January 2025 may be remembered as the month fact-checkers took their last breath — and despite all the caterwauling from Democrats and legacy media, that’s a good thing.
President Joe Biden denounced its demise during his brief farewell speech to the nation Wednesday night.
"Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit," Biden said.
"We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power."
That statement was no doubt prompted by Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision last week to no longer fact-check entries made by users of his platforms, and that may have spelled the end of media fact-checking — and not a moment too soon.
Zuckerberg announced that rather than fact-checking users’ posts, Facebook would employ a "Community Notes" system similar to the one used by Twitter/X.
It permits other X users to collaborate and add helpful notes to posts that would otherwise be misleading.
No one is exempt from Community Notes. When President Biden posted "No one is above the law," for example, Community Notes added context — namely that he’d placed his son Hunter "above the law" with a blanket pardon.
Zuckerberg came under fire for dropping fact-checking, but it turned out that Facebook wasn’t the real fact-checker. They were merely taking orders from government — orders that came all the way up from the White House, apparently.
He appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and said that "these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse," and they were even ordered to censor memes, indicating that even humor and satire were off-limits.
"It was brutal," Zuckerberg added. “It was brutal."
But it wasn’t just the Biden administration.
Government censorship was employed during the first Trump administration also, but with a difference — it was used at that time against the sitting president rather than to prop him up.
During the closing months of the 2020 election, the New York Post ran a series of exclusive stories centered on the damaging information discovered on a laptop computer owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Government agents ordered both Facebook and Twitter to censor any posts that discussed or promoted the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it "Russian disinformation," despite the fact that the FBI had that information in its possession for years.
What should have been the ultimate "October surprise" was swept under the rug, changing the course of the 2020 election.
Still, the left continues trying to rewrite history, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., She posted this memorial to her X account on Jan. 6:
"Four years ago, the electoral vote certification was interrupted by a violent mob. Police officers were injured and killed. Our democracy hung in the balance. I knew we had to do our duty and complete the count --- and in the early hours of January 7th, we did."
Without surprise, neither government nor legacy media fact-checkers corrected her, but Community Notes added context to her post.
"No officers were killed," the notes began.
"The medical examiner found Sicknick died of natural causes which means 'a disease alone causes death. If death is hastened by an injury, the manner of death is not considered natural.' Four other officers committed suicide days to months later."
No one, especially an arm of the government, can be the final arbiter of the truth.
And when they attempt to distort our own history, it becomes even more egregious.
President Ronald Reagan remarked on the importance of retaining our history during his own farewell address to the nation 36 years ago.
"If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are," he said. "I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."
Accordingly, we can’t allow others to distort the history of the great American experiment or permit the state to regulate what and how we think, through any means, including the use of fact-checkers .
And for that reason, freedom of expression is the most essential characteristic of a free society.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and a Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
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