Tag: fake news

CNN Hack Falls for Satirical Tweet from Fictitious Republican Lawmaker While Reading List of Comments Regarding Mitch McConnell’s Health

A CNN anchor made an embarrassing blunder this week while reading off what she thought was a quote from a GOP lawmaker regarding Senator Mitch McConnell (RINO-KY).

As The Gateway Pundit reported, McConnell was reportedly found unconscious in his DC home last month before he was rushed to the hospital.

While the 84-year-old Kentucky Senator is supposedly “receiving excellent care,” it is still unclear why McConnell was admitted to the hospital. However, he may have had a heart attack, according to newly released audio of a 911 call.

During Wednesday’s edition of “CNN This Morning,” anchor Audie Cornish shared a series of statements from Republicans who said they had recently spoken with McConnell.

“We have a lot of Senate Republicans coming out, we’re just going to show some on-screen,” Cornish said. “All saying, I talked to him, I talked to him, I talked to him for 20 minutes, I talked to him for 45 minutes.”

Among the comments Cornish read off were from CNN contributor Scott Jennings and statements attributed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY).

She also showed a post from the X account @RepJackKimble, thinking that he was a real person as well.

Keep reading

Despite Media Claims, USAID Cuts DID NOT Kill 14 Million People

Critics of the U.S., along with mainstream media and Democratic lawmakers, have claimed that Elon Musk’s cuts to USAID have killed 14 million people. This claim fails on multiple levels. Musk did not cut USAID. As head of DOGE, he held no formal legal authority to cancel contracts or eliminate programs, and the formal cancellations were executed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The death toll figures circulating in the press are not confirmed counts but forward projections spanning up to five years, derived from economic models that assume no alternative funding was found, no internal reallocation of funds occurred, and no recipient government, third-country government, or global aid organization stepped in to fill gaps, assumptions the evidence does not support. An examination of the countries most dependent on USAID funding finds no verified excess mortality data for 2025 or 2026 attributable to the cuts; what exists are modeled estimates, not death registries.

The White House stated in court that Musk was a senior presidential adviser with no formal decision-making authority. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that DOGE played a role in the dismantling of USAID. However, the court found that the cuts were approved by government officials. It also ruled that Musk’s social media statement claiming he had “fed USAID into the wood chipper” did not legally constitute evidence that he made those decisions.

Keep reading

NPR’s Nina Totenberg Reveals Why She Posted a Story Claiming Alito Was Retiring – Then Quickly Retracted

Does NPR’s Nina Totenberg have advanced knowledge that Justice Samuel Alito is about to retire?

NPR reporter Nina Totenberg on Tuesday published an article claiming Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.

Totenberg claimed that the Supreme Court made the announcement that Alito was retiring.

Nina Totenberg wrote: “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade is retiring, the court announced on Tuesday.”

However, 10 minutes later, the NPR article was scrubbed and left with an editor’s note.

The original article is archived here.

“This story has been taken down. It was published in error,” the note read.

NPR staff published a separate article claiming the Alito article was “erroneously published.”

NPR said that Totenberg already had a draft article on Alito’s retirement ready in advance of the announcement.

The outlet claimed that Totenberg assumed that Alito was retiring after she heard a bystander say that Chief Justice Roberts made a retirement announcement.

“Totenberg was reporting on the final day of the Supreme Court session on Tuesday. As she was leaving the court, Chief Justice John Roberts was announcing upcoming retirements. Totenberg wondered why everyone else wasn’t leaving and asked someone outside the court. According to her interview that same day on All Things Considered, Totenberg asked a bystander what was going on, and the person replied “retirement announcements.” But Totenberg heard the reply in the singular, “announcement, ” and assumed it was the notice that Alito was retiring,’ NPR reported.

Nina Totenberg revealed on “All Things Considered” that she made a “rookie mistake.”

“I scared everybody half to death for about five minutes,” Totenberg said on the show. “It’s entirely on me. It’s not anybody else’s fault.”

