In a victory for Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense team, Judge Bruce Schroeder threw out the misdemeanor gun charge against him yesterday, stating that “it was unclear whether the rifle used qualified under the Wisconsin statute, and the prosecutors in the case chose not to press their case on the single misdemeanor count.”
Amusingly, back in August 2020, the “fact checkers” had preemptively assumed Kyle’s guilt on that charge in what is probably the billionth thing they’ve gotten wrong.
Here was Politifact’s Daniel Funke, who rated the claim that Kyle legally possessed his rifle without parental supervision “false.”
The entire article has since been debunked the the defense team – with the debunking confirmed with the Judge Schroeder’s decision to drop the charges. Yet, if you read the original article, the “correction” now begins with the following: “Judge Bruce Schroeder recently dismissed a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 against Kyle Rittenhouse. Readers asked us if this made the fact-check below invalid. We don’t think so. Here’s why.”
Yes, they really are that shameless.
PolitiFact botching the facts is seemingly the rule, not the exception. We’ve covered their easily debunked facts checks before many times on this website:
Before this botched fact check, Funke was behind what was before this the most embarrassing fact check to blow up in a fact checker’s face to date. Back in September, Funke attempted to fact check Biden being captured on video checking his watch during the dignified transfer ceremony for those we lost in the Kabul terror attack.
Funke claimed, wrongly, that Biden had only checked his watch once, and it was after the ceremony.
Two Gold Star fathers, Darin Hoover and Mark Schmitz who were eyewitnesses at the event, went on the record stating that they saw Biden repeatedly checking his watch during the ceremony and one of them says it was “the most disrespectful thing” he has “ever seen.” According to them, it didn’t just happen once, but thirteen times overall.
A third Gold Star parent, Shana Chappell, wrote in a Facebook post: “I watched you disrespect us all 5 different times by checking your watch!!! What the f*ck was so important that you had to keep looking at your watch????”
Eventually Funke changed his ruling from “partly false” to “missing context,” I suppose because he knew he had to issue some sort of correction but was too embarrassed to admit he was 100% wrong.
But such is standard among today’s “fact checkers.”
A personal favorite from Politifact is when they initially rated Obama’s claim “if you like you healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan” as “true,” only for them years later to reevaluate the claim, determining it to be the “lie of the year.”
Sure would’ve been nice if the “fact checkers” could’ve figured that out beforehand.
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros, Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
