It's understandable that famous socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be terrified when pro-Trump rioters were raging at the Capitol on January 6. But AOC's backers in the "Fact Checker" community are fiercely editorializing on her behalf and putting the "facts" somewhere in the background. They weren't going to check on AOC's charge that Ted Cruz was "trying to get me killed."
They were going to defend AOC after her dramatic Instagram Live video had been viewed by millions and became a sympathetic top story on the network evening news shows.
Snopes went big at the top of their home page:
Did AOC Exaggerate the Danger She Was in During Capitol Riot?
AOC was targeted with another round of bad-faith smears after giving an emotional, firsthand account of her experiences during the Capitol riot.
They cried "Mostly False"!
What's True
Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located.
What's False
When the attack on the Capitol began, Ocasio-Cortez was in her congressional office, which is located in a network of office buildings immediately surrounding the Capitol, and her office building was one of the two buildings that were evacuated.
Bethania Palma didn't calmly check facts. She wrote like she was trying out for HuffPost or Daily Kos:
In a circus of cyberbullying that began on Feb. 3, 2021, conservative news outlets and social media conspiracy trolls latched on to the misleading claim that Ocasio-Cortez “wasn’t in the Capitol building” and therefore was not in harm’s way, as she had described in the Instagram video.
Examples included the RedState blog headline, “AOC Wasn’t Even in the Capitol Building During Her ‘Near Death’ Experience,” and the following tweet from the Daily Wire website...
It's not "misleading" to say AOC wasn't in the Capitol building. She wasn't! Ben Shapiro was befuddled that his website was "Mostly False" when the headline underlined what was true:
This is a weird fact-check from Snopes. I mean, they say that "what's true" is EXACTLY what the DW tweet says. Then they call the DW tweet "misleading." Almost as though they're just a Left-wing spin outfit. pic.twitter.com/IvkD8wiguz
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 4, 2021
As Amanda Prestigiacomo at the Daily Wire explains, Newsweek originally reported that AOC claimed there were rioters in her office in the Cannon House Office Building, which was not true. The rioters were in the Capitol itself, across the street. It is a fact that they were not an imminent threat to AOC, even though every Member of Congress had a right to be terrified, especially her. What originally drew conservative criticism was her suspicion of a Capitol Police officer looking for her, as if that was menacing.
Snopes was too busy hammering the right-wingers on Twitter:
It took less than 48 hours for the right-wing disinformation machine to contrive a way to minimize what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she had experienced. https://t.co/4ItjP4n8Gh
— snopes.com (@snopes) February 4, 2021
Decrying a "right-wing disinformation machine" guilty of "minimizing" AOC's January 6 story isn't "fact-checking." It's left-wing blogging.
This is a repeated pattern of defense-lawyering items by Snopes, as we've previously reported:
For Love or Clickbait? Snopes.com Leaps to Correct Obviously Silly Ocasio-Cortez Items
Snopes Tags Bad White-Voter Poll for AOC, Omar as 'Mostly False'
Snopes Leaps to Defend AOC From Spin on Words She Actually Said (about 9/11)
It's also not the first time Snopes has trashed a true Daily Wire story as False.
But over the AOC "fact check," Snopes asked for money, touting itself as a historic site that's "reliably reported the facts" and is supposedly "the internet's most trusted fact-checking site." That seriously needs a fact check. Snopes is a very leftist, partisan fact-checking site.
