As I've previously addressed in this newsletter, my job before joining Mother Jones was at the fact-checking organization PolitiFact. One of the tragic elements of covering misinformation is that you can turn into a version of the "but actually" guy: "But actually, it didn't happen that way," you interject as your friends swap stories around the barbecue. "But actually, the David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, got 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, not 90 percent." "But actually…But actually…But actually."
Since leaving the misinformation beat, I've basically weaned myself out of that unfortunate habit. But it still flares up every now and then, especially when I'm on Twitter, one of the few arenas where being an obnoxious skeptic can turn out to be an asset.
This brings me to last night, when a bunch of liberal influencers and politicians—from Nina Turner to Charlotte Clymer—began to repeat a series of unverified, salacious rumors about Lauren Boebert.
Boebert has denied the rumors. And tracing them to their source, as some of the best misinformation reporters have already done, ends up emphasizing just how shaky they really are. The claims originated with the American Muckrakers PAC, the group that released an explicit video of Madison Cawthorn, which the congressman essentially confirmed to be real. The PAC's claims about Boebert, however, are extremely unsubstantiated. As evidence, the group cites a series of text messages from a single anonymous source, who mixes the iffy allegations with at least one demonstrably false claim. As Will Sommer of the Daily Beast reported, the source shared a photo with the PAC, asserting that it was Boebert. But the photo actually depicts Melissa Carone, one of the many (dubious) voter fraud witnesses that Rudy Giuliani trotted out during his campaign to overturn the election.
Many conspiracy theories on the right originate in similar ways. First, an anonymous source of dubious legitimacy makes an allegation that confirms people's biases. Then influencers eager to own their political opponents credulously broadcast it to a wider public.
That many journalists and politicians repeated these rumors—often with libel-evading qualifications along the lines of "If these allegations happen to be true"—is another sign of just how far misinformation has penetrated our politics. Liberals often like to consider conspiracy theories an exclusively right-wing problem. But actually, the reality is that nobody is immune to wild allegations that confirm their preexisting biases. All we can do is try our best to filter out the noise and acknowledge our fallibility when further investigation confirms our beliefs to be less well-founded than we thought.
—Noah Y. Kim