During his time in the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden cast two votes 10 years apart — one of them the deciding vote — in favor of legislation that taxed Social Security income.
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What’s True
While serving as a U.S. senator representing Delaware, Joe Biden voted for two pieces of legislation — once in 1983 and once in 1993 — that resulted in taxing some Social Security income of some recipients. However …
What’s False
Biden did not cast the “deciding vote” in either case. The legislation passed in 1983 made up to half of Social Security income taxable only for individuals making more than $25,000, or couples making $32,000; also, the vote was bipartisan and was signed into law by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, a Republican. The second piece of legislation, in 1993, passed largely along party lines and was signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.
In early September 2020, Snopes readers asked for verification of a meme circulating on social media that stated Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden had voted in 1983 and 1993 to make Social Security taxable income — reportedly casting the deciding vote in 1993.
An example of the copy-pasted text that circulated of Facebook read as follows:
Prior to 1983, social security was not taxable. In 1983, Joe Biden voted in favor of taxing 50% of social security – and it passed. In 1993, Joe Biden doubled down and was the deciding vote in raising the percentage taxed on social security from 50% to 85%. Joe Biden is not a friend to working folks – and certainly not to retirees. His voting record on social security over the years is one slap in the face to retirees after another.
It’s true that Social Security wasn’t taxable income before the 1983 legislation went into effect. It’s also true that then-U.S. Sen. Biden, representing Delaware, voted in both 1983 and 1993 in favor of making some Social Security income taxable for some recipients. But the meme left out key context.
In 1983, Congress passed H.R. 1900, which was hashed out by a bipartisan committee and designed to ensure Social Security’s solvency. The bill was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
As CQ Almanac reported in 1983, the law made significant changes to the government-funded retirement system, namely making up to 50% of benefits taxable for single recipients who made more than $25,000, or $32,000 for married couples filing taxes jointly:
Congress also agreed to make fundamental changes in the program by taxing for the first time benefits of high-income recipients and by using transfers from the general Treasury to help bolster the system’s trust funds. It also voted to bring new federal employees, members of Congress, the president, the vice president and federal judges under the Social Security system.
Biden voted to pass the legislation, along with 47 Republicans and 40 other Democrats.
The second piece of legislation passed in 1993 was not bipartisan — however, Biden did not cast the “deciding vote.” The 1993 Omnibus Budget-Reconciliation Act took aim at reducing the federal deficit and relied heavily on tax increases to do so, “making it anathema to Republicans and bitter medicine even for [U.S. President Bill] Clinton’s own party,” CQ Almanac reported at the time.
It passed the Senate on nearly partisan lines, with no Republicans voting for it and six Democrats voting against it. Garnering a tie vote in the Senate, it was Vice President Al Gore who cast the deciding vote, before it was signed into law by Clinton, a Democrat.
The legislation increased the portion of taxable Social Security income from up to 50% to up to 85% for individuals making more than $25,000 and married couples earning more than $32,000. In other words, the higher percentage of Social Security income taxed only applied to higher-income beneficiaries, according to the Social Security Administration. “Beneficiaries of modest incomes might still be subject to the 50% rate, or to no taxation at all, depending on their overall taxable income.”
We reached out to the Biden campaign for comment but didn’t hear back in time for publication. We also reached out to the Social Security Administration for comment but didn’t get a response in time for publication.
This article is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.
But the framers of the Constitution never mentioned a right to vote. They didn’t forget – they intentionally left it out. To put it most simply, the founders didn’t trust ordinary citizens to endorse the rights of others.
They were creating a radical experiment in self-government paired with the protection of individual rights that are often resented by the majority. As a result, they did not lay out an inherent right to vote because they feared rule by the masses would mean the destruction of – not better protection for – all the other rights the Constitution and Bill of Rights uphold. Instead, they highlighted other core rights over the vote, creating a tension that remains today.
Many of the rights the founders enumerated protect small groups from the power of the majority – for instance, those who would say or publish unpopular statements, or practice unpopular religions, or hold more property than others. James Madison, a principal architect of the U.S. Constitution and the drafter of the Bill of Rights, was an intellectual and landowner who saw the two as strongly linked.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Madison expressed the prevailing view that “the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty,” meaning only people who owned land debt-free, without mortgages, would be able to vote. The Constitution left voting rules to individual states, which had long-standing laws limiting the vote to those freeholders.
In the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Madison trumpeted a benefit of the new system: the “total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.” Even as the nation shifted toward broader inclusion in politics, Madison maintained his view that rights were fragile and ordinary people untrustworthy. In his 70s, he opposed the expansion of the franchise to nonlanded citizens when it was considered at Virginia’s Constitutional Convention in 1829, emphasizing that “the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the Minority.”
The founders believed that freedoms and rights would require the protection of an educated elite group of citizens, against an intolerant majority. They understood that protected rights and mass voting could be contradictory.
What Americans think of as the right to vote doesn’t reside in the Constitution, but results from broad shifts in American public beliefs during the early 1800s. The new states that entered the union after the original 13 – beginning with Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee – did not limit voting to property owners. Many of the new state constitutions also explicitly recognized voting rights.
As the nation grew, the idea of universal white male suffrage – championed by the commoner-President Andrew Jackson – became an article of popular faith, if not a constitutional right.
After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed that the right to vote would not be denied on account of race: If some white people could vote, so could similarly qualified nonwhite people. But that still didn’t recognize a right to vote – only the right of equal treatment. Similarly, the 19th Amendment, now 100 years old, banned voting discrimination on the basis of sex, but did not recognize an inherent right to vote.
These disputes often invoke an incorrect assumption – that voting is a constitutional right protected from the nation’s birth. The national debate over representation and rights is the product of a long-run movement toward mass voting paired with the longstanding fear of its results.
The nation has evolved from being led by an elitist set of beliefs toward a much more universal and inclusive set of assumptions. But the founders’ fears are still coming true: Levels of support for the rights of opposing parties or people of other religions are strikingly weak in the U.S. as well as around the world. Many Americans support their own rights to free speech but want to suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree. Americans may have come to believe in a universal vote, but that value does not come from the Constitution, which saw a different path to the protection of rights.
Editor’s Note: This fact check was reviewed and corrected on June 9, 2023.
