PolitiFact Lamely Throws 'Mostly False' Flag at Dan Bongino Facebook Page

August 8th, 2020 6:43 AM

Matt Palumbo at Bongino.com took issue with the extremely biased nature of PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" in assessing "facts." The controversy? This week, President Trump signed an executive order to prevent illegal immigrants from being counted for the purposes of re-apportioning congressional districts after the 2020 census.

PolitiFact's Tom Kertscher decided to warn America that the following claim was "Mostly False."

“California has six extra” congressional representatives “because illegals are counted” in the census.

This was counted as a "correction" of "Facebook Posts," not as a direct judgment of the Bongino website, described as "part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed."

Kertscher used the familiar liberal-media template of finding "no evidence" to support a conservative argument: 

We found no evidence to back a claim that California has six more House seats than it would have if people in the country illegally were excluded from the apportionment.

The claim "is off base," said demographer Dudley Poston Jr., an emeritus professor of sociology at Texas A&M University.

He and other experts say California likely has two to four more seats than it would without counting people in the country illegally.

This takes us back to the obvious point we have to make over and over again when it comes to these "fact checkers." They are taking exception to an estimate, which is not a hard fact. To disagree on an estimate on this scale should not rise to the level of "false news and misinformation." 

Palumbo effectively summarizes the tendentious nature of the PolitiFact method here: 

So to summarize, his case amounts to “I can’t find evidence for this, one sociology professor disagrees with the claim, and so do some unnamed experts that I’ll quote even though you have no idea who they are.” He then rated the claim “mostly false,” which just goes to prove how Kertscher assigns his “ratings” to claims before even trying to cobble together a rebuttal. Does he really think that “well actually California only has four extra representatives due to illegals, not six!” is a satisfying rebuttal to anyone who doesn’t want illegals counted in terms of determining representation (which is almost everyone)?

That sounds “mostly true” to me, but you have to understand Politifact’s partnership with Facebook to understand his true motivation. Kertscher and those like him at Facebook don’t want information like the narrative I’m spreading to gain traction, so they bring in a “fact checker” to do an “analysis” of the claim. That’s why Kertscher’s article makes many references to the fact that my article was posted on the Dan Bongino Facebook page, because once it’s “fact checked” the page gets a warning, thus throttling our traffic. It also means a warning will pop up over the article anytime someone shares it on FB, even though you can see that his fact check didn’t check any facts.

In fact, Bongino's Facebook post is no longer available, but Palumbo's previous article is. A search of "Bongino" at PolitiFact locates four "fact checks" in the last year or so....all of them Mostly False or worse. 

PolitiFact finds a reliably leftish expert witness to claim conservatives are all wet. In this case, "demographer Dudley Poston Jr." is not just a demographer. He's been a repetitive small donor to the Democratic National Committee.