Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler departed the paper on Thursday in a gloomy mood as he penned his final column lamenting the state of the industry and repeating several sanctimonious falsehoods about the business.

Kessler began his lamentations by marveling that “somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world.”

After recalling how the fact-checking industry has suffered setbacks from Meta, Google, and demise of USAID, Kessler observed, “In reviewing many of the some 3,000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for president.”

Kessler also made sure to pat himself on the back, “[Mitt Romney and Barack Obama] “dropped talking points after a negative fact-check rating,” and “Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible).”

The guy who went to bat for Hamas’s casualty reports despite admitting they make no difference between civilian and combatant deaths should probably refrain from claiming he is the personification of the truth. Kessler has also suggested that viewing George Soros and his donations to left-wing causes as the driving force behind certain things, such as Trump’s New York indictment, could be anti-Semitic despite admitting the left did something similar for years with the Koch Brothers.

However, Kessler then returned to Trump and eventually mourned, “the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship.”

Kessler then tried to claim that he really is the definition of the truth, “Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers — The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95 percent of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way.”

They would say that because it is true. For example, for many years, something the fact-checkers loved to go after Republicans on was the size of the Navy. It’s a wonky policy debate that, to oversimplify, is between more ships and better ships. However, the fact-checkers, including Kessler, would, without fail, come down against GOP calls for more ships as if a preference could be false. They were able to do this because the experts they chose to talk to were on the other side of the debate.

Of course, no talk of Glenn Kessler can be complete without the memory that, “The Fact Checker team documented that [Trump] made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims.”

While other media people have mistranslated that as “more than 30,000 lies,” it should be noted that some of these alleged mistruths include things like “Then there was ultimately proven there was no collusion. No -- after two years, no collusion.”

Kessler also accused Trump of hypocritically attacking him while also citing him, “Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost twenty times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California).”

That was six years ago. So far this year, Kessler has awarded a total of 105 Pinocchios to conservatives and Republicans and only four to Democrats. The one instance where he slapped down a Democrat was when Rep. Eric Swalwell blamed the Trump administration for recent plane crashes, a dishonor he shared with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who claimed crashes were worse under President Biden.

In 2024, when there was a Democratic president, Republicans still outpaced Democrats 143-24, which means if a Democrat messed up, it must have been so bad that Kessler couldn’t ignore it.

Nobody has ever claimed that everything a Republican says is true, but the disparity cannot be disputed. What can be disputed are certain allegations of falsehood, which is something that happened a lot during Kessler’s time at the Post, but thankfully that is all over now.