At the Federalist: The top 10 hoaxes of a hoax-filled year.
Here are 8 through 10:
- Trump's Liz Cheney Comments
One of the biggest media-driven hoaxes concocted this year was the manipulation of Trump's remarks about Liz Cheney.
While speaking at an event days before the Nov. 5 election, Trump critiqued Cheney's obsession with overseas military adventurism. The former president referred to Cheney as a "radical war hawk" and defended the troops forced to fight in the never-ending conflicts neocons like Cheney would never personally partake in.
"Let's put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it ... when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, 'Gee, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,'" Trump said.
In the wake of Biden's "garbage" smear, the media rushed to distort Trump's comments to make it appear as if he was calling for Cheney to be executed via firing squad. The disinformation operation represented a clear attempt to smear Trump ahead of the election and boost Harris' prospects.
- What Assassination Attempts?
If you watched and read nothing but legacy media, there's a good chance you'd know little to nothing about the two assassination attempts against Trump this year.
After a longtime Democrat donor allegedly tried to kill the incoming president on his Palm Beach golf course in September, left-wing propagandists at NBC News and The Washington Post downplayed the attempted murder as nothing more than an "incident." Outlets like Time magazine whitewashed the suspect's history of donating to Democrats, characterizing him in a tweet as a "58-year-old with unclear political ideology."
Such dishonest propaganda isn't surprising, however. It's the same playbook these media hacks -- who spent years leading an "assassination prep" campaign with horrific smears and lies directed at Trump -- deployed when initially "covering" the first assassination attempt against Trump in July.
- The Atlantic's Hitler Hysteria
In a last-ditch attempt to salvage Kamala Harris' flailing presidential bid, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg -- who ran the debunked 2020 "suckers" and losers" smear -- published an anonymously sourced October hit piece with claims that Trump said he wanted "the kind of generals that Hitler had." It also contained accusations that Trump expressed anger about paying for the funeral services of a murdered Army soldier.
To the media, it didn't matter that the soldier's sister blasted Goldberg for his anti-Trump fabrications, or that numerous former Trump administration officials debunked the bogus claims. What mattered was regurgitating The Atlantic's slanderous hatchet job, which they did with no questions asked.
Update: CNN's Abby Phillips is a disinformation All-Star.
Possibly the biggest disinformation concerned the fact that the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS ESSENTIALLY A VEGETABLE.
This was officially "cheapfake disinformation" until they could hide it no more.
Bonchie
@bonchieredstate
In which Matt Yglesias admits he was incapable of assessing and investigating Bidens condition on his own and needed "insiders" to feed him talking points so he could function as a "journalist."
What a thing to say out loud.
They will confess anything rather than admit the truth that they are disgusting lying propangandists.
"Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out," the Post reported. "Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity."
Biden might earnestly believe that the confused, slow, dead-eyed, mouth-breathing performance he delivered at the June debate against Trump was because he "was sick" -- a one-off night that he could recover from before election day.
People suffering from dementia oftentimes lack self-awareness. Also, it's what he was being told. That Washington Post story led with an anecdote from Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who, you might remember, was the man who saved Biden's foundering primary campaign in 2020. Clyburn "made a confession" to the Post about his "belief that substance is more important than style in politics."
"I have come to the conclusion in recent days that I'm wrong about that," Clyburn told Biden after the debate. "The new environment that we currently live in -- style seems to carry the day more than substance," and "Your style does not lend itself well to the environment we're currently in."
"Style" was Biden's problem on June 27 -- yeah, that's the ticket. Yet it's the theme threaded throughout WaPo's excuse-mongering report on a failed president, with reporter Tyler Pager going deep to sell the fiction that Biden was a success on substance but doomed to a single term by a country obsessed with mere style.
Biden had "substance"?
Doctor_Zero
@Doctor_Zer0
I love how the media is treating the lack of coverage of Biden's mental decline like some sort of inexplicable natural disaster.
"It's amazing there weren't more headlines about this," the people who write headlines murmured, now that it was politically cost-free to do so.