Category: Fact Checking

Claim:

A Florida man kidnapped a University of South Florida professor to force the scientist to make his dog immortal.

Rating:

Most dog lovers might agree they would do anything to spend more time on Earth with their furry best friend. But, according to one internet rumor, one man went so far as to commit a crime to immortalize his four-legged friend. 

The claim that a man kidnapped a scientist to “make his dog immortal” has surfaced on a variety of social media channels throughout at least a half-decade, from Facebook and X to YouTube and Reddit, such as the post below. 

Florida man kidnaps scientist to make his dog immortal
byu/JustASimpleCubesmith inchaoticgood

Snopes found no evidence to confirm that the alleged crime occurred. Rather, our newsroom traced the above mugshot to a man arrested in 2014 for domestic battery and resisting arrest. 

The dog-napping story appears to have originated in a July 20, 2018, post published on the website The Mother of All Nerds titled, “Man Abducts Scientist To Make His Dog Immortal.” It read, in part: 

Florida man Philip Josef has decided that his dog should have eternal life because the loss of this loved one would be devastating. “he loves his dog too much, and he can’t let it die,” he explains. All dog owners would love to never have to worry about their four legged friend moving on to the afterlife. But Josef has taken it to the next level.

He is not trying to figure out how to immortalize his dog on his own. He doesn’t understand Frankenstein’s scientific formulas and the biological procedures necessary to accomplish this task. And Josef is not the giving up type. The idea suddenly came to mind, Why not kidnap a scientist! Says Josef to himself while laughing diabolically.

So “he kidnapped Ryan Lockhart, a doctor and scientist from the University of South Florida.” One can only imagine what was going on in Ryan’s mind at that point. No laboratory, no secret chemical formula to keep the dog alive forever, and a crazy guy holding him hostage trying to figure out what his next move was going to be. The good thing is that they found the Florida scientist before anything catastrophic occurred.

[…]

Scientists have also agreed to try and figure out how to make his dog immortal even though they might not be successful.

However, our newsroom found no evidence to confirm that the above story is true. We have rated this claim “False.” For further information, we contacted The Mother of All Nerds and will update this article if we receive a response. 

There are several reasons to doubt the article’s validity. For starters, we conducted a keyword search (archive) of Google News, an archive of thousands of reputable news and information sites. No credible documents or reporting results were returned that could corroborate the claim. Although it’s not labeled as such, the story appears to be a work of satire.

Snopes also contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), which confirmed that this is not, nor has it ever been, an investigation conducted by the agency. An FDLE spokesperson recommended our newsroom reach out to local police and sheriff’s offices in the geographic location where the kidnapping supposedly occurred. As such, Snopes contacted the Tampa-based University of South Florida, where the professor reportedly worked.

In an email to Snopes, the Tampa Police Department wrote: 

We do not have any report with those names, nor an incident that is similar in nature.

Similarly, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that there is no record for a “Philip Josef” in their system.

Snopes conducted a reverse image search (archive and archive) of the mugshot in The Mother of All Nerds article. We determined that the photo was first published in an article by NBC Miami and WPLG Local 10 News, a television station in Miami, Florida. The news reports did not describe a dog-loving kidnapper but rather a man accused of “attacking girlfriend with banana.” Below is how the Jan. 2, 2014, story appeared: 

Florida man arrested after attacking girlfriend with banana

Philiip Joseph Smolinksy charged with domestic battery and resisting arrest

TAMPA, Fla. – A Florida man didn’t get his new year off to a good start after he was arrested for attacking his girlfriend with a banana.

After responding to their home on Wednesday morning, police say the girlfriend of Phillip Joseph Smolinsky accused him of throwing a banana at her head. A Pasco County deputy noticed a red patch on the victim’s face where she said she was hit by the flying fruit.

The arrest affidavit shows that the same deputy also found a banana in a nearby garbage can and that parts of the peel were found on the ground near where the girlfriend was sitting.

In addition to the domestic battery charges, Smolinsky, 36, was also charged with attempting to resist arrest without violence.

Police say that pepper spray had to be used to apprehend Smolinsky.