Totenberg read the text of her apology to Alito on Tuesday’s show:

“Dear Justice Alito, there are no words to adequately apologize for today’s error in reporting your retirement. It was entirely my fault. I rushed out of the courtroom after the opinion announcements, and when I realized that the usual rush of folks after a few minutes had not happened, I asked somebody was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the ‘s’ on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed something no reporter should ever do, that you were retiring. It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism. I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say, except that I am so so sorry.”

NPR claimed that Nina Totenberg’s status as one of the most experienced reporters covering the Supreme Court contributed to the error.

“Totenberg is one of the most experienced reporters covering the Supreme Court. She’s done so for NPR since 1975. Her status contributed to the error,” NPR said.

“She’s the preeminent Supreme Court reporter in the courtroom,” NPR Executive Editor Krishnadev Calamur said. “So I’m assuming that’s what she heard. … She’s in the room. It’s like when we report opinions. I’m not waiting to see what the Times is reporting. It’s when Nina says, here’s what happened, and we do it. That’s the trust you build up.”

Keep reading

DuckDuckGo AI Tells Users Donald Trump and JD Vance Have Died from Rabies

DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature has been caught spreading the outrageous claim that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both died earlier this month from rabies, in what appears to be a successful campaign by internet pranksters to manipulate artificial intelligence systems using a technique known as “poisoning.”

Futurism reports that the false claim that Trump and Vance both died from rabies in early June represents yet another instance of AI systems amplifying misinformation without critical verification. According to the AI feature’s fabricated narrative, Trump had been deliberately bitten by Vance following advice from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who supposedly claimed the deadly infection could confer “superpowers.”

The misinformation traces back to a coordinated effort by the Reddit community r/poisonai, a group of approximately 45,000 users dedicated to posting absurd falsehoods in an attempt to trick AI systems into repeating them. The group’s self-described mission is providing “Accurate, Verified and Trusted information,” though this is itself part of the satirical nature of the operation.

The favored false narrative among these “AI poisoners” has been that JD Vance died of rabies on June 5, 2026. Community members have posted dozens of fabricated tributes and expressions of mourning, with some sharing fake screenshots of supposed Trump Truth Social posts eulogizing the vice president. The performance extends to comment sections, where participants maintain the fiction by expressing outrage at AI systems that correctly identify the claims as false.

“Google should really do something about this,” one participant wrote. “It is extremely insensitive for their AI to be treating this tragedy as something ‘fake’ or ‘satirical.’”

The campaign has achieved measurable success beyond DuckDuckGo. The browser Brave’s AI feature also began repeating the false claim about Vance’s death from rabies, which reporters were able to confirm independently.

Keep reading

Busted! Leftist Media Wants You to Think Talarico Is Polling Ahead of Paxton in Texas

There are two kinds of political polls. The first is curated propaganda for your consumption. Its goal is not to reflect public opinion but to shape it. It’s designed to shape your opinion, and in a sense manipulate you in the most cynical of ways. The second is the internal poll, where the campaign pays for it and keeps the results out of the public eye. This is the information and data the campaign uses to plan for, initiate, and respond to the day-to-day events of the campaign.

Since all campaigns conduct their own internal polling, you have to know that if their behavior and messaging seem slightly out of step with the general tone of news coverage, this is the reason. They know something the media does not, and you do not.

The Senate race in Texas has just served up a great example of how the left and their partners in the legacy media like to use polls to manipulate public opinion.

According to a poll from an organization called Texas Public Opinion Research (TPOR), Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D), who definitely eats meat and definitely likes females, has a three-point lead over Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). TPOR reports that Talarico is favored 47% to Paxton’s 44% among likely general election voters.

The totally unbiased people at The Hill reported that the poll sampled voters in the wake of Paxton’s defeat of Sen. John Cornyn (R) in the Texas primary election.