In August 2020, a photograph showing a T-shirt, reportedly being sold at a Target, bearing the slogan “In Pizza We Trust” circulated on social media along with the claim that the department store was endorsing, aiding, encouraging, or was actively participating in pedophilia:
(Reddit)
This appears to be a genuine photograph, though we have been unable to confirm this item was available at Target stores. A spokesperson for the chain told us the stores “don’t sell this shirt,” but it’s unclear if it was available in years past (the above-displayed image has been circulating since 2018). Similar items can be found via online retailers.
Regardless of the item’s availability at Target, neither the shirt nor the chain store has been credibly linked to pedophilia.
What Does Pizza Have To Do With Pedophilia?
The underlying claim in the above meme and others like it is that pizza is a secret symbol or “code word” for pedophilia.
The claim that pizza is a code word used by pedophiles first sprung up during the 2016 presidential election, after the email of John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was hacked by a Russian intelligence agency and published by Wikileaks. As internet users scoured through the illegally obtained material, they noticed some of the emails referred to “pizza.”
This was an innocuous detail to most political observers — in one email, Podesta suggests using a pizza oven to cook dinner; in another, he suggests buying pizza for political volunteers. But 4chan users posited that the word “pizza” in Podesta’s emails was actually a code word for pedophilia. The evidence? The first letters in the phrase “cheese pizza” — “C” and “P” — are also the first letters of the words “child pornography.”
On 4chan itself, at least, “CP” and “cheese pizza” had, in fact, been already used for years by Anons (the anonymous users of the vast image and message board) as coded references to child pornography and pedophilia-related content. When they found the word “pizza” in Podesta’s emails, they built a conspiracy theory around it. (It’s unclear when, exactly, the phrase “cheese pizza” came into wider use as a code word for child pornography outside of 4chan, but there is concrete evidence that it was used as such at least as far back as 2017, when a Craigslist post containing the phrase played a role in the arrest and conviction of a Lodi, New Jersey, man for receiving child pornography.)
In December 2016, The New York Times dissected the evolution of this repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory:
WikiLeaks began releasing emails hacked from the account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, a month before the election.
Social media users on a popular Reddit forum dedicated to Donald J. Trump and 4chan’s far-right fringe message board searched the releases for evidence of wrongdoing.
Within the emails were discussions that include the word pizza, including dinner plans between Mr. Podesta and his lobbyist brother, Tony Podesta.
A participant on 4chan connected the phrase “cheese pizza” to pedophiles, who on chat boards use the initials “c.p.” to denote child pornography.
Following the use of “pizza,” theorists focused on the Washington pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong. The WikiLeaks emails revealed that John Podesta corresponded with Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, who had connections to Democratic operatives.
The theory started snowballing, taking on the meme #PizzaGate. Fake news articles emerged and were spread on Twitter and Facebook.
The false stories swept up neighboring businesses and bands that had played at Comet. Theories about kill rooms, underground tunnels, satanism and even cannibalism emerged in fabricated stories and on social media.
On Dec. 4, Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, arrived at Comet with a military-style rifle and a handgun. The police said he fired the rifle inside the pizzeria, hurting no one, and surrendered after finding no evidence to support claims of child slaves being held there.
The shooting did not put the theory to rest. Purveyors of the theory and fake news pointed to the mainstream media as conspirators of a coverup to protect what they said was a crime ring.
It’s important to note that while a handful of mentions of pizza occurred in Podesta’s emails, the term “cheese pizza” did not. This rumor started in large part because 4chan users attempted to read between the lines and invented a connection that does not exist.
Journalists have repeatedly debunked “Pizzagate” rumors since they started spreading in the lead-up to the 2016 election. One of the most glaring errors and obvious indications that this conspiracy theory was practically conjured out of thin air had to do with the claim that a sex trafficking ring was being run out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., that had no basement. Alex Jones, the face of the conspiratorial website InfoWars, even apologized for his part in spreading these false rumors. Still, this theory continued to gain traction on social media as it was absorbed into “QAnon,” a wide-ranging and unfounded conspiracy theory of dubious origins holding that there’s a “deep state” plot against U.S. President Donald Trump.
The QAnon conspiracy picked up where Pizzagate left off, alleging that the liberal elite’s pedophile ring extends way beyond one restaurant and that it is only a matter of time before Trump arrests Podesta, Clinton, and other Democratic power brokers for their crimes. All of this was fueled by an anonymous internet poster dubbed Q, who claims to be a government insider.
In Pizza We Trust
While pizza’s conspiratorial links to pedophilia are relatively new, the marketing slogan “In Pizza We Trust” had whirled around for decades. For example, here’s a 1986 coupon from a pizza parlor in California:
The arcade and restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese also used the slogan on game tokens in the 1980s. The slogan has appeared on a wide range of merchandise, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirts and designer handbags. Pizza parlors from New York to France to South Africa to Oklahoma have also used this slogan. In other words, the slogan has been used for decades without issue.
Of course, “In Pizza We Trust” was not the only punny pizza slogan to get caught up in this conspiracy. Similar rumors were also circulated about shirts bearing slogans such as “Wanna Pizza Me?” a play on the tough guy phrase, “Do you want a piece of me?” as illustrated in the following outtake video from “Seinfeld”:
Claims that these T-shirts are in anyway related to pedophilia are based solely on the fact that they include the word “pizza.” But this train of thought quickly derails when you consider the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods in the world. It is a fact that pizza symbolism and the phrase “cheese pizza” are sometimes used as coded references to child pornography and pedophilia, but it’s patently absurd to assert, without supporting evidence, that any given reference to pizza connotes those things.
The Eye of Providence
According to these conspiratorial claims, the slogan “In Pizza We Trust” isn’t the only supposedly suspicious item on the aforementioned T-shirt. The item also includes the Eye of Providence, otherwise known as the “all-seeing eye,” which is a symbol that has been used by various groups dating back centuries. In the conspiratorial context, this symbol is often associated with the “Illuminati,” a shadowy group of global elites whose globe-controlling puppet strings are much longer in lore than in life.