Snopes adores dogs and has debunked many rumors related to human’s best friend. We’ve looked into whether ice water is dangerous for dogs, if Taco Bell ended its famous ad campaign with a Chihuahua because the dog died. and detangled the difference between human and dog years. 

Found a questionable claim in the wild? Submit your tip to our newsroom and we’ll do our best to look into it.

Claim:

Robert A. Chesebrough, the inventor of Vaseline, ate a spoonful of petroleum jelly every day until he died at age 96, and once cured himself of pleurisy by having a nurse cover his body in Vaseline.

Rating:

What’s True

Shortly before petroleum jelly inventor Chesebrough died in 1933, at the age of 96, he publicly claimed to ingest “more than a teaspoon” of Vaseline daily. However …

What’s Undetermined

We were unable to confirm the claim that he once cured himself of a case of pleurisy by having a nurse cover his body in Vaseline.

On June 28, 2024, a Reddit user made a post on the r/Damnthatsinteresting subreddit claiming that the inventor of Vaseline, Robert A. Chesebrough, ate a spoonful of petroleum jelly every day until he died at age 96 and once cured himself of pleurisy, an inflammatory condition of the tissues that line the lungs and chest cavity, by having a nurse cover his body in Vaseline.

The post had received around 68,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments at the time of this writing.

Several hours after the r/Damnthatsinteresting post appeared, the same claims were repeated in a similar post by X user @historyinmemes. That post had been liked around 23,000 times and reposted around 3,800 times as of this writing.

Snopes was able to confirm the first part of the claim thanks to a letter he wrote to the Spring Lake (New Jersey) Gazette six months before his death. In it, Chesebrough, then 96, indeed attributed his longevity to eating “more than a teaspoon daily” of Vaseline. The relevant section of the letter can be seen in the Newspapers.com clip below.

Although the part of the claim that concerns Chesebrough’s daily ingestion of Vaseline is true, we have so far been unable to locate any primary or authoritative secondary sources corroborating the part of claim concerning Chesebrough allegedly treating a case of pleurisy by having a nurse cover his body in petroleum jelly. For this reason, we rate the claim as “Mixture.” We will update our rating if strong evidence for this second part of the claim surfaces.

Tracing the Claims

As outlined on the official Vaseline website’s “Our History” page, Chesebrough developed the idea for petroleum jelly, the generic name for the substance later marketed as Vaseline, when oil drilling began in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. A chemist with previous experience producing kerosene from whale oil, Chesebrough took special interest in a byproduct of petroleum called rod wax, which Titusville oil workers had begun using as a salve for cuts and burns.

In 1865, Chesebrough filed the first of several patents for methods for purifying petroleum into petroleum jelly, which he began selling under the brand name Vaseline in 1870.

The earliest publication to contain the full claim investigated here was an article titled “Mr. Chesebrough’s Wonder Jelly,” which was published in Coronet magazine in November 1953. Without any mention of how he found this information, the article’s author, Mort Weisinger, wrote,

So great a faith did Robert Chesebrough have in the therapeutic value of his product that he swallowed a spoonful every day of his life … In his late fifties, ill with pleurisy, he made his nurse anoint him with the substance from head to toe — and promptly recovered. Chesebrough died in 1933 at 96. On his deathbed, he boasted that he owed his longevity to his habit of taking a daily dose of the jelly. 

Over the following decades, these claims appeared in whole or in part in popular books, newspaper articles, blog posts, in “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” and even on the Britannica website. However, none of these appearances pointed readers toward an authoritative or primary source for the claim.

This was the case even for a mention of the claim that appeared in a 2017 issue of JAMA Dermatology, an academic journal published by the American Medical Association. In their citation for the claim, the authors of the piece pointed toward “Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Ordinary Things,” a book first published in 1987, which does include the claim but provides no source for it in the “References” section at the end of the book.

Snopes was able to track down the newspaper article verifying the part of the claim concerning Chesebrough’s daily consumption of Vaseline by scouring obituaries published after the inventor died in September 1933. One obituary, published in the Spring Lake Gazette, noted that Chesebrough, a Spring Lake resident at the time of his death, had “frequently” contributed articles and letters to that paper.

