Which interiewer of @BillAdairDuke will be the first to ask him why his claim of an explosion in political falsehoods isn't borne out by the fact checker he created, @PolitiFact? #PolitiFactThis

How Anti-Gun Media Turns Fact-Checking Into Fiction bearingarms.com/matthew-hoy/…

Pressley claims that black children have “underfunded schools” because America is “designed to exclude, to exploit, and to harm black people.” IN FACT, school districts with large portions of black students spend about the same amount per student as other districts but have worse outcomes that are associated with leftist policies and mindsets. Here are the specifics: • Across a broad range of measures, the average educational outcomes of black and Hispanic students are far below that of whites and Asians. • A common explanation for such disparities is that schools with high proportions of minority students receive less funding per student than other schools, an allegation that has been made by Elizabeth Warren, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Education Week, NPR, and Bernie Sanders. • Those claims are based on studies that exclude federal education funding, which flows overwhelmingly to schools in low-income areas. However, the authors of these studies bury that fact in their publications, thus misleading people who don’t carefully read them. • In contrast, wide-ranging studies that include all sources of funding have found that for the past 50 years, school districts with large portions of minority students spend about the same amount per student as other districts, including analyses conducted by the left-leaning Urban Institute, the U.S. Department of Education, PhD economist Derek Neal from the University of Chicago, the conservative Heritage Foundation, and the center/left Brookings Institution. • Contrary to racist views that minority children are intellectually inferior or that their parents are to blame for their poor performance, empirical facts show that students of all races and backgrounds can and do excel — if they have competent schooling. • Public K–12 schools are mainly run by local governments, and Democrats have dominated the local governments of minority communities for decades. • In institutions that are dominated by Democrats, the doctrines of leftism are treated as conventional wisdom and righteous causes, including socialism, intersectionality, extreme environmentalism, sexual licentiousness, and negative views of the police. • Schools run by leftists devote less time to teaching practical skills because curriculums are packed with progressive priorities like critical race theory, social justice, environmentalism, and sexual instruction. • Schools run by leftists instill a victim mentality in students, which is a defining element of intersectionality and is associated with weak self-control and less ability to persist in challenging tasks. • Schools run by leftists have lax disciplinary standards that allow unruly students to disrupt the learning of the entire classroom. • Schools run by leftists place the demands of teachers’ unions — which are a major source of funding to Democrats — over the desires of parents and the welfare of students. • In 2020, the education research group Brightbeam compared student outcomes in the 12 most progressive and 12 most conservative U.S. cities and found that students in progressive and conservative cities “have roughly the same proficiency rates,” but black and Hispanic “students in America’s most progressive cities face greater racial inequity in achievement and graduation rates than students living in the nation’s most conservative cities, even though per-student “spending is actually much higher in most progressive cities.” • The study, conducted by Brightbeam while Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, was on their board, also found that “there are U.S. cities where little to no” racial “gaps exist,” and “those cities happen to be conservative.” Because association does not prove causation, these facts cannot determine if the leftist doctrines embraced by Pressley caused these outcomes, but they open the door to this possibility. Hyperlinks to the sources of all the facts above are available at justfactsdaily.com/in-fact/n…

That was quick. My interview with the inestimable @EdMorrissey is already up. With a couple of shoutouts to Bryan White over @ZebraFactCheck. Check it out (and buy my book)! hotair.com/podcasts/the-ed-m… Video version here: youtube.com/watch?v=mG566_l3…

Thank you @Grok, for making the Dali Parton a reality.

I have spent months writing to the you, the Manhattan borough historian, and the mayor to honor Audrey Munson ("Civic Fame" & "Miss Manhattan"). It is 35 years overdue. She's the "crown jewel" (see below), but her name is not mentioned. Nothing? a856-centre360.nyc.gov/

Mamdani claims that ICE “should be abolished” and does “nothing to serve the interests of public safety.” IN FACT, ICE protects the lives and livelihoods of Americans by removing aliens who have murdered thousands of people, committed millions of crimes, and financially burden the nation. Here are the specifics: • Immigration laws contain numerical limits and quality standards to ensure that immigrants assimilate and benefit the people of the U.S. by being law-abiding, self-sufficient, productive members of society who don’t have totalitarian views. • Politicians, especially Democrats like Biden and Obama, have consistently neglected or broken those safeguards by letting millions of illegal aliens into the U.S. with little or no vetting and giving them incentives to come and stay. • They have done that by allowing millions of gotaways to penetrate the U.S. border, a figure that grew by 6.1 times under Biden. • They have done that by letting millions of temporary visitors overstay their visas while making them effectively immune from deportation unless they commit crimes, as Obama and Biden did. • They have done that by paroling millions of inadmissible immigrants into the U.S. by twisting a provision of federal law that allows for such entries “only” on a “temporary” “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” as Biden did en masse. • They have done that by abusing “Temporary Protected Status” to allow immigrants to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. • They have done that by trying to place four-to-five million illegal immigrants above the law by shielding them from deportation, giving them work authorizations, forcing states to issue them drivers licenses, and making them eligible for an array of government programs like Social Security and Medicare, as Obama attempted to do. • They have done that by giving a wide array of other taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants and fighting Republican attempts to curb these handouts. • They have done that by flouting the federal law that prohibits foreigners from immigrating to the U.S. if they are “likely at any time to become a public charge,” or burden to taxpayers. • They have done that by impeding ICE from fulfilling its core duty of removing criminals from the U.S. interior, a figure that fell by 53%under Biden. • They have done that by creating sanctuary cities, counties, and states that shield arrested illegal immigrants from deportation by refusing to turn them over to federal immigration authorities for deportation, enabling them to commit murders and other crimes in the United States. • Thus, aliens have committed an average of at least 600 homicides per year in the U.S. for decades, far above the number of their murder victims who make national news like Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin. • Beyond murder, DHS estimated in 2012 that about “900,000 arrests of aliens for crimes occur every year,” and “1.94 million removable criminal aliens are in the United States today.” • Likewise, DHS reported in 2024 that “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories” known to ICE were in the United States, including 13,376 aliens convicted of homicide and another 1,896 currently charged with homicide. Hyperlinks to the sources of all the facts above are available at justfactsdaily.com/in-fact/n…

