Another week, another Republican hoax. Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post pushed a story with a blaring frontpage headline "VETS KICKED OUT FOR MIGRANTS: Outrage as upscale hotels tell 20 homeless veterans to leave." It was based on an unverified claim from the head of a veteran's nonprofit, and whether the Post bothered to do even the most minimal fact checking on any of those claims is, ahem, unknown.
The story was everywhere in conservative circles. Fox News screamed about it, of course, with a Republican state assemblyman calling it a "slap in the face to veterans" who are "being cast aside to allow for asylum seekers to come here." The story was picked up by all of the conservative outlets you can think of but are embarrassed to know about, and we ain't linking them here.
CNN's Jake Tapper Twitter-boosted the story. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made the burping claim that the Biden team was only talking about veterans being hurt by Republican debt limit hostage-taking to "distract you" from stories like the Post's.
House Republicans of course held a four-flag news conference about the claims, multi-flagged news conferences being the only duty House Republicans can still crawl out of bed for on most days. Oh, how Republicans were mad.
Surprise! Mere days later, the Post had to roll back their scoop because, yep, the whole thing was a very crude hoax. The Post and that state assemblyman mentioned above got rolled good and hard by a veterans advocate and nonprofit group head who made it up. She now looks to have forged the only physical evidence she could offer to back up her charges. When finally confronted about all the discrepancies, she admitted it didn't happen.
Not that the Post is going to be gracious in admitting they fell for it, mind you. "The bizarre twist in New York’s mounting migrant debacle came to light when management at the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh denied that veterans associated with YIT ever stayed there," pouts Rupert Murdoch's birdcage liner. It's still a "mounting migrant debacle," damn it! Just because not a word of it was true doesn't mean it’s not!
The Times Union broke the hoax wide open, and credit should be given to Republican state assemblyman Brian Maher for confronting the nonprofit head when it became clear her story wasn't adding up. The hotel that supposedly carried out these evictions, according to local veteran's nonprofit head Sharon Toney-Finch, had no record of dealing with her. The alleged "receipt" she presented to Maher as proof that her nonprofit was paying for the veterans' housing had, Maher began to suspect, signs of digital manipulation.
It was he who finally confronted Toney-Finch about her evidence after a week of loudly introducing new legislation based on those false claims, an appearance on Fox News boosting the claims, and a feting of the nonprofit head in the state legislature. It appears that a long-standing working relationship between the two was the reason behind his initial gullibility, but when the story began to unravel and his source admitted the hoax, he did two things that no national Republican lawmaker or party official may have done in the last decade:
1. He went to the press with the new evidence he had proving the hoax false.
2. He stopped believing it and instead publicly distanced himself from it.
It is impossible to imagine Rep. Jim Jordan, for example, reversing course during one of his countless pseudo-investigations after learning that one of his star witnesses was actually six woodchucks in a trenchcoat. Rep. James Comer's entire persona consists of making bizarre and shocking claims based on no evidence at all, merely citing a general aura of suspicion that something something Joe Biden something.
Republican Rep. Mike Lawler held a news conference bellowing about this latest hoax earlier this week, but in the wake of the whole farce being exposed he is so far unwilling to address it, aside from perhaps deleting tweets that now make him look like a chump.
And the Murdoch empire itself, from the New York Post to Fox "News" to Fox "Business," is more likely to chew its arms off than admit they've lied to their audience. If Maher didn't make a point of very publicly scuttling the hoax himself, the Post would likely never have bothered addressing it.
Making up false stories to demonize immigrants and conservatism's other enemies is what Fox and the Post do on a daily basis. That is the whole point. We are told of "crises" at the border, one that appears to coincide uncannily with national election cycles. We are told that entire cities are "no-go zones" under the control of sharia law, or antifa, or Black Lives Matter advocates.
It is not that President Joe Biden is an opponent of conservative priorities or of white supremacism; he is "seemingly pushing us toward a race war," say Fox News hosts.
It's not that the Murdoch empire is content only to push hoaxes. Much of the time, their network segments or front-page headlines are the hoaxes.
As for House Republicans, this has been just another week for them. The party's embrace of flat-out hoax is embodied by James Comer's every hearing, Jordan's every shrieking supposed "defense" of Trump, and every third syllable that comes out of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's mouth. The Post getting caught peddling a hoax without doing proper due diligence (like, for example, calling up the hotel and asking whether they had any record of such a thing happening) is unusual only in that on this occasion the error was so egregious they likely had to retract the story or face another Dominion-style defamation lawsuit from the hotel's ownership.
On most occasions, conservative hoaxes are so thinly premised that there's nothing to even rebut. It's woodchucks and trenchcoats all the way down.
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