Tag: fake news

California Reveals All Job Gains In 2023 Were Fake

In the past year we have discussed on multiple occasions that US labor market data has been repeatedly doctored to artificially appear better than it really is (see “Here Is The “Unexpected” Reason Why The Fed Will Rush To Cut Rates As Soon As Possible“, “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000” and “Here Comes The Job Shock: Philadelphia Fed Admits US Jobs “Overstated” By At Least 1.1 Million“), although thanks to a quirk of BLS data revision reporting, we won’t have definitive proof of just how ugly the real job market has been in recent years until some time in 2025, well into Trump’s second administration.

However, while the BLS will be able to maintain the facade of “strong job gains” lies into early 2025, the dismal reality has already made an appearance in America’s largest labor market.

According to the latest report published by the non-partisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) which is an agency of the California government, is overseen by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California State Legislature, and performs and publishes extensive analyses of the state’s budget in addition to providing fiscal and policy advice to the California Legislature, contrary to prior reports of over substantial job gains in the deep blue state in 2023, the reality was far uglier.

In a report titled “Newest Early Jobs Revision Shows No Net Job Growth During 2023” we learn just that: the Early Revisions to state-level data flagged here previously, suggests that California actually lost jobs during the fourth quarter of last year. As the report details, “based on the most recent release of the early benchmarks, payroll jobs declined by 32,000 from September 2023 through December 2023. On the contrary, the preliminary monthly reports showed a solid increase in job growth (+117,000 jobs) at the time.”

This, according to the LAO, means that “with the fourth quarter revision, calendar year 2023 saw essentially no net job growth (+9,000 jobs overall).“

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Attacks On ‘Cheap Fakes’ Extend Biden Administration’s War On Free Speech

There were two astonishing developments this week in the Biden administration’s continuing attack on free speech. First, just days ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s injunction against the administration’s extensive censorship enterprise, a second White House press secretary strongly encouraged the media to chill political debate. Second, Karine Jean-Pierre was masterful in her delivery of the new Biden attack line on “cheap fakes.”

To set the stage: last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal district court’s finding that the evidence likely established that the Biden Administration, including then spokesperson Jen Psaki, had engaged in a broad attack on free speech in violation of the First Amendment. It issued an injunction prohibiting the White House and other federal agencies from taking “actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce… social-media content containing protected free speech.”

The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which stayed enforcement of the injunction, pending its review. The Court heard oral argument in March. The administration might prevail, despite browbeating social media into blocking core political speech, including criticism of Biden, humor, and discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop. Yes, that same laptop the Justice Department and FBI just admitted were legitimate and tamper-free. A decision is expected within 10 days.

Now, KJP and the administration are doubling down. Attacking a new category of “cheap fake” videos, KJP blasted the media for publishing unaltered video of the president’s frailties. Her objection appears to be that by presenting information about the president out of the context preferred by the administration, this video is, in effect, fake. See here.

While the administration was unclear about the missing context, I infer that it prefers a focus on the presumed majority of the president’s 10 AM to 4 pm, Monday-to-Friday workday during which he is not frozen, wandering aimlessly, mumbling incoherently, or blanking out. I understand that preference, but it is unseemly, and depending on next steps, may be unconstitutional, for a government official, speaking from the White House, to seek to chill free speech.

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Biden Campaign Launches Taskforce to Combat Alleged “Cheap Fakes,” Urges Media Support

The Biden campaign is putting together a specialized task force that has been formed to counter what it considers manipulated portrayals of President Biden in online videos.

According to a staffer, who spoke with Politico, this initiative aims to “mitigate the risks” associated with these videos, which depict the president in various awkward or confusing situations.

Despite pushback on the Biden administration that the videos are actually accurate and have not been manipulated with AI, this move underscores a deepening concern within the Biden administration regarding the circulation of these clips on social media platforms, often highlighted as signs of the president’s deteriorating mental agility.

The issue gained traction following a press conference where White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized the media for distributing footage showing Biden in an unflattering light. Jean-Pierre labeled one such video, which showed former President Barack Obama assisting a seemingly bewildered Biden off a stage, as a “deepfake” and a “cheap fake video done in bad faith.”

Further incidents adding to the controversy include Biden’s peculiar behavior during a G7 summit and a Juneteenth event. In one instance, he was seen wandering away from a group of world leaders and in another, appearing disoriented among dancing attendees.

The campaign’s approach has sparked criticism from various quarters, accusing it of attempting to censor and control the narrative surrounding the president’s public appearances. Social media reactions have been sharply divided, with some users mocking the campaign’s efforts to label these videos as “cheap fakes” and questioning the integrity of the mainstream media’s coverage of these events.

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Biden Camp Caught Red Handed Spreading A Blatant ‘Cheap Fake’

The Biden campaign is at it again, doing exactly what they have accused Trump supporters of doing, creating so called ‘cheap fakes’.