A survey of Chesebrough’s contributions to the Spring Lake Gazette turned up the aforementioned March 2, 1933, letter in which Chesebrough both described his daily Vaseline ingestion and explicitly claimed he believed it was the source of his longevity. Chesebrough died in September of the same year, several months after the letter was published.

None of Chesebrough’s letters to this publication contained any mention of Chesebrough curing himself from an attack of pleurisy by having a nurse slather him in petroleum jelly, and as of this writing we have not been able to locate any other sources published during or soon after Chesebrough’s lifetime that might corroborate this part of the claim. For this reason, we have rated the overall claim as it is presented in social media posts as “Mixture.”

Sources

Claim:

The Pledge of Allegiance was created to sell flags to U.S. schools.

Rating:

What’s True

It’s true that the Pledge of Allegiance was created in part to sell flags to U.S. schools …

What’s False

However, that wasn’t the only reason. The Pledge of Allegiance also was created to venerate the flag and “foster patriotism,” in addition to boosting revenue for a popular magazine in the late 1800s by selling flags and subscriptions.

For years, a rumor has circulated online that the Pledge of Allegiance was a “marketing tool” used to sell more flags to U.S. schools. A reddit user posted the claim in the subreddit r/todayilearned in 2017, for example. This claim has also circulated on other social media sites, such as Facebook and X, and is partly true, though selling flags wasn’t the only reason the pledge was created. 

In 1888, one of the largest publications in the United Sates, The Youth’s Companion, started a school flag campaign to increase patriotism after the magazine’s marketing director, John Upham, saw a lack thereof. He wanted more flags to be put into schools across the nation. Richard J. Ellis, a professor of political science at Willamette University, wrote about the scheme in his 2005 book “To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance.” 

In its October 1888 premium issue, the Youth’s Companion for the first time offered American flags for purchase. Flags of various sizes were offered to readers at reduced prices, from thirty cents for a 12-by-18-inch decorative silk flag to fifteen dollars for a giant 10-by-20-foot bunting flag. A 3-by-5-foot bunting flag could be obtained for two dollars, or for two subscriptions and seventy-five cents, and a 2-by-3-foot silk flag could be had for one dollar, or for one new subscriber and forty cents. The hope, the advertisement announced, was “to encourage the idea of Flag decoration in home and school-room.” The Companion lamented that while “we decorate our homes most profusely,” we seldom use “that most beautiful and inspiring of objects, the American Flag.” The magazine hoped that the “Stars and Stripes [might] be hung upon the walls of every home, and of every school room in the land” so that “patriotism and love of liberty [would] be unceasingly taught.

A report from University of Rochester Library Bulletin described Upham’s campaign:

“When I was a boy in the little red schoolhouse,” [Upham] said, “every Friday some boy declaimed Webster’s speeches about the Union and the forefathers. We were brought up in the very atmosphere of patriotism. Are the children getting that culture now? No. We must start it up again. The flag will do it. I want to see the flag over every schoolhouse. What is more, I want the children to put it there themselves. I want them to raise the money to buy their flag. If they do that, the Boards of Education will give the staff. When we get that well started we’ll go further. We will get up a flag-raising exercise for the children to join in saying. What a great thing that will be.

“Think of it. A flag over every school to remind the children that they belong to the nation as well as the town. Then, the children every day uniting before the flag in patriotic exercises which will stir up their love of country.”

That was the programmed work actually undertaken in 1891. It was never talked about in the newspapers. It was never advertised outside of the promotion notices of The Youth’s Companion itself. It was a still hunt, one school after another. The usual method was to offer to any pupil in any school, free, a hundred cards on which were printed the words:

This Certificate, representing a 10 cent contribution, entitles the holder to One Share in the patriotic influence of the School Flag.

Those hundred cards at ten cents each covered the wholesale cost of the good-sized, substantial flag.

This frank little scheme worked amazingly. In a year’s time it was estimated that thirty thousand flags had been raised in front of schoolhouses from Maine to California. By that time the educational papers were talking about the movement and teachers’ conventions were helping it along. Various patriotic organizations recognized it.

