Fake News Thread

Happy weekend all. :2wave:

I was thinking that it might be fun to start a thread dedicated to the ever popular "fake news."

Therefore, I dedicate this thread for the reporting of the various examples of "fake news" floating around the internetz.

I suppose I should establish some kind of understanding of what definition of "fake news" shall be applicable to this thread. I'll try to not complicate the focus.

If you find an example of some kind of blatant propaganda bull**** floating around, copy the link and share it here. Briefly explain why the link you shared is absolutely "fake news." Keep in mind that just because you do not want to believe it, doesn't necessarily qualify it as fake news. The responsibility of displaying WHY it's fake news, is upon the person posting the link. Belief, opinions, will carry no weight.

Ex: Post the link and then comment, "This link says "X." I can prove that it's fake news and here is my evidence." Short and sweet.

Things we all want to look at.

1. The leading headline. ex: "President Obama creates giant mudslide killing in Texas 7 with 20 still missing. Heavy GOP districts were targeted." A headline that does not directly reflect the actual facts on the ground is to be labeled and accepted as "fake." This needs to be shown in the post.

2. Note the source and see if we can establish the usual dot.com culprits and their frequency of creating midleading/fake news.

3. Note the political lean on the piece of "Fake news." Is it a rightwing propaganda outlet? Is it a leftwing propaganda outlet? It would be interesting to see if any particular party or ideology is more prone to assimilate the bull**** "fake news" type of propaganda. Just remember, regardless of the lean of the "fake news," you STILL have to show the evidence that it is, in fact, "fake news." We might even get a clearer understanding which kind of ideologies are more honest in their presentations. It can go 2 ways. What we are trying to avoid is labeling an information piece simply because it comes from the rightwing leaning outlets. (Or, leftwing leaning.)

4. Please do take advantage of the various fact check sites available throughout the internet. And, anyone who disagrees with a fact check sight, simply because it doesn't agree with them, must post evidence of it's shortcoming. Anytime, anyone, calls a recognized fact check site, (ie: Snopes, Politifact, FactChex, etc.,) "fake news," they will lose their debate by default. (Kinda like the Godwin's Law. :lamo) You have to PROVE it's fake news and you have to post facts, or checked facts, to make your argument. You can't just say, "Well, it's FOXNews, so we all know it's fake." (Or, CNN. or CBS, NBC, etc.)

If you can't find and post evidence of what you believe is true, then do us all a favor. Grab a beer, a bowl of popcorn, go sit in the corner and S.T.F.U. because nobody "in this thread" CARES what you believe.

Keep this thread in mind, if tomorrow, or next week, you run across some fake news. The thread will be sitting here available to use.

Have fun!

You can start by including every single anti-Trump article that you can find in the Mainstream Media including their talking potato heads, the non-Mainstream Media including THEIR talking potato heads, the entertainment media and every anti-Trump blog. Forget about Twitter. We already know that is manipulated by Twitter Corporate to only show anti-Trump stuff.

In any case, I would add a bit to the definition of "fake news".

1. Spin is fake.

2. Unnamed sources is fake.

So...y'all have fun, now.

Mycroft said:

You can start by including every single anti-Trump article that you can find in the Mainstream Media including their talking potato heads, the non-Mainstream Media including THEIR talking potato heads, the entertainment media and every anti-Trump blog. Forget about Twitter. We already know that is manipulated by Twitter Corporate to only show anti-Trump stuff.

In any case, I would add a bit to the definition of "fake news".

1. Spin is fake.

2. Unnamed sources is fake.

So...y'all have fun, now.

Click to expand...

So, what you just stated was that anything critical of President Trump from the MSM can automatically be considered, "fake news" right?

Wrong!!!

You have to debunk it with a "matter-of-factly" source. You cannot validate fake news with more fake news. That defeats the purpose.

Have fun!

(Scorekeeper, chalk one Pinocchio Nose up over there, on the right.)

Here is an article that will assist folks here in identifying fake news when you see it. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/dont-get-fooled-by-these-fake-news-sites/3/

Captain America said:

So, what you just stated was that anything critical of President Trump from the MSM can automatically be considered, "fake news" right?

Wrong!!!

