CNN: False! Then CNN: Well, Trump Was Right, But Still a Meanie

“Fact checkers.” You can’t live with ’em, you can’t live…with them, actually. They are worse than useless. 

By now we all know, as unfortunately many still-naive Americans don’t–that “fact checking” means nothing more than “Narrative™ policing.” Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, but at all times the goal is not to illuminate and provide context, but to sell a Narrative™ that is intended to supplant reality instead of buttress it.  

President Trump was spot-on about the $8 million wasted on absurd transgender mouse experiments. The NIH, under Biden, threw taxpayer dollars at pointless projects like studying testosterone’s impact on mice and hormone therapy’s effect on HIV vaccines. CNN tried to dismiss…

— DOGEai (@dogeai_gov) March 5, 2025

The latest example of this is CNN’s immediate publication of a “fact check” disputing Donald Trump’s amusing/shocking example of government waste and ideological capture: spending money to create transgender mice. 

The first version of their “fact check” claimed that Trump was fibbing for effect. There was no money spent to trans the mice because, well, that would be absurd. Who would do that? Can’t be true. 

Liar, liar, pants on fire!

But, of course, it is true, and they got hammered for claiming otherwise. And because CNN is on its last legs and has no credibility left to spare, they were forced to backtrack a bit and admit that, well, yes, we did spend money to trans the mice, but that is a good thing. 

They have so little time left before they collapse that they had to move from “it isn’t happening” to “it’s a good thing,” skipping over the intervening steps of hemming and hawing about rarity. 

Transing mice saves lives is the new hotness, replacing the “it’s absurd to say that the government is transing mice!”

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post had a similar “fact check” of President Trump’s statement that hundreds of thousands of federal employees don’t show up for work. 

Ann Althouse has an excellent rebuttal for Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler’s “fact check” on Trump’s claim about workers “not showing up for work.” https://t.co/kPfsn3vNPY

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) March 6, 2025

Kessler, who is a very smart man who obviously knows that he is bulls**tiing, claimed that Trump was lying. Only his “fact check” proved that Trump was NOT lying, but he hid the numbers to make it seem as if Trump were. 

Here is Ann Althouse’s critique, which is a model of clarity:

I’m reading Glenn Kessler’s “Fact-checking 26 suspect claims in Trump’s address to Congress/President makes false claims about border crossings, regulations, the economy, inflation and many other issues” (free-access link).

Kessler explains his judgment of falsity like this:

This is false. Trump appears to equate teleworking with not showing up for work. But he often uses inflated numbers for how many federal workers work from home. The White House budget office reported in August that 54 percent of federal employees “worked fully on-site, as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours,” while just 10 percent worked only from their homes. Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office reported in April that 22 percent of federal employees usually teleworked — compared to 25 percent of private sector employees.

There are 2 problems with this fact check.

First, the numbers Kessler gives do not undermine the assertion that there are hundreds of thousands who don’t come into work. There are something like 2.1 million federal employees (if you leave out the military and the postal service). Even if we restrict ourselves to the 10% who work only from home, there are over 200,000. If you add in the people who telework most of the time, that’s another 400,000+. Kessler makes it look as though his numbers are powerful, but they support Trump! 

Second — and harder to notice — there’s a quibble about the meaning of “not… showing up to work.”

Trump is using the expression to mean not coming into the workplace. Kessler may want to argue for the industriousness of the workers: They’re showing up to work at home! Fine, make your argument for respecting working from home. But don’t use the “false” rating for this semantics disagreement. Clearly call attention to it for exactly what it is, and don’t mix it up with those numbers you’re bandying about. It has nothing to do with the numbers!

Althouse doesn’t even like Trump’s characterization of working from home as “not showing up for work,” but even she knows that her policy disagreement or dislike of Trump’s characterization does not make his claim FALSE. Trump’s policy choice may be good or bad, depending on your assumptions, but the raw numbers show him to be right. 

By the way, you are missing out if you don’t follow Ann on X or her blog. She is smart. 

Narrative policing is fundamentally different than “fact checking.” It is all about ensuring you take the spin, have the right attitudes, share the same bubble, and feel smug at the same time as everybody else in the elite. 

This is more fake news from Reuters based on anonymous sources who have no idea what they are talking about.

The truth: no decision has been made at this time. pic.twitter.com/djf0CjTfiD

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 6, 2025

The “it’s not true” to “it’s a good thing” journey is not a bug or an admission of failure, but a brainwashing technique. A sort of boiling the frog approach to soften the blow of some fact that is absurd and offensive, and acclimate people to the idea, and get them to embrace it finally. 

Unfortunately, if people like the bubble they are in, it works.