After the success of the flag campaign from 1888-91, Upham started a new campaign centered around a celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. In a Youth’s Companion issue from Sept. 8, 1892, the instructions for the “National School Celebration of Columbus Day” were printed and featured the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time. The magazine gave away a flag with every new subscription, which family members of the author, Francis Bellamy, said grew from 400,000 to 600,000 after the 1892 marketing campaign. 

In 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the United States Flag Code into law, codifying existing rules regarding civilian display of the flag. The Flag Code outlines the correct way to deliver the pledge. In 1954, under the Eisenhower administration, the phrase “under God” was inserted into the pledge immediately after “one nation” to emphasize the United States’ rejection of “godless Communism.” Since the pledge’s initial installation in public schools in the 1800s, numerous people have criticized it, even leading to several U.S. Supreme Court cases. Most notably, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette in 1943, the high court reversed a previous ruling that stated a public school could force students to recite the pledge in the classroom. 

Before all of that, the Pledge of Allegiance was a catalyst for the rise in sales of the Youth’s Companion magazine and also flags in its first rendition in classrooms across the nation in 1892. Marketing American flags to schools was one of the reasons for the creation of the Pledge of Allegiance, but not the only reason. On that basis, we have labeled this claim a “Mixture” of true and false.

Claim:

Eating hot dogs can reduce a person’s life expectancy.

Rating:

An archived Reddit post on the forum “r/OutOfTheLoop” posited that hot dogs can reduce a person’s life expectancy by 30 minutes each time they’re eaten. The redditor reported seeing many articles saying as much while citing a study from University of Michigan. 

An article for Metro on Aug. 20, 2021, explained the study in this way: 

A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan has suggested that you may lose 36 minutes of healthy life after eating one hot dog, while other foods can actually ‘add’ time to your life.

Studying 5,800 commonly-eaten foods, they also found that chicken wings will subtract 3.3 minutes of your life, while – perhaps surprisingly – a peanut butter and jam sandwich could increase your lifespan by over half an hour.

Salted peanuts add 26 minutes and baked salmon gains you 13.5 minutes.

But the viral post misinterpreted the study. The researchers in the study were talking about Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE), a statistic that represents the number of years a person can live in good health, as opposed to the number of years lived in less-than-good health, due to disease or injury. The foods analyzed were suggested to add or subtract years from a person’s HALE, not their actual life expectancy.

The University of Michigan researchers concluded small changes in a person’s diet can be just as effective as wholesale changes. In the study, researchers tested foods based on their “Health Nutritional Index” and quantified the amount of minutes of “healthy life” that can be lost or gained — the amount of time in which a person has a good quality of life and is disease-free — not actual physical life minutes. According to the abstract: 

To identify environmentally sustainable foods that promote health, we combined nutritional health-based and 18 environmental indicators to evaluate, classify and prioritize individual foods. Specifically for nutrition, we developed the Health Nutritional Index to quantify marginal health effects in minutes of healthy life gained or lost of 5,853 foods in the US diet, ranging from 74 min lost to 80 min gained per serving. Environmental impacts showed large variations and were found to be correlated with global warming, except those related to water use. Our analysis also indicated that substituting only 10% of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meat for fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and selected seafood could offer substantial health improvements of 48 min gained per person per day and a 33% reduction in dietary carbon footprint.

In the study, the researchers found that hot dogs were among the worst foods both environmentally and nutritionally, assessing that a single one can shave 36 minutes off of a person’s “healthy life.” Olivier Jolliet, one of the lead researchers on the study, spoke to USA Today in an article from 2021. He stated: 

I wouldn’t get too worried about eating a hot dog from this,” Jolliet said. “Basically, we were trying to show how you can improve your lifestyle and the environment without necessarily trying to be vegan.

The study acts as an illustration for the way in which a person can change a diet to impact long-term wellbeing. Jolliet also told USA Today: 

The condition of the study is for marginal change and for the everyday (American) where they can make minimum changes in their diet for overall health and the environment.

In short, the study is simply a guide to making better dietary choices for both personal nutritional and environmental benefits, emphasizing the benefit of small changes. Jolliet told Metro: 

The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health and the environment is clear.

Our findings demonstrate that small targeted substitutions offer a feasible and powerful strategy to achieve significant health and environmental benefits — without requiring dramatic dietary shifts.’