Nearly a third of the respondents who voted for Cornyn in the runoff indicated in the poll that they will support the Democratic nominee in the November election. A plurality — 44 percent — of these voters said they will now choose Paxton, and 23 percent were undecided, The Hill Reported.

The pollsters and The Hill, apparently, would have you believe that roughly 33% of Cornyn voters switched over to Talarico. Before taking this seriously, take a step back and ask yourself if this makes any sense. Chances are, if it doesn’t make sense to you, then it doesn’t make sense.

Texas is a solidly red state. Cornyn, while seen as a RINO and a squish by many conservatives, is still largely regarded as very, very far to the right of Talarico. On his campaign website, Cornyn bragged that he had a “more than 99.2% voting record with President Trump.”

Do the people who voted for that sound like the kind of people who would now vote for a man-child who is working very hard to try to convince voters that he eats meat and is a heterosexual male? He even has a girlfriend, according to the latest reports.

The New York Post reported that she is “Brianna Menard, 30, (who) describes herself as a ‘committed vegan,’ yoga buff and cat mom who likes ‘dancing the night away’ at local gay bar Cheer Up Charlies in Austin.”

Keep reading

BUSTED: Trump White House Catches The New York Times Spreading an INSANE Lie About VP JD Vance as Paper Desperately Tries to Pit Him Against the President

The Trump White House completely busted the New York Times in a bizarre falsehood, while the paper published a total hit piece trying to paint Vice President JD Vance in a bad light with President Trump.

On Saturday, The New York Times published an article titled “Is JD Vance the 2028 Front Runner? Trump Has Questions.” The piece alleges that Trump has several doubts about Vance’s ability to succeed him as President.

For example, The Times claims that Trump has doubts whether Vance is capable of running a national campaign and scorned the vice-president’s initial opposition to the war in Iran. Of course, the Times provides no evidence to back up its claims.

While trying to divide Vance from the president, The Times tries to humiliate Vance further by portraying him as a thin-skinned social media addict who was recently put in timeout by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

From the New York Times:

In meetings, Mr. Vance frequently scrolls his phone, and he uses social media to fight with his critics. The president frequently posts to Truth Social, but he does not spend time replying to people online, as Mr. Vance does.

Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, recently advised Mr. Vance to take a break from social media, as have other officials in the West Wing, according to people familiar with those interactions, because the fighting was beneath his office. (Mr. Vance said he took a break for Lent.)

But White House Communications Director Steven Cheung quickly exposed this claim as nothing but a crazy lie.

He also noted that The Times refused to run their denial.

“This isn’t true. We denied it to the New York Times, and they refused to run our quote,” Cheung wrote. “Complete fake news.”

“This supposed ‘conversation’ never happened.”

Keep reading

Trump and Interior Sec Doug Burgum Nuke the Failing New York Times for Lying About Reflecting Pool Restoration at a Fraction of Obama’s $34 MILLION Hack Job

President Trump went off on the New York Times in a lengthy Truth Social post on Friday over its attacks on Trump’s renovation of the nearly half-mile-long reflecting pool, which sits between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. 

The outlet has written several hit pieces on the project to restore the filthy green water basin, built in the 1920s, which has been marred by issues, including sinking and leaking into the swamp beneath. “Hundreds of Millions of Dollars have been spent throughout the years trying to fix it, and even from its inception, in 1922, it never really worked!” Trump noted.

Still, a recent New York Times piece attacks Trump over his $13.1 million budget and the so-called “lucrative contracts” awarded to “hand-picked vendors.”

But according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Trump Derangement Syndrome-infected Times ignores the scope of the project to properly seal the pool with crack and leak-proof materials for the expansion joints, which will withstand the years and changing temperatures that come with the seasons. “This is something the Obama administration didn’t understand,” Burgum said, adding that Obama “wasted millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars” with a failed project in 2012, which had a massive cost of $34 million, more than twice what Trump is paying. Notably, Obama’s botched repairs took nearly two years to complete, while Trump’s will be completed by July 4 after starting in April. 