While the inclusion of this ominous symbol, a slice of pizza, and the slogan “In Pizza We Trust” may signal to some that Target is involved in a sex trafficking scheme, a much simpler explanation is at hand. The T-shirt design is spoofing the design on the back of an American dollar bill and making a punny point about how at least pizza is something that everyone can have faith in. Instead of “In God We Trust,” the slogan reads “In Pizza We Trust.” Instead of a pyramid — which Charles Thomson, who presented the Great Seal to Congress in 1782, said symbolized “strength and duration” — it’s a slice of pepperoni pizza. The all-seeing eye appears on the pizza slogan because that’s how it appears on the dollar bill:
The Motivated Perceptions of Moral Panics
The United States (as well as the rest of the world) has seen several moral panics over the years. In the 1970s, for instance, parents worried their children’s Halloween candy was being spiked with drugs or laced with razor blades. While this fear continues to this day, scant evidence exists that this was ever a genuine problem.
While these moral panics typically involve overblown fears and unnecessarily exaggerated reactions, they often run parallel to genuine real-world concerns. The Pizzagate narrative, for instance, took off around the same time that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire financier with high-profile connections, was arrested on sex trafficking charges. Conspiracy theorists, however, pick and choose which parts of reality they incorporate into their narrative. Yes, a wealthy businessman with high-profile connections was allegedly involved with a sex trafficking ring. No, there’s no evidence that “pizza” was ever used to orchestrate these crimes.
As fact and fiction blur into one, some people just can’t help seeing “evidence” wherever they look. The Pizzagate rumors started, in large part, because conspiracy theorists wanted to find something damning in Podesta’s emails. When they encountered mundane emails about ordering pizzas for volunteers, they saw salacious invitations for satanic rituals.
These illogical leaps continued long after these egregious accusations bore no fruit and, as of this writing, appear to be growing more common. In the summer of 2020, multiple companies have had to issue statements or change business strategies as a growing community of conspiracy theorists turned the faintest hints of suspicion into trending topics. An overpriced cabinet became “proof” that Wayfair was trafficking children. A poorly thought out bottom button became “proof” that Hasbro was grooming children for pedophilia. And a punny pizza shirt became proof that Target was involved with a sex trafficking scheme.
As was the case with the origins of the Pizzagate rumors, no evidence exists to support any of these accusations.
A photograph taken from a drone shows the ‘Sleeping Lady’ mountain in Alaska.
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Mount Susitna, a 4,396-foot mountain in Alaska about 33 miles northwest of Anchorage, is informally known as ‘The Sleeping Lady’ for its resemblance to the shape of a woman at rest:
A photograph of The Sleeping Lady said to have been taken from a drone has been circulated via social media, an image showing the mountain to bear a much stronger resemblance to a recumbent woman when seen from overhead:
Bihorel verified in a Facebook post that this Sleeping Lady exists only in digital form on his computer, not in the physical world:
The Alaska.org website offers a summary of the legend behind the ‘sleeping lady’ name:
Native stories say that the lady was engaged to a man who went off to protect their village before they wed. On the day her fiancé left, she promised to wait in the exact spot where he bade farewell.
After many nights, she fell into a deep sleep waiting for him. Word came back to the village that the men were killed. Seeing how peacefully she was sleeping, the villagers couldn’t bear to wake her up, so she lay there, asleep and waiting for her love to return.
However, a 2003 article published in the Anchorage Chronicle asserted that the common backstory behind the mountains’s name was of modern origin and did not derive, as often claimed, from native lore:
Mount Susitna, known as “Sleeping Lady,” has long been a jewel in Anchorage’s panoramic crown of mountains across Cook Inlet. The historical tale describes the mountain as resembling the profile of a woman asleep, long hair stretched out behind her.
Everyone knows the story comes from Alaska Native lore, right?
Wrong, according to Nancy Lesh, a University of Alaska Anchorage librarian.
Lesh wrote a story about Sleeping Lady in the early 1960s as a senior in high school, and published it in Alaska Northern Lights magazine.
“I think I made the story up, although I can’t definitely say for sure,” she said.
Ann Dixon, who published the children’s picture book “The Sleeping Lady” in 1964, agreed that the story is not a Native legend. Instead, Dixon said, the tale probably originated with prospectors or homesteaders sometime between 1930 and 1950.
In Dixon’s version, the giant woman fell asleep waiting for her beloved to return from battle, unaware that he had been killed.
University of Florida dropped its “Gator Bait” cheer used at sporting events due to the phrase’s invocation of a history of racist imagery of Black children being used as “alligator bait.”
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In the summer and spring of 2020, as protests against institutional racism and police brutality spread across the United States, sports institutions began to look at their own relationships to racist rituals. The police-custody death of a Black man, George Floyd, in May led to a national reckoning around race, including at the University of Florida, which decided to ban the “Gator Bait,” a traditional cheer used at sporting events, for its association with racist imagery.
In June 2020, the university President Kent Fuchs announced a list of steps the university was taking to combat racism. One of these included “moving forward with symbolism and behavior consistent with our values.” He addressed the “Gator Bait” cheer as one such example:
While I know of no evidence of racism associated with our “Gator Bait” cheer at UF sporting events, there is horrific historic racist imagery associated with the phrase. Accordingly University Athletics and the Gator Band will discontinue the use of the cheer.
The cheer involves fans shouting “Gator Bait” and using their arms to mimic an alligator’s mouth chomping when the band plays a school tune associated with the cheer.
According to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, Black children in the South were in fact sometimes used to bait alligators in the late 1800s and early 1900s, though the historicity of that claim is in question. Snopes itself conducted a 2017 investigation into the alleged practice and found a plethora of examples of images and songs in popular culture illustrating this racist trope. Conversations with historians and archival research offered us little evidence that such incidents actually took place, but we also couldn’t actually prove that this cruel practice never took place. Like other demeaning stereotypes about Black people, the notion that dark-skinned children were a favorite food of alligators and crocodiles was commonplace in the antebellum United States.
Regardless, according to their own statements the University of Florida’s awareness of the dark racist history of terms like “alligator bait” led to their discontinuing use of the cheer at sporting events. As such, we rate this claim as “True.”
Sources
Emery, David. “Were Black Children Used as Alligator Bait in the American South?” Snopes. 9 June 2017.
Fuchs, Kent. “Another Step Toward Positive Change Against Racism.” University of Florida. 18 June 2020.
Kim, Allen. “Florida will Ban its ‘Gator Bait’ Cheer Due to the Phrase’s Racist History.” CNN. 18 June 2020.
Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. “Alligator Bait Revisited – June/July 2017.”
Lewis, Sophie. “University of Florida Drops “Gator Bait” Cheer Due to Term’s “Horrific Historic Racist Imagery”.” CBS News. 19 June 2020.
A video shows a naked child using bedsheets to escape from an upper story of Buckingham Palace.
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Context
The video was released on YouTube as a “stealth promotion” for the E! comedy series “The Royals.” It did not depict an actual event, nor was the naked male seen in the video a child.
Origin
A video posted to the “Covert Geopolitics” YouTube channel in November 2019 purported to capture a “fully naked ‘Filipino looking child’ escaping from a window of the Buckingham Palace in the middle of the day.” The clip was accompanied by a voice-over narration that consisted of a long diatribe about “pedophiles” and “Satanists.” Our partial transcript below gives a general idea of what the narrator tried to convey (minus the profanity):
This is how disturbing your world really is. I’ve been holding on to this footage for way too long. Every time I decide to post it, they take it down.
[…]
What’s up? I mean, the top floor [of] Buckingham Palace … just a naked-looking Filipino kid, you know, tied a whole bunch of sheets together just … just for the heck of it. Yeah, that’s it. Just for the heck of it. He’s willing to try to escape naked, leap out of that floor, while a parade is going by. What has happened to that kid that he’s willing to do that? Imagine that.
This kid looks like he falls to death here in about 10 seconds. This is what you are deciding to not listen to and not understand, on everything that I’ve been trying to tell you what’s going on in the world. Your world is run by Satanists, and these are their victims, and we seem to think that it’s just funny and okay. That’s [expletive] sad. The world you live in people, controlled by pedophiles.
[…]
However, neither the video clip nor the description of it offered by “Covert Geopolitics” was real. The “Covert Geopolitics” version of the clip was actually a slowed-down, looped, lower-resolution version of a video — purportedly captured by a tourist in London — that prompted a good deal of consternation and speculation when it mysteriously appeared online in February 2015. The Mirror wrote:
This extraordinary video clip appears to show a man scaling Buckingham Palace — completely nude.
The shocking clip was posted on YouTube earlier today and has so far been watched by more than 500 people.
It appears to show a man climbing down from a window before falling spectacularly.
The incident was captured by bystanders standing over the road from the royal residence.
It is not known whether the man was injured in the apparent fall.
It’s also not clear whether the clip is a hoax, but we will bring you more details as we get them.
A spokesman for Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the video.
That clip, in turn, was a stealth promotion created for the upcoming premiere of the E! Entertainment television series “The Royals,” a “drama about a fictional British Royal family who inhabit a world of luxury and regal tradition that also involves intrigue and unexpected twists, revealing the complexities faced by royals trying to maintain high-profile relationships under scrutiny.” From the E! Online website:
The [naked guy] video made headlines when it was uploaded from what seemed to be a tourist’s YouTube channel while visiting Buckingham Palace during the changing of the guard.
In the video, an almost completely naked man (minus a sock) was seen climbing down a bed sheet, on the side of the palace from a window. Blogs and news agencies from Daily Mail to Cosmopolitan covered the video not knowing whether it was real or fake while users took to the comments to share their opinions.
But now, we have answers. With the “exclusive, never-before-seen extended footage of the scandal” from D-Throned, an online tabloid covering E!’s fictional modern day royal family from “The Royals,” it’s clear that this was a clever way for E! to give viewers a glimpse of the drama that will go down on the upcoming premiere season of the new show.
In the full tabloid video, viewers see that the naked man was actually escaping from Princess Eleanor’s (Alexandra Park) chambers, once again putting her back into the spotlight. “The renegade royal has been spotted dancing wildly at a late night club and snogging at least one member of the cabinet,” the narrator explains.
The promotional strategy was conceived by the advertising company Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), which also created a short video asserting bragging rights over its worldwide success. Producer SF Hartley did the same.
Whatever activities the satanists of the world might be up to, producing viral commercials for cable television dramas is probably not among them.
Sources:
dthronednews. Reign of Error—Eleanor’s Latest Mishap Has Tongues Wagging. https://dthronednews.tumblr.com/post/112601772128/reign-of-error-eleanors-latest-mishap-has-tongues. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.
“E! Entertainment – Hitting the Tabloid Headlines.” BBH Global, https://www.bartleboglehegarty.com/e-entertainment-hitting-the-tabloid-headlines. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.
“E! The Royals SCANDALS.” SF HARTLEY, https://sfhartley.com/e-the-royals. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.
Films, FoxDevil. Tom Malmros – The Royals – ‘D-Throned’ 2016. Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/154292540.
Rkaina, Sam. “Naked Buckingham Palace Video: Watch Clip of Nude Man Appearing to Leave Palace.” Mirror, 27 Feb. 2015, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/buckingham-palace-naked-man-watch-5244989.
Video of Naked Man Is Just E! Promo. https://adweek.it/1ADFovZ. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.
“Viral Video of Naked Man Escaping From Buckingham Palace Revealed to Be Launch of D-Throned Tabloid for E!’s The Royals!” E! Online, 3 Mar. 2015, https://www.eonline.com/news/630827/viral-video-of-naked-man-escaping-from-buckingham-palace-revealed-to-be-launch-of-d-throned-tabloid-for-e-s-the-royals.
Videos show people collapsing on the street due to coronavirus.
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In January 2020, videos supposedly showing people collapsing on the street due to “coronavirus” started to circulate on social media. One example that garnered more than 1.2 million views (since removed) is viewable on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
These videos have been published by a number of tabloids, such as The Daily Mail and The Sun, but not much information about what they show has been confirmed. At the moment, these videos have not been definitively linked to the new coronavirus.
We reached out to the World Health Organization (WHO) for more information about these videos. While they didn’t provide information about any specific footage, they did say that “sudden collapses” from the coronavirus would be “atypical.”
Here are a few other videos shared in January 2020 with captions insinuating they showed people infected with the coronavirus collapsing on the street:
When we examine viral footage like this, one of the first things we do is try to trace the footage back to its source. If we find that the video was circulating before the event it supposedly shows, we can determine that the video was recaptioned and is being shared out of context. In this case, however, we were unable to trace these videos back to a date before the discovery of the coronavirus.