Because this study states that hot dogs take away 36 minutes of “healthy life,” and not actual life expectancy, we have rated the claim “False.”

 

 

Sources

Claim:

Mike Rowe said, “Maybe if we taught kids a trade instead of pronouns, we wouldn’t have to pay off their loans for them.”

Rating:

On July 3, 2024, a Facebook page named America – Love It Or Leave It posted a meme claiming “Dirty Jobs” reality TV host Mike Rowe said, “Maybe if we taught kids a trade instead of pronouns, we wouldn’t have to pay off their loans for them.”

One commenter under the post said, “Right on Mike!”

Another user added, “Absolutely! These people can only think of themselves! Get a life and stop this stupidity!”

A third person commented, “It should start in the home, parents should teach their children instead of allowing hours and hours of video games!”

Meanwhile, a manager of the Facebook page submitted the top-voted comment. That comment read as follows:

It really is this simple, patriots. You take someone like Mike Rowe, who has a degree in communications and an extensive background in song and dance, and turn him into a blue-collar worker for a TV show. It’s almost as easy as turning a failed businessman who managed to bankrupt casinos into a mogul of some sort. You just need the right spin.

Add student debt relief to the ‘tEAcH TraDes InSTeAd oF mATh!’ slogans and you have a masterpiece of tater bait they just can’t resist. God bless America.

As some readers might gather from the page manager’s comment, this story was not a factual recounting of real-life events. The America – Love It Or Leave It Facebook page belongs to the America’s Last Line Of Defense network of satire and parody websites. According to the page’s description, “Nothing on this page is real.” The lower-left corner of the meme also displayed a “satire” rating label.

The page manager’s comment mentioning “tater bait” referenced the term the America’s Last Line Of Defense uses for people who supposedly believe its untrue stories. For example, The Dunning-Kruger Times’ website – a website associated with the network of satire and parody – describes “taters” as follows:

“Taters” are the conservative fans of America’s Last Line of Defense. They are fragile, frightened, mostly older caucasian Americans. They believe nearly anything. While we go out of our way to educate them that not everything they agree with is true, they are still old, typically ignorant, and again — very afraid of everything.

Our mission is to do our best to show them the light, through shame if necessary, and to have a good time doing it, because…old and afraid or not, these people are responsible for the patriarchy we’re railing so hard against. They don’t understand logic and they couldn’t care less about reason. Facts are irrelevant. BUT…they do understand shame.

For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.

President Joe Biden’s debate performance on June 27 left many in his own party uneasy about his ability to serve another four years.

“I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, one of several Democratic Party leaders who have publicly expressed their concern, said on July 2.

The following day, the New York Times reported that Biden privately “told key allies that he knows the coming days are crucial and understands that he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince voters that he is up to the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.” The White House called the Times report “absolutely false.”

In her daily press briefing on July 3, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked directly if Biden is considering stepping down.

“Absolutely not,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that Biden “understands it was not his best night” and “understands that it is fair for people to ask that question.”

At this point, there’s no telling if Biden will voluntarily leave the race, or if some in the party will attempt to deny him the nomination. The fact that either option is even being discussed is shocking at such a late stage in the nominating process. Biden has amassed more than 99% of the pledged delegates who will meet in Chicago in about seven weeks to nominate the party’s standard-bearer.

Here, we answer some of the questions about the Democratic National Convention process. What happens if he voluntarily steps aside? What if he doesn’t? Can Biden be replaced, and if he can, how would that work?

Are pledged delegates bound to support Biden at the convention?

Pledged delegates are those who were elected in state primaries and caucuses to represent their candidate at the national convention. The Democratic National Committee rules for pledged delegates at the 2024 convention state: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” 

The word “shall” may suggest that pledged delegates are bound to their candidates. But they are not, and that’s because of the phrase “in all good conscience” that follows the word “shall,” William Mayer, a political science professor at Northeastern University who has written numerous books on presidential politics, told us in a phone interview. 

“You are kind of encouraged to vote for the candidates for whom you were elected – but ‘in all good conscience’ you could vote for someone else,” he said.  

“The thing to remember is that the convention is what decides the nominee, not the primaries,” Elaine Kamarck, author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” explained in a July 1 podcast on the Brookings Institution website.