The “Obama-era errors that failed at the cost of millions for the American taxpayer,” Burgum said, caused the pool to continue leaking a whopping 16 million gallons of water per year.

“Finally, we have professionals doing the right job for a tiny fraction of the money that has been spent, and The Failing New York Times continues to demean the work of these wonderful, talented, and proud construction professionals that are bringing this over 2,000 foot long pool, the largest in the World, BACK TO LIFE!” Trump said. “It is happening before your very eyes, and will soon be completed at a much higher level, and after doing much more work than was originally anticipated.”

Trump previously said they had to remove “eleven or twelve truckloads of filth out of the water” when a reporter asked why he would bother cleaning the monument.

Along with screenshots of an X thread by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, correcting the record, Trump slammed the Times, saying the failed news organization “should spend more of its energy on fixing its broken ‘shop,’ and celebrating America’s Greatness.”

Keep reading

WHEN REALITY BITES: Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Factually Vacant ‘Rich Pay 8%’ Tax Claim

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would likely today be a quarrelsome local education union official somewhere in her native Oklahoma had she not left the Sooner State in search of greener pastures following her father’s death.

She was born in Norman, home of a certain college football team associated with a university that is actually a left-wing troll manufacturer in one of America’s reddest states, and somehow, according to Wikipedia, ended up graduating from Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City in 1966.

Having myself grownup on Okie City’s southside — aka the “poor side of town” where we rednecks resided —my classmates and I in Moore High School’s class of 1968 mostly viewed Classen as a school for rich kids because it drew students from some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the state.

Interestingly, Warren’s Classen debate team won a state championship. As it happens, I was on Moore’s debate team with a then-young fellow named Tom Cole, who was a year ahead of me. You may have heard of Tom as he’s now Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, a position from which he wields vastly more influence on the nation than Warren likely ever will have.

Anyway, enough of the Liz Warren, Okie, history lesson. She ended up at Harvard, ran for the Senate and won in 2012, where she has afflicted the national public policy debate with endless streams of the Left’s nonsensical “government-is-our-salvation” rhetoric masquerading as intelligent discussion.

A recent example of which is her April 15 Tax Day “Reminder: The average taxpayer pays 13% of their income in taxes. The wealthiest 400 families in the U.S. pay just 8% of their income in taxes.It’s time to make the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.It’s time to pass a wealth tax.” 

If you have paid even the scantest attention to American politics since FDR, you have heard millions of variations on Warren’s claim because it’s conventional wisdom on the Left, which has been failing the test of reality since before the New Deal.

As I expected, Just Facts Daily (JFD) addressed Warren’s assertion and found it wanting:

“IN FACT, the wealthy pay about 33% of their income in federal taxes, even after write-offs. Warren’s 8% figure misleadingly counts paper gains as income and excludes massive amounts of taxes paid by wealthy people,” JFD reported.

Here are the specifics (Actually, there are more, but the following seven points ought to be the end of the discussion. For those who want more, however, JFD is happy to oblige with five more points at the link):

  • The U.S. Treasury estimates that the richest 0.1% of families paid an average effective federal tax rate of 33.5% in 2024.
  • The Treasury’s estimates of effective federal tax rates roughly accord with data published by the Congressional Budget Office, which typically lag the Treasury data by several years.
  • Unlike the incomplete and misleading tax rates reported by the media and politicians of both parties, the Treasury’s and CBO’s computations of effective federal tax rates reflect actual taxes paid (not marginal rates) and account for nearly all forms of income and nearly all federal taxes, such as capital gains, pensions, health benefits, payroll taxes, excise taxes, corporate taxes, hidden taxes and write-offs (aka preferences).
  • Warren cites no source for her figure of 8%, but it accords with a 2021 Biden White House analysis that estimated an “average federal individual income tax rate” of 8.2% for “America’s 400 wealthiest families” during 2010–2018.
  • Contrary to Warren, that analysis is not a full measure of “taxes” because it only includes “federal individual income taxes” and excludes all other types of federal taxes, such as social insurance taxes, corporate income taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, and gift taxes.
  • Contrary to the law and reality, the Biden White House analysis understates the actual income tax rate by counting “unrealized capital gains” as “income.”
  • Per the Supreme Court’s 1920 ruling in Eisner v. Macomber, “increase in value of capital investment is not income in any proper meaning of the term,” and “mere growth or increment of value in a capital investment is not income.”