It appears that these videos were truly taken in January 2020 in various locations around China. According to social media reports, these videos first started circulating on apps such as TikTok and were originally posted by random citizens who had witnessed these events. However, that does not mean that the people featured in this video were infected with this virus.
If we strip the above-displayed videos of their captions, we can take a look purely at what the videos show. In one case, it looks like a person was the victim of a traffic accident. In another, it appears that a man suffered a head injury. But since these videos appeared online during heightened hysteria about an outbreak of an illness, it’s easy to see how a passerby may have made the assumption that these incidents were connected to the coronavirus.
WHO explained that the coronavirus is a respiratory illness with symptoms such as “fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties.” A WHO official also told us that “sudden collapses” would be “atypical” for this disease. While we have not been able to definitively determine what these videos show, it seems unlikely that these people collapsed on the street due to coronavirus.
On Jan. 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus as a public health emergency:
The new coronavirus has been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization, as the outbreak continues to spread outside China.
“The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The concern is that it could spread to countries with weaker health systems.
The death toll now stands at 170 people in China.
The WHO said there had been 98 cases in 18 countries outside of the country, but no deaths.
Learn more about the outbreak of coronavirus here.
A missing airliner (Santiago Flight 513) mysteriously landed 35 years later with a cockpit and passenger cabin full of skeletons.
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The story of Santiago Flight 513 has been making its way around conspiracy-minded circles for decades. For the uninitiated, here’s the general gist of the time-traveling tale, as recounted on the website Gaia:
On September 4, 1954, Santiago Airlines Flight 513 departed from Aachen, West Germany, destined for Porto Alegre, Brazil. The flight should have taken around 18 hours.
Instead, it took 35 years. On October 12, 1989, without any contact with air traffic controllers, Santiago Flight 513 was spotted circling the Porto Alegre airport, where it eventually made a successful landing.
[…]
Upon opening the doors, authorities found something still more shocking: the skeletons of 92 people, buckled into their seats. The skeletal body of Captain Miguel Victor Cury was found in his pilot’s seat, hands on the controls, with the engine still humming.
If this story sounds a bit familiar, it may be because it shares quite a few similarities with a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “The Odyssey of Flight 33.” Or, maybe it’s because you used to read the tabloid Weekly World News.
In 1985, the tabloid known for conjuring up farcical stories, published an article about another flight, Pan Am Flight 914, that reportedly had gone missing for 37 years before turning up again and landing without incident. You can read our article debunking that claim here.
While the story of Pan Am Flight 914 is undoubtedly a work of fiction, it must have proved popular with readers. In 1989, the tabloid returned to the genre of physics-defying airplanes. This time, the flight was referred to as Santiago Flight 513, and the crew and passengers on this fictional flight didn’t fare nearly as well. In the Pan Am Flight 914 version, the passengers all survived. On Santiago Flight 513, the plane was full of skeletons when it landed.
This is not a genuine news story. We were unable to find any news reports from credible outlets about a Santiago Flight 513 that disappeared in 1954. We were also unable to find any reports about this flight landing 35 years later in 1989 or a plane landing full of skeletons. The reason is simple: The story of Santiago Flight 513 is a work of fiction created by an infamous tabloid.
A photograph shows a 28-foot-long crocodile that was killed in Australia in 1957.
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An old photograph showing a relatively large crocodile is frequently shared on social media accompanied by the caption: “The only known photograph of the 28-foot crocodile that was killed in Queensland, Australia in 1957”:
This is a genuine photograph of a crocodile. However, it was not 28 feet long, nor was it killed in 1957. This photograph was actually taken decades earlier and shows a crocodile of undetermined size that appears larger due to forced perspective.
The picture was likely taken in 1914 along the banks of the Roper River in the Northern Territory of Australia. While we have yet to find the original source of this picture, we did find a scan of it that seemingly shows its original caption: “Miss Cross and Mr Joynt near crocodile, Roper River 1914, CMS Hart Collection, Darwin.”
We’ve reached out to the National Library of Australia and the Northern Territory Archives Service and will update this article if more information becomes available.
The original caption does line up with other information we were able to find about R.D. Joynt, a reverend who did missionary work in the early 1900s in Australia and published a short book in 1918 about his expeditions entitled “The Roper River Mission.” We were not able to find much information about “Miss Cross.”
While we have been unable to find any information regarding this crocodile’s specific size, it’s very unlikely that it was 28 feet long. For one, there’s never been a crocodile recorded at this size. The current largest, living crocodile in captivity is an 18-foot Australian saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) named Cassius. The previous record holder was “Lolong,” who died in 2013 and measured more than 20 feet in length.
The Guinness Book of World Records notes that the aforementioned species of crocodile can grow to more than 7 meters (nearly 23 feet) in the wild:
The largest species of crocodilian in the world is the estuarine or saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), which ranges throughout the tropical regions of Asia and the Pacific, including the northern coast of Australia. Average adult sizes for male and female C. porosus are 4.6–5.2 metres (15–17 feet) and 3.1–3.4 metres (10 feet 2 inches–11 feet 1 inch), respectively, with outsize males occasionally achieving 6 metres (19 feet 8 inches) or, on rare occasions, even 7 metres (22 feet 11 inches). One of these really large males may weigh as much as 1,000–1,200 kilograms (2,204–2,645 pounds), also making these animals the heaviest reptiles.
The crocodile in the above-displayed photograph may also appear larger than it actually is thanks to an optical illusion known as “forced perspective.” The two people in this photograph are likely standing a few feet behind the crocodile. Because they are further from the camera, they appear smaller in the frame. This makes the crocodile in the foreground appear unusually large. We’ve covered several other examples of “forcedperspective” photographs over the years.
This photograph does not show a 28-foot-long crocodile that was killed in Australia. However, the accompanying caption — “The only known photograph of the 28-foot crocodile that was killed in Queensland, Australia in 1957” — wasn’t made up out of thin air.
In 1957, Krystina Pawlowski shot and killed a crocodile that was reportedly 28 feet long. While stories about this near-mythical-sized beast are popular in Australia, the size of this crocodile has never been confirmed and still draws skepticism from researchers.
Adam Britton, a zoologist who specializes in crocodiles, wrote in 2010:
I’ve never counted “Krys” because it’s just a story — there’s no evidence at all to back it up, and it just seems so far outside the maximum possible range for this species that I’d need some pretty solid evidence to believe it. That’s why it never appears in any official statistics.