“The primaries elect delegates to the convention, but the legal authority for choosing the nominee of the Democratic Party, or for that matter, the Republican Party, is not the primaries, it is the delegates voting in convention. When that happens, you have a formal nominee,” Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings, said.

The last time pledged delegates were bound to the candidates was at the 1980 convention, when then-President Jimmy Carter held off a challenge from the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, Mayer said. 

“There was a provision in the 1980 rules that said if you are elected as a Carter delegate, and you decided as the convention got closer that you didn’t want to vote for Carter, then Carter could actually replace you with someone that would [vote for him].” Mayer said. “It became a little bit of a controversy at the 1980 convention.”

In a 2005 interview for the University of Virginia’s presidential oral history project, Kennedy recalled how the “faithful delegate rule” had “caused resentment” among some Carter delegates.

“Some of the delegates selected and pledged to Carter early appeared to have been willing to support my candidacy later in the process, but there had been a change in the rules put in by Carter that said that once a delegate was selected as pledged, they had to stay that way,” Kennedy recalled. “They call it the ‘faithful delegate rule,’ which means that if they pledged, they couldn’t change their mind. That caused resentment with the delegates, just generally was not popular.”

In a compromise after the 1980 election, the Democrats changed the rules for the 1984 convention to give delegates more flexibility, as the New York Times wrote at the time.

There are 3,937 pledged delegates, including 3,894 pledged to Biden, according to the Associated Press delegate tracker. The nominee will need the votes of 1,968 delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot, the AP said.

What about the superdelegates?

In addition to pledged delegates, the Democratic Party also has up to 744 so-called superdelegates — officially known as “automatic delegates.” Superdelegates include, for example, members of the Democratic National Committee and all Democratic Senate and House members, among others, as the DNC delegate selection rules explain.

They are not pledged to any candidates, but cannot vote in the first round if the nomination is contested.

The DNC rules state: “On the first ballot of the presidential roll call, only pledged delegates will be permitted to vote unless a presidential candidate has been certified by the DNC Secretary to have obtained a number of pledged delegates equal to a majority of all pledged and automatic delegates to the Convention, at which point automatic delegates will also be permitted to vote on the first ballot.”

Will delegates replace Biden?

For an open convention to become a reality, William A. Galston and Kamarck, both senior fellows in governance studies at Brookings, wrote in commentary after the debate, “Biden would have to either withdraw of his own accord or a strong opponent would have to challenge him and build a credible campaign among the approximately 4,000 delegates already elected prior to the August convention. Both scenarios are, at this point, long shots.”

But it is far less likely if Biden refused to step aside. Although it is technically possible for delegates to choose someone else, “The only way that would happen is if he [Biden] voluntarily took himself out of the of the race,” Kamarck said in a podcast on July 1. “He has the delegates, etc.”

In the event that Biden were no longer an option, delegates elected for Biden would become uncommitted, Kamarck explained back in January. “Candidates who step into the breach hoping to take the place of the fallen candidate will find out who these delegates are and woo them in as many ways as they can.”

How would the process for selecting a new nominee play out?

If Biden did end his candidacy, Kamarck said the process would begin with other candidates putting “their names in the pot to become the nominee of the party.”

“They would campaign in a short period of time for the allegiances of approximately 4,000 [delegates],” she explained in the podcast. “How they would do that varies. I mean, there’d be a lot of phone calls. There would be a lot of delegation meetings. People would speak before delegations. I’m sure there’d be some debates, etc. But it would be a very truncated campaign geared towards those … approximately 4,000 people.”

One detailed proposal for how to select a new nominee surfaced this week from a longtime DNC member. 

James Zogby, who has served in DNC leadership roles for three decades, outlined his plan in a memo he sent to DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and circulated among DNC members.

The plan, according to the New York Times, would require Biden to step aside and “instruct the party not to simply designate Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee, but instead meet after the Fourth of July to ‘lay out a one-month campaign schedule to select the party’s nominee.’”

Zogby, who currently is chairman of the DNC Ethnic Council, elaborated on his plan in an interview with CNN. 

