Hillary Clinton’s rant in India about Trump voters being motivated by racism, sexism, and loathing of Indian-Americans who succeed is being carefully protected by the “fact checkers” at PolitiFact and Snopes.com.
Despite topping their website with the question “Did Hillary Clinton call Wisconsin backwards?," PolitiFact failed to issue a “Truth-o-Meter” ruling. It reported Gov. Scott Walker tried to shame Wisconsin Democrats when Hillary suggested that she won the forward-looking states and Trump won the “backward” ones. Tom Kertscher of PolitiFact Wisconsin wrote an article called “In Context, our periodic feature that fleshes out sound bites that attract attention.”
Wouldn’t this imply that Walker was taking Mrs. Clinton out of context? They took no position, just reproduced her comments, including the money quote:
I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving-forward, and his whole campaign, "Make America Great Again," was looking backwards. You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.”
Ironically, the PF team did not quote Walker’s complaint for the Republican Governors Association in context (they just linked to it): “Hillary Clinton is stirring new outrage this week after she was caught on tape calling states that voted against her in the 2016 presidential election ‘backwards.’ Clinton lost Wisconsin that year when 1.4 million voters in the state rejected her candidacy.”
Snopes was notably worse, lazily sticking Hillary’s India comments into a previous blog from last fall, and implying it was still “MOSTLY FALSE” that she was implying white women who voted for Trump “caved” to pressure from men. They shared this passage of the India remarks:
Part of that [decline] is an identification with the Republican party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son — whoever — believes you should. What happened in my election is I was on the way to winning white women until [James Comey] dropped that very ill-advised letter on October the 28th, and my numbers just went down…
All of a sudden, white women who were going to vote for me and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told “She’s going to jail, you don’t want to vote for her. That’d be terrible, you can’t vote for that.” [Emphasis mine.]
The headline over the warmed-over article remains "Hillary Clinton Says Women 'Caved' to Men in Voting Against Her?" Snopes “fact checker” Dan McGuill repeated his argument that if she didn’t use the word “caved,” it’s "MOSTLY FALSE" to imply she blamed male pressure on women for her loss:
Once again, Clinton did not actually say that women “caved in” to pressure from men, and this time, she specifically framed her remarks around married white women [with a "husband" reference?], not all women, as well as offering historical context for the Democratic party’s declining vote share among the white, female electorate.
This is like arguing that it was "mostly false" and that Trump "did not actually say" something untoward about Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle when he said she had "blood coming out of her wherever." When it comes to Hillary, the "fact checkers" are going to resolutely refuse to take the hint.
We have rated this "fact-check" by Politifact and Snopes.com as Fully Fake. For similar analyses, please visit our Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers site.
