger photo of a DIFFERENT rally, and have them claim it’s this rally. This is most likely a “fake MAGA” shill on Twitter. The best technique is to feed the fake photo to somebody like – OH – maybe a conservative commentator who is known to “borrow” and re-post photos without checking too closely. (This is a bit like “entrapment”, which we know the left never does.)
- you request, call out, or perform a “fact check” on the photo, perhaps using a reliable “blue-check” on Twitter, or you feed it to your own “fact checkers” on Facebook
- you “debunk the photo” in a misleading way, that makes it look like the Trump rally was actually small – not that one photo of it was too large and from a different rally
- you make sure that the “mark” is sufficiently embarrassed and chooses to “go silent”, rather than to admit to the con job (which would enable crowdsource forensics) – then you go forward with the “fact check”
See how that works? It’s like a “debunking gun”.
Go back to the title above. What does it say?
Photo shows a “massive” crowd at a Trump rally in Wisconsin on Aug. 5, 2022.
What is next to the title?
So what EXACTLY is “false” here?
Now, the important MISTAKE that you are SUPPOSED to make here, when you don’t click the link, is to think that the Wisconsin Trump rally was not well-attended, and that “MAGA” had to resort to “fake pictures” to pretend that it was well-attended.
You’re supposed to put THAT fear-based or schadenfreude-gifting story into your brain, and just move on – don’t click on it. It’s PSYCHOLOGY.
The TRUTH is simply that the picture is of a DIFFERENT Trump rally, in Pensacola, Florida.
Here is the complete crux of the issue, which is admitted deep in the core of the “fact check”.
“But recent social media posts used an outdated photo to tout the size of the crowd.”
That’s it. It’s ALMOST the same “nothingburger” of BAD JOURNALISM that the left does all the time, and forgives itself for, routinely.
But don’t think I’m defending bad journalism – as you will see.
Thankfully, we can still see the DELETED TWEET where conservative talk show host Benny Johnson EXCITEDLY shared the image on Twitter.
BAD MOVE, BENNY. But good that somebody saved it.
ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/ldRqq
This analysis is from “Truth or Fiction” – a MUCH better “fact checker” site. As you can see, they are “showing their work”, so we can do some forensics.
Ask yourself – do you really think this Benny Johnson would tweet an easily confirmed “wrong picture” of the event if he KNEW it was a bogus picture? No. He’s not that stupid. But he WAS as stupid as I have been, sometimes, and forwarded a picture from a “surely reliable source” that turned out not to have been reliable.
If you remember TEN-GOP, then you know how easily people can be fooled on sources.
In my opinion, after looking over Benny Johnson’s Twitter, and reading this tweet, I think he really believed he was forwarding a picture of the rally. THEN, he was embarrassed by his own lazy image “borrowing”, and lack of fact-checking. In my opinion, it is likely that he was the victim of a rather smart discreditation operation, and is NOT simply a bald-faced and stupid liar. Loath to admit that he grabbed somebody’s photo off the internet and assumed it was real without checking or doing BASIC JOURNALISM, he just deleted the tweet and moved on, cutting his losses.
Could have even been an intern, for all we know. If so, TRAINING is needed (ask Wray!!!).
SO – bad journalist or both a bald-faced liar and stupid as hell? I’m going with bad journalist. At least for now. This seems confirmed by the opinion that Benny Johnson rarely deletes stuff that offends leftist sensibilities.
Normally, things would end there. Dude made a mistake. But that’s not what the left wants.
They want an ISSUE that they can exploit for MILLIONS of impressions.
So what they do is take the error and REFRAME IT exactly as you see.
They likewise use this for clickbait elsewhere, as a “FEATURED FACT-CHECK”, on OTHER “fact checks”. That is, in fact (cough), how I found this one – while looking at a NASA conspiracy theory debunking (which STILL does not work for me, but that’s A DIFFERENT STORY with far more troubling implications).
FALSE. That’s it. FALSE.
But let’s call the left on this a little bit.
Why didn’t the “fact checkers” call this MOSTLY TRUE? Why didn’t they call it “PARTIALLY TRUE”? Why did they not, at the least, call it “SOMEWHAT TRUE”?
They would CERTAINLY do that for a Biden rally or an Obama rally – AM I RIGHT?
A picture from a DIFFERENT Biden rally with 24 people instead of 12? Would that not get a pass? Maybe 120 instead of 12?
Let me speak for them. They would have been more honest.
