“Invasion of the Fact-Checkers” by Jacob Siegel of Tablet magazine.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers

Siegel takes us through the history of fact-checking, and how it's devolved from an attempt to ensure news sources were trustworthy to what it’s become today:

“An institutional fixture with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding behind it, along with battalions of NGOs and formerly broke journalistic authorities who are more than happy to cash fat checks and proclaim that America’s ruling bureaucrats at the FDA, the CDC, the FBI, the CIA, the Fed—and the entire alphabet soup of government agencies—along with the ruling Democratic Party, are never wrong about anything, at least nothing important.”

He offers multiple examples (most of which will be familiar to readers of this newsletter) of times when the self-proclaimed “fact-checkers,” with their “tin badges and unearned air of authority,” declared stories that challenged Democrat narratives to be false, only to have them later revealed to be true – although the “fact-checkers” seldom outright admit that. Hunter’s laptop is only the tip of the crack pipe that these people must be smoking.

He also goes into the specific ways in which these “fact-checkers” operate to protect their masters, including a tactic I wrote about recently: the logical fallacy of the “appeal to authority,” or quoting cherry-picked alleged “experts” as if their opinions were objective fact.

This “partisan plot against reality,” as Siegel puts it, is necessary to protect “progressive” narratives because if they didn’t have an excuse to censor “misinformation” (usually, facts that disprove their hooey), everyone with any sense would see how ludicrous leftists ideas are, from defunding the police to giving free crack pipes to addicts to teaching kindergartners racism and graphic sex lessons to claiming men can actually become women just by saying they are. It’s such obvious insanity that when people see it clearly, they revolt. Even parents in ultra-liberal San Francisco voted out their “woke” school board members in a landslide.

Recently, I’ve seen commenters on my sites complain about why we even bother writing about this stuff. They despair that it won’t make any difference. But it already is. If enough people keep pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, or that the guy in a woman’s swimsuit is clearly a dude, it gives others courage to also speak up. And when truth reaches critical mass, it can no longer be denied, censored or bullied into silence by a tiny minority of radical fantasists.

Believe me, we deal with it every day. You’d be astounded how often our stories get labeled as “misinformation” by Big Tech and limited in their reach by Google, Facebook, etc. This despite the fact that my writers are diligent researchers who are scrupulous about getting details right, double-checking and citing sources for accuracy and making sure that quotes are verified and in context.

And if you think you can’t fight this, consider the following wonderful news: Mark “Bought the White House for Joe Biden” Zuckerberg thought that Facebook was so powerful that it could start censoring its own customers under the guise of “fact-checking misinformation.” After all, where else could they go? Turns out they could go to other social media sites, or spend their time more productively by working to elect Republicans.

The stock price of Facebook parent Meta Platforms recently took a tumble after it was reported that Facebook saw a drop of 500,000 daily active users, its first-ever quarterly decline. Keep arrogantly treating your users as if they’re a captive audience that you can freely abuse, and that trend will continue, as they flee to sites like Gab and MeWe that respect freedom of speech.

I’ve got one compound word for Facebook, Twitter and anyone who thinks it’s futile to keep exposing Big Tech's arrogance and censorship because they’re just too big to fail:

“MySpace.”

Anyone remember that? At one time, it was so big, it was the Blockbuster Video of the Internet. Now, it’s what Seth Meyers once called “the abandoned amusement park of the Internet.” If Facebook, Twitter, et al, think their biased “fact-checkers” will protect them from customer revolt, then that abandoned amusement park might soon become even larger. It can’t happen soon enough.