You have to debunk it with a "matter-of-factly" source. You cannot validate fake news with more fake news. That defeats the purpose.

Have fun!

(Scorekeeper, chalk one Pinocchio Nose up over there, on the right.)

Click to expand...

There is no "matter-of-factly" source when the source is unnamed. When the news is an exercise in spin, speculation and innuendo there is no "matter-of-factly" source.

ALL of the anti-Trump "news" falls into those two categories...and is, therefore, fake news.

(keep your Nose)

Mycroft said:

There is no "matter-of-factly" source when the source is unnamed. When the news is an exercise in spin, speculation and innuendo there is no "matter-of-factly" source.

ALL of the anti-Trump "news" falls into those two categories...and is, therefore, fake news.

(keep your Nose)

Click to expand...

Please remember, your opinion doesn't mean doodly-squat in this particular thread.

Post facts, figures or sources or just go grab a beer and watch the grown-up's play.

Thank you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/us/trump-stephanie-clifford-stormy-daniels.html
Even thou NYT points out that Trump and his lawyers claim the stories false. These MSM think its fun to go ahead and run a story and just tell people its false inside the story. Knowing that just the headline itself is more damaging then the false story.

A website called Last Line of Defense (sounds patriotic doesn't it?) put this story out recently. It was picked up by a site called Police Times and probably several other sites.

Does it sound believable?

No? Why?

Yes? Why?

Black Alabama Running Back Loses Scholarship Over SICK Anti-Trump Outburst

And begin........

jdog21 said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/us/trump-stephanie-clifford-stormy-daniels.html
Even thou NYT points out that Trump and his lawyers claim the stories false. These MSM think its fun to go ahead and run a story and just tell people its false inside the story. Knowing that just the headline itself is more damaging then the false story.

Click to expand...

GREAT! Let's play....

Here we go....

A lawyer for President Trump orchestrated a $130,000 payment to a pornographic-film actress in October 2016 to prevent her from going public with claims of a consensual sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Did The Wall Street Journal, in fact, report this on Friday (today?) Fact or fake?

FACT --->> https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-...yment-for-adult-film-stars-silence-1515787678

Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, said on Friday that in a series of interviews with Ms. Clifford in August and October 2016, she told him she had an affair with Mr. Trump after meeting him at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament. She told him that Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, had agreed during the presidential campaign to pay her the $130,000 if she kept the relationship secret, Mr. Weisberg said, adding that Ms. Clifford had told him she was tempted to go public because the lawyer was late in making the payment and she feared he might back out of their agreement. Fact or Fake?

Undetermined: Until we have some sort of tangible evidence, recording, video, something, all I can do is take Jacob Weisberg's word at face value. I don't even know him. If anyone does find evidence of this, please bring it to this thread. I might reconsider.

She forwarded Mr. Weisberg a draft amendment to the original agreement in which the parties were referred to by pseudonyms. Mr. Weisberg shared it with The Times.

According to the draft, Ms. Clifford was referred to as “Peggy Peterson” and was represented by a lawyer named Keith Davidson. On the other end of the negotiations were other parties referred to as “David Dennison” and “David Delucia.” Ms. Clifford promised to send Mr. Weisberg the original paperwork. But shortly after the text message exchange, Ms. Clifford stopped responding. Mr. Weisberg said that his conversations with the actress were on the record but that he was not prepared to write the story without her consent.

Fact or fake?

I think I have seen enough. All I can do is go with my gut on this one. Too many pseudonyms, he said's, she said's. For every accusation I have read there is an equal denial. One source seems no more credible than the other. What do I think? I figure the whore actually did get paid off to keep her trap shut. But the word of a whore is no better than the word of a lawyer to me. Two lies don't make a truth no more than two truths make a lie.

Until more hard evidence is presented, I look upon this as:

FAKE NEWS

CNN on Friday corrected an erroneous report that Donald Trump Jr. had received advance notice from the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks about a trove of hacked documents that it planned to release during last year’s presidential campaign.

In fact, the email to Mr. Trump was sent a day after the documents, stolen from the Democratic National Committee, were made available to the general public. The correction undercut the main thrust of CNN’s story, which had been seized on by critics of President Trump as evidence of coordination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.