A “life-size” replica of this 28-foot-long crocodile, nicknamed “Kris,” can be seen in the town of Normanton in Queensland:
Photo by: Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
No photographs of this alleged 28-foot-long crocodile exist, which is probably why the viral claim was attached to an unrelated image from 1914.
A video shows 300 children who were found frozen alive for purposes of organ harvesting.
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A video of a child covered by ice in a small box has been circulating online for several years attached to a number of different rumors. In October 2019, the video went viral again when it was shared on Twitter along with the claim: “Around 300 hundred kids found frozen alive for the purposes of selling organs for transplantation.”
VIEWER WARNING: The video at the center of this rumor contains images of a dead child and may not be suitable for all viewers.
This video (posted below) has also been shared with other claims about this child. When it first went viral in 2017, it was attached to a rumor holding that the boy climbed into the cooler while his parents were packing vegetables in ice. The boy’s parents didn’t notice, closed the lid, and the boy froze to death.
Here’s the video. Again, this may not suitable for all viewers:
Around 300 hundred kids found frozen alive for the purposes of selling organs for transplantation. This is only one of the many Criminal Groups caught. Poor kids! What a pain for parents/relatives! pic.twitter.com/rWw01GYll9
This video does not show one of nearly 300 children who was found frozen alive for the purposes of organ harvesting, nor does it show a child who died climbing into a cooler unbeknownst to his parents.
The portion of the video showing the child covered in ice was taken in the Guangdong province of China in the summer of 2017. Police looked into this video after it started circulating attached to rumors concerning criminal behavior. They found that the boy had accidentally drowned and that the family packed his body in ice, due to the high temperatures of summer, in order to transport him back home for burial.
A Weibo message posted by the Public Security Bureau of Yiyang City, Hunan province explained (translated via Google and edited for clarity):
“The child in the video… died in the waters of relatives in Guangzhou. Due to the heat in summer, the family put the body into a foam box with ice cubes and took them home to bury them.”
This video shows a family grieving over a little boy who accidentally drowned. It does not show criminal activity related to organ harvesting.
After verifying to the command center of the Liuzhou Public Security Bureau, the jurisdiction and relevant departments, the districts in our city have not received any warning that the traffickers will freeze the children. Therefore, the above information is a rumor.
It should also be noted that the viral video shown above contains a few jarring edits. The first 15 seconds, in fact, which show people gathered near a body of water and then two people on the ground getting beat up, appears to come from an entirely separate incident. Zhejiang Online reported in 2017 that the first portion of this video actually shows an unrelated incident in the town of Shaojiaqiaozhen in the Chinese province Guizhou in which two men were beat up in December 2017 after being accused of attempting to defraud elderly people:
On December 14, 2017, Wang and Lumou and other four people went to the triangle dam village of Shaojiaqiao Town to sell plaster to middle-aged and elderly people. The people in the village of the dam were mistaken for fraud and theft. Beaten. Someone took a live video and posted it online, rumoring that “the gangsters are robbing children and being besieged.”
The fact that this video features footage from at least two different incidents and has been shared with a variety of unfounded rumors should immediately raise some red flags for viewers. The claim that this video shows a child who was frozen alive for the purposes of harvesting organs is unsubstantiated and appears to have been made up out of whole cloth.
The portion of the video showing a child covered in ice in a small box actually shows a family grieving as they prepared this child for burial after he accidentally drowned.
A C-SPAN video shows former Vice President Joe Biden confessing that he “bribed” Ukraine to drop the Burisma investigation.
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As an impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions commenced in October 2019, so did partisan invocations of whataboutism — a logical fallacy that involves “a reversal of accusation, arguing that an opponent is guilty of an offense just as egregious or worse than what the original party was accused of doing, however unconnected the offenses may be.”
One example of such was a video clip posted to C-SPAN’s website on Sept. 21, 2019 under the title “Joe Biden Confesses to Bribery.” The video was accompanied by a caption reading “Former Vice President Joe Biden confesses to being in charge of Ukraine for the Obama Administration, and withholding $1 billion in loan guarantees from the USA to force Ukraine to fire prosecutor who was looking into the company that Hunter Biden was receiving $83,000+ PER MONTH from”:
The user-created clip fostered a false impression by pairing a misleading caption with an excerpt from a much longer video with no context. (The video carries a statement from C-SPAN noting that “This clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN.”)
President Trump has been accused by a whistleblower, and is under a House-led impeachment inquiry, for allegedly attempting to coerce Ukraine into provide damaging information on Trump political rival Joe Biden by withholding crucial military aid from that country. The video on C-SPAN’s website attempted to show Biden, a potential political rival for the presidency in 2020, admitting to a parallel wrongdoing during a trip to Ukraine in 2016:
And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
The video clip was taken from a portion of a talk Biden gave in January 2018 at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in Washington, D.C., which was held in conjunction with the publication of the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Biden had co-authored an article for that month’s issue with former White House official Michael Carpenter, titled “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies.”
In the excerpted portion of the clip, Biden was discussing his efforts on behalf of the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine into prosecuting corruption and firing Viktor Shokin, an ineffective prosecutor. That effort by Biden has been used by Trump supporters to argue, inaccurately, that Biden single-handedly had Shokin fired because Shokin was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian group of energy exploration and production companies of which Biden’s son Hunter was a board member.
However, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma, but for his failure to pursue corruption investigations — including investigations connected to Burisma. And Biden wasn’t alone in the effort to push Shokin out, but rather was spearheading the Obama administration’s policy, which represented a consensus among diplomats, officials from various European countries, and the International Monetary Fund that Shokin was an impediment to rooting out corruption in his country, according to Bloomberg:
Shokin became prosecutor general in February 2015. Over the next year, the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund criticized officials for not doing enough to fight corruption in Ukraine …
The U.S. plan to push for Shokin’s dismissal didn’t initially come from Biden, but rather filtered up from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Embassy personnel had called for U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine to be tied to broader anti-corruption efforts, including Shokin’s dismissal, this person said.
Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion [in U.S. loan guarantees] if Ukraine didn’t crack down on corruption reportedly came in March [2016]. That same month, hundreds of Ukrainians demonstrated outside President Petro Poroshenko’s office demanding Shokin’s resignation, and he was dismissed.