“So while the photo is NOT a photo of the Biden rally in question, it is in fact a photo of a different Biden rally, taken during the 2020 election campaign.”
MOSTLY TRUE.
Here is how “PolitiFact” takes their carefully misleading question and goes from there to calling a well-attended Trump rally “false”, while pretending to just be honing in on an evidence problem.
PolitiFact conducted a reverse image search of the photo and found Trump’s son, Eric Trump, shared it on Twitter in November 2020. At the time, he used the image of a large, apparently pro-Trump crowd to push the false claim that the presidential election was rigged.
Molly Beck, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, quote-tweeted Johnson’s now-deleted tweet and said the photo in question was not from the Aug. 5 rally. She also pointed to Eric Trump’s tweet as the source of the photo.
The scene depicted in this older photo does not match photos shared by reporters who were on site at the Aug. 5 Wisconsin rally. Media photos show a smaller crowd and a different event layout.
In the older photo, two large screens that read, “The best is yet to come!” can be seen. This was a slogan often used by Donald Trump during his 2020 campaign.
Meanwhile, media photos from the recent rally show two screens displaying the event’s speakers, including Trump, as well as a large, blue sign that said, “Save America!”
Additionally, photos from reporters show there were three bleachers of roughly the same size behind the stage at the event. But in the 2020 campaign photo, there is one large set of bleachers in the center and two smaller sets to the left and right.
Our ruling
Social media posts shared a photo from Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign and claimed it was of an Aug. 5, 2022, rally in Wisconsin.
The photo in question does not show the Aug. 5 rally and can be traced back to a November 2020 tweet from Eric Trump. It also conflicts with several photos taken by reporters on site at the Aug. 5 Wisconsin rally.
We rate this claim False.
Whatever.
Conclusion
Now you know why it is IMPERATIVE to confirm materials from our sources. The left will ABUSE any error on our part.
AND – if it turns out that the source is suddenly dubious, you really need to DIG INTO the error, rather than running away.
BURN THE SOURCE TO GET TO THE TRUTH.
For me, the classic example of digging into a bogus meme and finding shocking truth was the ZIM shipping meme that Valerie brought here. I will not lie – Val brings an enormous amount of disinformation and CRAP here – but it was all worth it, to reset my thinking on how many of the elite skated on 9/11. She found some of the best circumstantial evidence, outside of convenient stock moves in the days preceding 9/11, that many top people knew the operation was coming. Whether these people were conspirators or just high-level would-be victims who got tipped, people knew the op was coming and did a GTFO.
Technically, the meme (which I cannot find now – it’s on Gab) was wrong on the length of ZIM’s lease at WTC, using waffly language to make 30 years of separate leases ending in a 10 year lease, into what was easily misconstrued as a 30-year lease. Likewise, it personified ZIM as the Rothschild family, who may or may not have been the controlling financial interest in the Israeli firm at the time. WHATEVER. Other than that, the meme was shockingly accurate in throwing 4 Suspicious Cats at ZIM’s ridiculously convenient and hasty move – despite a world of fact-checkers and “crusaders against antisemitism” waving their hands and saying “don’t look here”.
HA. The CHUTZPAH. It BURNS.
Closer to the current example, I watched a Breitbart journalist get set up with bogus information on Loretta Lynch – basically identifying the WRONG Loretta Lynch (a Clinton associate) as being Obama’s corrupt nomination to replace Eric Holder. This resulted in a defamatory article and a STEALTH RETRACTION BY BREITBART (“what article?”) – which was then (apparently) used to silence Breitbart completely on one of the most corrupt nominations in this nation’s history, since Loretta Lynch was a SORORITY SISTER of Eric Holder’s wife. Not a WORD followed on the REAL SCANDAL, after Breitbart was misled by SOMEBODY into publishing an ERROR.
Face the facts. CORRUPTION IS RAMPANT.
And they will say and do almost ANYTHING to cover it up.
We have ALWAYS got to be prepared for DISCREDITATION – but in my opinion, if you PUSH BACK on the discreditation and ADMIT YOUR ERROR – whatever it was – you automatically level up as a TRUTH WARRIOR. You will OFTEN find that the other side did something to entrap you.
Why?
Because WE value the truth and THEY do not.
PUT ON YOUR BELT, to hold up the PANTS OF CREDIBILITY.
Stick with the truth. No matter how unexpected, embarrassing, or unbelievable. At the same time, be BOLD in pointing out likely malfeasance, and MAKE THEM ANSWER OR RUN AWAY.
W
(@rising_serpent) 