Keep reading

Trump Administration Slams ‘False Reporting’ by EU Top Diplomat Kaja Kallas Claiming That US Diplomats Had Left Kiev Ahead of Expected Missile and Drone Strikes

Many feel Kallas is not up to the job.

Of all the bloated bureaucracies installed in Brussels, the seemingly less effective official is the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.

In yet another of her faux-pas, she announced that the heroic European diplomats were still in Kiev, while the American would have fled after the Russian warnings of massive drone and missile attacks programmed for the next days and weeks.

But no one’s surprise, the information was incorrect, prompting US officials to criticize her statement, calling it a ‘false reporting’.

The Telegraph reported:

“Kaja Kallas, the EU’s most senior diplomat, claimed the US was the only country to evacuate its embassy in response to Russian threats against the Ukrainian capital over the weekend, while praising Europeans’ courage for remaining in place.

But in an unusual intervention highlighting the tensions between Washington and Brussels, the US embassy in Ukraine stated: ‘There are no changes to our operations, and reports otherwise are false’.”

Keep reading

Mediaite Founding Editor Colby Hall Out After Suspension for ‘Fabricated Quotes’

Colby Hall, the founding editor of the far-left media site Mediaite, is out after a 30-day suspension for, among other things, fabricating quotes.

In the middle of last month, Mediaite’s editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo announced Hall’s suspension.

“We presented the findings to Colby Hall, who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of AI,” DePaolo wrote. “Regardless, it is completely unacceptable, and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”

What was fascinating is that Hall was exposed by his ideological counterparts in the far-left media. From my earlier report:

On Monday, the far-left media outlet Status told Semafor that One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.”

Semafor further reports that since its launch, One Sheet has serially misattributed quotes to the wrong people and outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Status, and Politico. In other words, those dumb enough to pay for One Sheet were misinformed about who said what. Hell, I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to read Mediaite for free.

Semafor summed it up as a “series of mishaps… including misattributed information and made-up quotes.”

Apparently,  DePaolo’s “further investigation” didn’t come out too well for Hall because Hall has announced he’s out at Mediaite to spend more time with his Substack.

“After 15 years as Founding Editor of Mediaite, I’m stepping away from the site I helped launch, and that has been my obsession for well over a decade,” he announced last week. “The decision follows the editorial errors in the One Sheet newsletter that surfaced in April. I addressed those mistakes on the record at the time, and I stand by what I said then.”

He then spun the 30-day suspension as a plus. “What I didn’t expect, when the suspension started in April, was that the past month would turn out to be one of the most clarifying experiences of my professional life,” he said. “It also gave my brain a chance to do something it hadn’t done in a long while: rest.”

He does admit that the suspension was “about as dark as anything I’ve gone through professionally.” But it was still good because he realized “I’d been running on fumes for longer than I wanted to admit, and that some of what I thought was professional rigor was actually just exhaustion dressed up as urgency.” Whatever that means.

We all make mistakes, and out of humility and even self-preservation, we need to show some grace when others make those mistakes. Making up quotes doesn’t sound like a mistake. You can accidentally plagiarize by not indenting a paragraph. I’ve done that. You can accidentally misattribute a quote. I’ve done that. The thing, though, is that after you make those errors, you know you’re prone to making those errors, so you’re extra careful about double-checking. Fabricating quotes, though?

Now, Hall says, he plans to do some consulting and disappear into that massive pile of Substack with the rest of the disgraced, like Jim Acosta and Taylor Lorenz and Ryan Lizza and Terry Moran…

Keep reading