Moreover, among the reasons the U.S. and others sought Shokin’s ouster was his failure to assist with or pursue an investigation of Burisma Holdings’ owner:
Hunter Biden joined [Burisma’s] board in April 2014, two months after U.K. authorities requested information from Ukraine as part of a probe against [Burisma Holdings owner Mykola] Zlochevsky related to money laundering allegations. Zlochevsky had been minister of environmental protection under then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in February 2014 after mass protests.
After the U.K. request, Ukrainian prosecutors opened their own case, accusing Zlochevsky of embezzling public funds. Burisma and Zlochevsky have denied the allegations.
The case against Zlochevsky and his Burisma Holdings was assigned to Shokin, then a deputy prosecutor. But Shokin and others weren’t pursuing it, according to the internal reports from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office reviewed by Bloomberg.
In a December 2014 letter, U.S. officials warned Ukrainian prosecutors of negative consequences for Ukraine over its failure to assist the U.K., which had seized Zlochevsky’s assets, according to the documents.
Shokin took no action to pursue cases against Zlochevsky throughout 2015, said [Vitaliy] Kasko, who was Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation and helping in asset-recovery investigations. Kasko said he had urged Shokin to pursue the investigations.
“There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko said in an interview. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”
That’s not to say the former vice president’s 2018 commentary at the Council on Foreign Relations meeting was worded well. Before his remarks morphed into “evidence” for claims that Biden ordered Ukraine to fire Shokin for investigating Burisma, they were picked up by Russian government-controlled outlets such as RT and Sputnik to levy accusations that the Obama administration was engaged in heavy-handed meddling in Ukraine’s affairs.
Biden’s remarks can bee seen in full in the video below:
A photograph shows a group of people playfully gathered around their co-worker after he died of a heart attack.
In September 2019, a picture supposedly showing a group of people playfully gathered around their dead co-worker for a selfie went viral after it was shared on the website iFunny under the caption, “Man suffers heart attack, dies at work, coworkers gather for group selfie thinking he’d fallen asleep.”
This is a genuine photograph, but the “dead” man isn’t actually dead. He’s just sleeping.
The photograph was first posted online in 2016. It was originally shared in the “TIFU” (today I f*cked up) section of Reddit under the caption: “TIFU by falling asleep at the job on my second day.” This picture was then subsequently posted to “PSBattles,” a section of Reddit dedicated to photoshopping images, and quickly became a viral meme:
Shortly after the picture went viral, this sleepy individual (a Redditor by the name of TheOrangeDuke) spoke with the Huffington Post about his internet infamy:
“One of the associates noticed me sleeping,” he told The Huffington Post. “And it just went downhill from there!”
The lighthearted staff decided to snap an office photo with the slumbering intern. When he awoke, he found the picture so funny that he posted it on Reddit …
And believe it or not, TheOrangeDuke, who would like for him and his company to remain anonymous, did not get fired for catching zzz’s at work. He’s on his third day of his internship and had a perfectly logical reason for his catnap.
“I have been diagnosed with anemia, as shown by my amazing skin color, that causes me to be ultra sleepy!” he said.
CNBC also interviewed “TheOrangeDuke,” identified as Eduard Paraschivescu, in 2016:
“It doesn’t really bother me — I’m not naked, I’m not getting shamed,” he told CBC News. “I’m just surrounded by amazing people who are having a blast!”
A video shared widely in August 2019 shows a dangerous type of worm inside of a bell pepper.
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What’s True
The video is authentic and does show a real worm moving about inside a green bell pepper.
What’s False
The experts we consulted agreed the worm was likely to be a mermithid nematode, and therefore harmless to humans. One expert explained that even if it were a different type of worm, it did not resemble any variety known to infect humans or pose a threat to them.
In August 2019, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the facts surrounding a viral video clip that showed what appeared to be a long, stringy worm of some kind moving about inside a green bell pepper.
The video was re-posted by multiple Facebook users, many of whom warned viewers about the worm, which several of them described as potentially dangerous, and some identified as “the simla mirch” worm.
On Aug. 20, a Facebook user from Brazil posted the video, garnering almost 10 million views within a week. Her caption warned (translated from Portuguese): “Be careful with peppers … this worm is called Simla Mirch … a new worm which lives in wet areas of the body … It can cause pain and ultimately lead to death”:
Other widely sharedvideos did not specifically claim the worm could inflict pain or kill humans, but did advise viewers, in broader terms, to “be careful.” Some videos identified the worm as “Simla Mirch.”
The video was undoubtedly a curiosity, and it’s not surprising that the unappetizing spectacle of a worm moving about inside a popular vegetable caused it to be shared widely on social media. However, some of the specific claims associated with it were inaccurate.
The worm
According to experts we consulted, the creature shown in the video is very likely to be a mermithid nematode worm (a member of the Mermithidae family and the nematoda phylum). They are parasitic to insects and spiders, but they do not parasitize humans, and they are not harmful to us.
Ben Hanelt, a senior lecturer in biology at the University of New Mexico and an expert in parasitic worms, told Snopes in an email: “This is very likely a mermithid nematode. These are not pathogenic to humans; only to insects.”
John Janovy, emeritus professor of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an expert in parasite ecology, told Snopes “There is a chance” the worm shown in the video was a mermithid nematode. If so, he told us, it “is of no danger to humans.”
Matt Bolek, an associate professor of integrative biology at Oklahoma State University and an expert in parasite ecology and evolution, wrote:
“As far as I can tell to me this looks typical of a mermithid nematode. These are parasites of insects and spiders and emerge from the arthropod host to seek either soil or water to develop to a free living adult worm. Not dangerous to humans and they [humans] cannot become infected with this parasite.”
Bolek said it was possible that the worm was a horsehair worm (of the Nematomorpha phylus), but this was unlikely because juvenile horsehair worms die quickly after leaving their hosts, and the adults are darker in color than the worm shown in the video, and do not move in the same way.
He told us that the horsehair worm also does not infect humans, and “there are really no other nematodes that have that coloration, move that way or are that skinny that have been reported to infect humans.” So whether the worm shown in the video was a mermithid nematode (which several experts told us was likely), or another kind, it was not harmful to humans.