Following this weekend’s massive Trump rally in Philadelphia, which saw an arena full of MAGA supporters and Trump being mobbed by adoring fans everywhere he went, the Biden campaign pathetically attempted to concoct something to disrupt the narrative.

As we highlighted, Trump took a pop at Biden, who is holed up at Camp David practicing standing up.

Trump packed the arena in Philly on Saturday.

But Biden’s meme team wanted to highlight the empty seats in the back corner and compare it to when Biden appeared in the same arena.

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MSM Defames MAGA Michigan State Rep. – Media Caught Lying about 3AM Stripper Shootout

Rep. Neil Friske is one of the most conservative pro-Trump members of the Michigan House of Representatives, and last night was arrested for alleged assault in the state capital, Lansing.

Immediately the accusation was salacious: the mainstream media claimed that Rep. Friske fired gunshots at a stripper shortly before 3 A.M. after a dispute. The implication was that Rep. Friske met the woman at a south Lansing strip club, Deja Vu, and brought her home for sex, and then during a dispute started shooting at her and chased her down the road. This was what the media pushed through its disinformation networks.

But of course none of that is true.

Friske has told several sources that he was awoken at his home to a 3 A.M. robbery, saw an intruder, and started shooting. The robber was trying to take a briefcase as they fled, and the briefcase was left by the police on the lawn of his residence. Friske said it was likely the briefcase was simply left by police on the lawn. He was arrested and has been unable to make any public statement so far.

The media ran with a bogus, obviously-untrue story, because it hurt a conservative and they knew Friske was silenced by virtue of being in jail.

Friske is widely known in Lansing to never drink alcohol, and is known as a soft spoken, pleasant, and upstanding legislator. The idea that he would be drunkenly paying a hooker at 3 A.M. and then shooting her in the street is completely out of character.

Here are left-wing fake news disinformation outlets that are quietly changing their story: Detroit Free Press, MLive, Bridge Magazine, Detroit News.

But the damage was done. The smear has been made. The narrative has been set. Friske, unable to offer any other side to the story because he was being held without bail, has been unable to say anything while the media spun these lies against him.

The lies started with unreliable and dishonest MIRS News, which is a Capitol-focused blog whose audience is almost exclusively legislators, quoted anonymous sources as saying the Friske incident involved a stripper.

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Viral Story About Bogus Viral Story Was Also Bogus

Corey Harris attracted widespread news coverage—including from Reason—when a video showed him behind the wheel during a court hearing about a suspended license. Except he never had a license at all.

The topsy-turvy legal odyssey concerning a Michigan man’s driving privileges, which has captivated the nation, took another turn yesterday when he reappeared in court not long after a video showed him behind the wheel of a car while he Zoomed into a hearing that was allegedly for driving with a suspended license charge.

“This is for driving on a license suspended,” said Judge J. Cedric Simpson of the 14A District Court in Washtenaw County on May 15. “That is correct, your honor,” a public defender replied.

It turns out that was not, in fact, correct. At least not in the literal sense, because the defendant, Corey Harris, apparently never had a license to begin with.

“He has never had a license, ever,” Simpson said Wednesday. “And has never had a license in any of the other 49 states or commonwealths that make up this country.”

That revelation is just the latest twist in a story that has attracted massive national coverage and had more loops than a Six Flags death wish. The initial viral narrative—that Harris had a suspended license—was covered in outlets from USA Today to The Washington Post to Fox News, CNN, NBC, and on.

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When a North Carolina Colonel Shot This Utility Worker, Journalists Suggested His Victim Was a Spy

At first glance, the killing of Ramzan Daraev was a senseless tragedy. Daraev was taking photographs of a telephone pole in Carthage, North Carolina, on May 3 for his utility company job. A U.S. Army special operations colonel who lives on that street accused Daraev of trespassing; the confrontation ended with the colonel shooting Daraev dead.

Journalists smelled a more sensational story. Daraev, it turns out, was an immigrant from Chechnya, a Muslim-majority region of Russia that has a history of conflict with the Russian government. Fox News reporters and a conservative social media personality falsely called Daraev an illegal alien, both implying that Daraev was a Russian spy.

Although the investigation is ongoing and it’s unclear whether the colonel or Daraev was to blame for escalating the fight, there’s no evidence that Daraev was connected to any foreign scheme.

The story is a perfect storm of anti-immigrant panic and national security paranoia. Because the incident involved a U.S. soldier and a foreigner—one who fled from a rival government, to boot—journalists were quick to assume that the foreigner had it coming. And they projected an action-movie fantasy to explain why.

The confrontation began while Daraev and a coworker were “performing pole surveys as part of an ongoing engineering design project for deploying fiber infrastructure,” his employer, Utilities One, later confirmed. An unnamed colonel, who is stationed at nearby Fort Liberty, was alarmed by two men with cameras outside of his house.