I've got an article slated to run tomorrow on Bearing Arms that talks about just this sort of thing. Same thing happened a few years ago at Poynter.org on "How to Cover Gun Violence" seminar was oddly one-sided. This is SOP. Buy my book! amazon.com/Fact-Checking-Fra…

Anonymous cowards have so much swagger.... PUT A NAME ON IT.

Terrific example (last of a string) of arguing without the benefit of supporting evidence.

Our horrible media: Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough asks Maine Democratic senate candidate Graham Platner about his "so-called scandals." Way to pitch those softballs.

IN FACT, Jayapal supports policies that have fueled the wealth gap by impoverishing working Americans, and her plans could make them poorer. Here are the specifics: • She supports government money printing, which is the primary driver of inflation and expands the wealth of current asset holders while making homes, stocks, and other investments less affordable for everyone else. • She supported the American Rescue Plan, which stoked the worst inflation in 40 years with $1.9 trillion in deficit spending mainly for social welfare programs and bailouts for state and local governments and private union pension funds. • She supported Covid-19 lockdowns that swept away more than 20 million jobs, fueled inflation, and caused multitudes of deaths through missed medical care, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, school closures, and other collateral damages. • She supports expanding government social programs that reduce incentives to work and the ability to save. • She supports pervasive government regulations that raise the costs of living and make it difficult for small businesses to compete with major corporations. • She supports mass illegal immigration that reduces the wages of low-income workers and decreases the prices of services that high-income people purchase, like maids, nannies, landscapers, and restaurant meals. • She supports green energy mandates that increase the costs of energy and virtually everything else. • She supports government-mandated employee benefits that reduce workers’ wages. • She supports monopoly powers for unions that raise taxes and consumer prices. • She supports liberal ethics about sex, which create household fragmentation that dilutes workers’ incomes and is strongly associated with poverty. • She supports increases in K–12 education spending, which raise taxes while failing to substantially improve student achievement. • She supports canceling student loans, which raises the costs of college and disproportionately benefits higher income people. • She supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15, which will destroy jobs, spur inflation, and give 81% of the resultant salary increases to families above the poverty line while raising the average income of families below the poverty line by about 1%. Wealth is not a fixed pie, and the rich getting richer doesn’t necessarily mean the poor get poorer. Nevertheless, Jayapal and her fellow progressives often complain about wealth inequality without acknowledging that the only span in modern history in which it declined was the three pre-Covid years of Trump’s first term. In this period, real median family wealth rose 3% for whites, 33% for blacks, and 65% for Hispanics. Hyperlinks to the sources of all the facts above are available at justfactsdaily.com/in-fact/n…

I like this Damin kid.

This morning's "defenses" of Quinn Slobodian are trying to paint the misquotations as isolated incidents and accusing me of focusing on narrow technicalities while ignoring his larger argument. False. I actually wrote a methodical rebuttal of his larger argument. You can still read it here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… It looks at the manipulated quotes in depth, explores their connection to the argument he was making, documents multiple errors of fact and interpretation with that argument, introduces new evidence that he ignored, and offers an alternative and better-sourced explanation for the historical events he was attempting to describe. I also submitted this article to Contemporary European History, the journal where Slobodian committed some of his worst quote-edits, back in 2020 as part of my attempt to get them corrected. I got an instant desk rejection, followed by assurances from the editor that Slobodian's paper had passed "rigorous" peer review (in fact it had not - CEH's own referee recommended rejection of his piece over the quote edits about a year earlier, and was overruled by the journal). Around the same time that I submitted my rebuttal piece, Slobodian was also named co-editor of CEH. And that, my friends, is how academic corruption works in the real world.

It's small consolation but the result is the continued decline in the once respected journals on which we used to rely for accuracy while more and more people begin to do the kind of digging that expands our understanding. Maybe the next generation will learn a lesson.

If you want to know why I am doggedly persistent - and even a bit prickly - about these sorts of things, there is your answer. I almost always try to get a correction to a problem that I find in other people's research by first working behind the scenes and through the proper channels before going public with an expose. But those official channels seldom work as advertised. And more often than not, the journal or publisher just circles the wagons to protect the shoddy research, no matter the evidence. Going public then becomes the only option.

Here's something many people don't know about me - Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum. Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public. Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article. Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation." Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.