“DNC members would be authorized” to endorse candidates who would then be certified by the party secretary as official candidates, he told CNN. A “limited field” of candidates – “four or five” – would then spend a month campaigning, beginning with televised town halls, he said. 

The process would end at the party’s national convention, which will be held in Chicago from Aug. 19 through Aug. 22, where the delegates would select the nominee from among the candidates. 

Instead of Biden “leaving later in the process toward the convention, and handing it off to Kamala Harris,” Zogby said Harris would be given “an opportunity to show her stuff in an engaged democratic process.” It would not be “simply a coronation, which I think would not be helpful to her or helpful to the party or to the country,” he said. 

But, he added, Biden needs to start the process by stepping aside. 

“The call ultimately has to come from Joe Biden. He has to decide whether he’s going to leave,” he said. “But here’s the point: If the holdup is that he’s afraid of handing it off to Kamala Harris and she may not be able to win, this solves that problem. If there’s a fear that if he withdraws, there’ll be chaos. This solves that problem.”

Biden may endorse his vice president for the nomination, but he wouldn’t have “any formal power over the delegates to say they have to vote for X candidate,” said Mayer, the Northeastern University professor. “Since we haven’t faced anything like this, it’s hard to know how much his recommendation would matter.”

Can Biden be replaced after the convention and, if so, how?

Yes, if Biden were to decide to drop out of the race after receiving the formal nomination at the Democratic convention, he could still be replaced on the Democratic ticket in November.

In that case, the 426 DNC members — who are elected in their states and include the state party chair and vice chair, as well as other prominent people in their state and party — would meet in a special session to choose a replacement nominee, Kamarck explained in a Jan. 3 post.

And, no, she wrote, “the nomination does not automatically extend to the vice-presidential candidate on the ballot.”

“The authority of the national parties to choose their nominee in the event the nominee can’t run comes as a surprise to many in this day of wall-to-wall primaries,” Kamarck wrote in September. “And yet, it is a reminder that the choice of a nominee is party business — not state law, not federal law, and not constitutional law.”

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Claim:

Denzel Washington will play the emperor of Rome in “Gladiator II.”

Rating:

In early July 2024, a rumor circulated on social media that Denzel Washington would be playing the emperor of Rome in the movie “Gladiator II,” set to be released in November 2024.

“Meet Hollywood’s Marcus Macrinus, Emperor of Rome. The bastardization and blackwashing of European history continues. This is a sick joke,” one X post (archived) read, reaching more than 842,000 views and 13,000 likes as of this writing.

(X user @Klaus_Arminius)

“When they swap a fictional White character, their excuse is: ‘it’s just fiction, not real’. When they swap a historical White person, their excuse is: ‘it’s just acting’,” one X user commented under the post. “Once again, we’re seeing historical blackwashing with the casting of Macrinus, a Roman emperor of Numidian (Amazigh) descent, being portrayed by a black actor,” another post claimed.

In short, Washington is not playing the emperor of Rome in “Gladiator II,” but rather a character named Macrinus, a “dashing powerbroker” and arms dealer. Because of that, we have rated this claim “False.”

“Gladiator II” is set to be released on Nov. 22, 2024. Vanity Fair published the photo of Washington used in the viral posts in a “first look” article about the movie, writing in a caption that “Denzel Washington’s Macrinus is an arms dealer who lives lavishly and keeps a stable of gladiators for sport.” The article went on to describe Washington’s character:

Throughout Gladiator II, the reluctant hero encounters a number of other colorful and dubious characters. Denzel Washington plays a dashing powerbroker named Macrinus. “Denzel is an arms dealer who supplies food for the armies in Europe, supplies wine and oil, makes steel, makes spears, weapons, cannons, and catapults. So he is a very wealthy man. Instead of having a stable of racehorses, he has a stable of gladiators,” [director Ridley] Scott says. “He’s beautiful. He drives a golden Ferrari. I got him a gold-plated chariot.”