“They are talking to each other on the property line right now, and they are obviously having a difficult time communicating,” his wife told police, laughing a little, according to audio of her 911 call released by The Fayetteville Observer. “My husband’s just yelling to me to ‘call the police, call the police.'”

Then something went wrong. The colonel’s wife called the police again a few minutes later, screaming that she needed a rifle. “This person is from Chechnya. He came up on our property line. My kids are in the backyard. He’s taking pictures of our property. My husband, he’s military,” she said. “He’s trained and he knows what he’s doing, but I really need some police presence here.”

Soon after, Daraev was dead. He was shot in the face, the hand, and the back, according to a petition by the Daraev family. The sheriff’s department found Daraev’s partner, Adsalam Dzhankutov, nearby.

It would appear to be a common misunderstanding, turned violent. Thieves have pretended to be utility workers in the past and jumpy homeowners have shot real utility workers mistaken for intruders. But three weeks later, Fox News picked up the story, turning a local incident into a “mysterious shooting” that “raises questions” about national security.

“U.S. Special Operations soldiers around the country have experienced strange interactions in recent years that they say involve suspicious surveillance of them and their families,” national security reporter Jennifer Griffin and producer Liz Friden wrote. “Many believe that U.S. military bases have become an increasing target of foreign probes.”

Griffin and Friden conceded that the shooting “could have been a case of mistaken identity,” then quickly emphasized that Daraev and Dzhankutov had “cell phones with Russian language contacts.” (In other words, they still talked to their friends and family back home.) “Sources tell Fox News that ‘power company employment is often a cover for status/action’ that U.S. intelligence agents use for surveillance of foreign targets overseas,” they added.

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The Viral Story About a Defendant Driving With a Suspended License Was Fake News

A Michigan man swept the internet last week after a viral video showed him attending a court hearing via Zoom after he appeared to park his car. That quickly became a national story.

Should it have been?

The footage, which first made the rounds on social media, showed Corey Harris calling into a hearing before Judge J. Cedric Simpson of the Washtenaw County District Court. “I’m looking at his record. He doesn’t have a license,” Simpson says about a minute into the hearing. “He’s suspended and he’s just driving….I don’t even know why he would do that.” Harris’ bond was promptly revoked and he was ordered to turn himself in to the local jail.

Neither of those repercussions would have anywhere near the lasting impact that the forthcoming news cycle did, which was deemed a significant enough event to merit coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, NBC, BBC, USA Today, and the New York Post, among other outlets. 

It turns out all those stories, however, were based on a falsehood. Harris’ license had been reinstated years prior and was only registering as suspended due to a clerical error. As of this writing, there has been no spate of additional articles, corrections, or a reinvigorated news cycle based around this information, because the truth here doesn’t lend itself to virality and engagement.

That’s a good indication that this never should have been a national story to begin with, which would be true even if Harris had been driving on a suspended license. A man in Michigan driving allegedly when he wasn’t supposed to is not newsworthy enough to deserve coverage in the most influential outlets in the U.S. (and beyond). Good for a social media laugh? Sure. Justifying its own news cycle? No.

That idea may seem weird in a media landscape where social media virality has for several years been seen as a metric for measuring newsworthiness. What that means in practice, though, is that some of the largest publications in the world—across the political spectrum—routinely blow up small stories that are of no import to society, simply because they may be good for clicks and shares. But while those stories may offer little to no benefit to readers, they do have real impacts on the people at the center of them, like Harris, because the internet never dies.

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Media spreads false claim that Tucker Carlson launched a show on Russian TV

Multiple media outlets have been criticized after they spread a false claim that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson had launched a new show on Russian television. 

In response to a Newsweek article published on the topic, originally claiming that Carlson was working with Rossiya 24 on a show, Tucker Carlson Network investor Neil Patel wrote, “The Tucker Carlson Network has not done any deals with state media in any country.  Whoever is currently pretending to be the old Newsweek brand would know that if they had checked with us before printing like news companies are supposed to do.” 

The “show” in question is state-owned Rossiya 24 pulling footage from Carlson’s YouTube page and airing that on television translated to Russian. 

Newsweek originally wrote that a Russian paper “said that the show is part of a joint project with Carlson TV, in which he will interview figures and politicians who have “alternative views to the mainstream.”

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New NPR CEO Gave Ted Talk Asserting “Truth” is a “Distraction”

New NPR CEO Katherine Maher gave a Ted Talk during which she asserted that “truth” is a “distraction” which is “getting in the way of getting things done.”

Calls are growing for NPR to have its government funding withdrawn after a series of tweets by Maher were uncovered in which she supported far-left causes, including endorsing racial reparations and making claims that the planet is “burning.”

But the content of the Ted Talk she gave is raising even more eyebrows.

Maher ludicrously suggested during the speech that far-left Wikipedia had a model “which actually works really well” in determining “what the truth really is.”

Acknowledging that Wikipedia writers are “not focused on the truth, they’re focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now,” Maher suggested the “truth” was not a priority.

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