It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/business/media/cnn-correction-donald-trump-jr.html

Click to expand...

CNN's story could be considered as fake news at the time it was broadcast / published, as it was factual that the email to Donald Trump Jr. from WikiLeaks "In fact, the email to Mr. Trump was sent a day after the documents . . . . were made available to the general public."

However, it must also be said that CNN issued a correction, after the idea was already in the minds of the CNN viewers / readers, and the damage (objective) was already done.

Captain America said:

GREAT! Let's play....

Here we go....

A lawyer for President Trump orchestrated a $130,000 payment to a pornographic-film actress in October 2016 to prevent her from going public with claims of a consensual sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Did The Wall Street Journal, in fact, report this on Friday (today?) Fact or fake?

FACT --->> https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-...yment-for-adult-film-stars-silence-1515787678

Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, said on Friday that in a series of interviews with Ms. Clifford in August and October 2016, she told him she had an affair with Mr. Trump after meeting him at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament. She told him that Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, had agreed during the presidential campaign to pay her the $130,000 if she kept the relationship secret, Mr. Weisberg said, adding that Ms. Clifford had told him she was tempted to go public because the lawyer was late in making the payment and she feared he might back out of their agreement. Fact or Fake?

Undetermined: Until we have some sort of tangible evidence, recording, video, something, all I can do is take Jacob Weisberg's word at face value. I don't even know him. If anyone does find evidence of this, please bring it to this thread. I might reconsider.

She forwarded Mr. Weisberg a draft amendment to the original agreement in which the parties were referred to by pseudonyms. Mr. Weisberg shared it with The Times.

According to the draft, Ms. Clifford was referred to as “Peggy Peterson” and was represented by a lawyer named Keith Davidson. On the other end of the negotiations were other parties referred to as “David Dennison” and “David Delucia.” Ms. Clifford promised to send Mr. Weisberg the original paperwork. But shortly after the text message exchange, Ms. Clifford stopped responding. Mr. Weisberg said that his conversations with the actress were on the record but that he was not prepared to write the story without her consent.

Fact or fake?

I think I have seen enough. All I can do is go with my gut on this one. Too many pseudonyms, he said's, she said's. For every accusation I have read there is an equal denial. One source seems no more credible than the other. What do I think? I figure the whore actually did get paid off to keep her trap shut. But the word of a whore is no better than the word of a lawyer to me. Two lies don't make a truth no more than two truths make a lie.

Until more hard evidence is presented, I look upon this as:

FAKE NEWS

Click to expand...

Well, according to Steve Bannon, Trump has made deals like this with 100 women. Maybe she’s in that group?

December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Woellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Woellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”

The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.

The problem? The central scandalous claims of Woellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”

Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.

[h=2]January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball[/h]On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.

[h=2]January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’[/h]Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.


To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.

[h=2]January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy[/h]On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”

Muslim Doctor Refuses To Save A Christian Man’s Life On Flight From New York To Las Vegas


Snopes declared the story FALSE.

The story is a fabrication, but was shared 24,000 times on Facebook within five days. We could find no corroboration of any incident even similar to the one described by Patriot United.
https://www.snopes.com/muslim-doctor-christian/

[h=2]January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter[/h]During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”


This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.


How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.)

“Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).


The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.


Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.

[h=2]January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department[/h]On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.


The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.


There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).


More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.


As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.

[h=2]January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair[/h]On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.


The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.

"We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out." - Jestin Coler, publisher of fake news sites

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltec...f-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs


Couldn't help myself. :mrgreen:

[h=2]January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake[/h]Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.


Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.

[h=2]January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie[/h]On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”


Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares).Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.


The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.


There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.

Surprised. Even Fox gets it wrong.

I have to admit, I never knew there was just so much fake news to chose from!

[h=2]February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico[/h]On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”


Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.


Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook;Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC Newsposted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.

[h=2]February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions[/h]Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.


A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.


At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.


In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”

[h=2]February 2: Renaming Black History Month[/h]At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.


The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.

[h=2]February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures[/h]On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm bytweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.


The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).


Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).


The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.


If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)


As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.


The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.


As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”