The rumor about Washington playing a Roman emperor may have arisen because there was, in fact, a Roman emperor named Macrinus in 217 and 218. However, he does not appear in the movie “Gladiator II.” The Vanity Fair article noted that Fred Hechinger plays Emperor Caracalla and Joseph Quinn portrays Emperor Geta in “Gladiator II.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at a claim regarding Washington. For instance, in June 2024, we fact-checked a rumor claiming he and Clint Eastwood joined forces to launch a “non-woke” movie production studio. In June 2023, we investigated whether Washington once said, “With so many things coming back in style, I can’t wait until morals, respect, and intelligence become a trend again.”

Sources

Claim:

Anthony Bourdain said: “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”

Rating:

On March 28, 2024, a Facebook fan page for chef and journalist Anthony Bourdain claimed he made the following quote: 

Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.

Variations of the quote have gone viral over the last several years, including ones that emphasize the idea of sitting down with people one disagrees with: “Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways.”

We searched in many of Bourdain’s books and interviews and found no evidence that he said the above words, though it is possible he may have said something similar in his lifetime. As such, we rate the claim “Unproven” until more information comes to light.

We began by looking through his writings, including “Kitchen Confidential,” “A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal,” “No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach,” “Medium Raw,” “The Nasty Bits,” his novel “Bone in the Throat” and more. 

In Bourdain’s cookbook “Les Halles,” he wrote something similar to the above quote after describing the prep work for a recipe: “Have a drink. Relax. Dress for company. Smoke a joint. Your work is practically done here.” 

Truth or Fiction found the earliest versions of the quote in 2021. The quote appeared on a film blog about the documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” which stated:

The best thing to say about Neville’s compact, dense yet feather-light attainment is that it sings and it stings and stands alongside memory of vigorous Bourdain passages such as the immortal: “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a Negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”

We do not know from where the blog was quoting. We watched the film and there was no evidence of the quote in it.

Truth or Fiction also found the quote in a June 2021 post on a message board, where it wass not attributed to Bourdain:

Re: Anthony Bourdain dead.

Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.

Happy Bourdain Day

He would have been 65

One Substack user reached out to the commenter behind the above post to determine whether it was their quote or whether it was Bourdain’s. They received a response from the user, who claimed they knew Bourdain:

Quotes are funny things, can you ever have 100% assertion that any quote was directly from one person ? Maybe if you have video or audio but with AI now thats not even possible. What we are left with is the character of the quote. I knew Tony, I hung out with him on a few occasions before he made it big as Anthony Bourdain and I can assure he said something similar to me on many occasions. Maybe not that direct quote but damn near close to the fundamental ideas behind it. It was at the core of his sensibilities and love for culture, food, and life. So yea [it] totally sounds like the Tony I knew.

Ultimately, we have no documented proof that the words came from Bourdain directly. It is possible he felt that way, given his extensive travels, the people he interviewed and his numerous experiences. In the movie “Roadrunner” Bourdain spoke about changing his mind and opinions as a result of his travels. In one clip Bourdain joked about curiosity being his “only virtue.”

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Claim:

U.S. President Joe Biden accurately said he lowered the price of a shot of insulin, to $15 per shot from $400.

Rating:

What’s True

Under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden lowered the cost of insulin for seniors on Medicare.

What’s False

However, the numbers he cited during the June 2024 presidential debate were inaccurate. The Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin at $35 per month for seniors on Medicare, not $15 per shot. And insulin users on Medicare spent an average of $449 per year on insulin, not $400 per shot.

On June 27, 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump faced each other for the first debate of the 2024 presidential election.

Following the first question, regarding the economy, Biden claimed that he brought down the cost of a shot of insulin, to $15 from $400. “We brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400,” he said (viewable at 4:41 in the video):

We looked into the claim, and found that while it’s true that Biden brought the price of insulin down, the numbers he cited were not correct, so we have rated this claim a “Mixture” of truth and falsehood.

Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in August 2022, codifying measures that capped the cost of insulin for seniors on Medicare at $35 per month starting in January 2023. As a result, many drugmakers — including Eli Lilly, the largest manufacturer of insulin in the U.S. — lowered their prices accordingly.

According to a 2022 study by the Department of Health and Human Services, insulin users on Medicare paid an average of $449 annually. Contrary to Biden’s claim, a shot of insulin did not cost $400 before the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Snopes newsroom fact-checked the first debate of the 2024 presidential election in real time, available here.

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