That refutes the rather alarming claim made in the most widely-shared posting of the video, that the worm “can cause pain and ultimately lead to death.”
The life cycle of parasitic nematodes is not for the faint of heart. The worm shown in the video likely entered the pepper while it was a parasite of an insect or spider that bored its way inside. That is, the arthropod was likely carrying a juvenile mermithid nematode inside of its body, and when the worm reached adulthood, it emerged from the arthropod, killing it, and becoming “free living,” that is, no longer a parasite of another animal.
The video below shows three mermithid nematodes emerging from their host, a mosquito. It is not suited to queasy viewers:
The pepper
“Shimla mirch” (misspelled as “simla mirch” in some Facebook posts) is simply a Hindi name for Capsicum annuum, a species of the pepper plant and a popular way of describing bell peppers in India and Pakistan.
Some social media users who posted the video mistakenly described the worm, and not the pepper, as “simla mirch,” apparently due to a misreading of earlier posts by users in India and Pakistan, many of whomwrote:
“Be careful of shimla mirch. New type of worm. Cut properly, check and cook.”
To readers in India and Pakistan, it would have been clear that these posts were warning viewers to be vigilant when using bell peppers (shimla mirch) because of the presence of a “new type of worm.” However, some readers outside those countries understood “shimla mirch” to be the name of the “new type of worm” and shared the footage along with that significant inaccuracy.
Conclusion
The video that went viral in August 2019 is authentic and does indeed show a worm moving about inside a green bell pepper. However, according to the experts we consulted, it is likely to be a mermithid nematode, which is not parasitic of humans and does not pose a threat to us, contrary to the warnings posted on social media along with the video.
Furthermore, the worm shown in the video is not “new,” although August 2019 was likely the first time that millions of viewers had come across the mermithid nematode. Finally, “shimla mirch” (misspelled as “simla mirch”) is a Hindi name for the bell pepper shown in the video and not the worm itself.
On Aug. 21, 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump articulated a belief that he is “the chosen one,” the “King of Israel,” or the “second coming of God.”
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What’s True
In a brief aside during remarks about the ongoing U.S.-China trade war, Trump said “I am the chosen one.”
What’s False
Trump’s “chosen one” aside was likely tongue-in-cheek, not a sincere profession of any belief in his own messianic status. Separately, in a series of tweets, Trump quoted a radio host who claimed Jewish people in Israel admired the U.S. president so greatly that it was as though Trump were the King of Israel or the second coming of Christ. Trump never himself articulated any such belief.
In August 2019, we received inquiries from readers about multiple claims that U.S. President Donald Trump had, in one day, called himself the “second coming of God,” the “King of Israel,” or “the chosen one.”
On Aug. 21, the left-leaning Facebook page Occupy Democrats posted a meme that featured a quotation attributed to Trump: “I’m the King of Israel. I’m the chosen one” along with an unattributed quotation that read: “The Anti-christ will pretend that he is the son of God.” (That quotation is not Biblical in origin, and appears to have originated in a famous medieval text about the antichrist, written by the French Benedictine monk Adso of Montier-en-der.)
The same Facebook page posted a second meme on similar themes, writing:
Today, Trump:
Promoted the idea that he is “King of Israel.” Retweeted that he’s “the second coming of God.” Then said he’s “the chosen one.”
And in a third post on the same subject, Occupy Democrats published a meme that read: “Trump says he’s ‘the second coming’ and ‘the chosen one.’ I say we throw him in the sea to see if he can walk on it.”
Other mostly left-leaning sources posted similar claims on Twitter, garnering a high volume of retweets. One of them wrote:
“When the president of the United States starts declaring that he is: – ‘The King of Israel’ – ‘The Chosen One’ – ‘The Second coming of God’
It means he is out of his goddamn mind & it’s time for the 25th amendment now.”
When the president of the United States starts declaring that he is:
— “The King of Israel” — “The Chosen One” — “The Second coming of God”
It means he is out of his goddamn mind & it’s time for the #25thAmendmentNow.
The @BarristerSecret account tweeted that Trump had “unironically [declared] himself ‘the second coming of God,’” and the controversial surgeon and left-leaning activist Dr. Eugene Gu claimed the president had “[praised] himself as ‘the King of Israel’ and ‘the second coming of God.’”
Vanity Fair also published an article with the headline “Trump Declares Himself ‘King of Israel,’ ‘the Second Coming of God.’”
The reality was much more complicated, and the claims and reports mentioned above largely misrepresented what Trump actually said or wrote by removing them from their proper context or issuing inaccurate descriptions of them.
Analysis
‘The chosen one’
While speaking with reporters about the ongoing U.S. trade war with China, Trump did briefly say “I am the chosen one,” but it’s quite possible, even likely, that he was merely speaking tongue-in-cheek or for rhetorical effect.
His remarks came on Aug. 21, while he was speaking with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. In response to a question about recent talk of an impending economic recession, linked to the U.S.-China trade war, Trump held forth on what he presented as sharp economic practices by China, a common topic of discussion for the president. He said:
“One thing I have to do is economically take on China because China has been ripping us off for many years. President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama and others should have done this long before me. My life would be much easier — although I enjoy doing it — but my life would be much easier if I just said ‘let China continue to rip off the United States.’ It would be much easier, but I can’t do that …
“… Somebody said ‘It’s Trump’s trade war’ — this isn’t my trade war, this is a trade war that should have taken place a long time ago, by a lot of other presidents … Somebody had to do it. [Turning to the sky] I am the chosen one. Somebody had to do it, so I’m taking on China. I’m taking on China on trade, and you know what? We’re winning …”
The concept of a “chosen one” — an individual predestined by prophecy to perform the role of a savior or messiah for a particular people — has roots in various cultures and religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. However, it has evolved beyond those parameters to gain much looser and more secular connotations.
It is a common trope in fiction and literature, especially science fiction and fantasy (think of Harry Potter), and is also frequently invoked, sometimes with tongue in cheek, in the context of sports. For example, the basketball player LeBron James famously had “Chosen 1” tattooed on his back, after Sports Illustrated published a cover story about him, describing the then-phenomenally promising high school junior as “the chosen one.”
In theory, Trump could have been seriously declaring a sincere belief that he is destined by prophecy to be the savior of the American people, or indeed the world, when he said as an aside “I am the chosen one,” during a discussion with reporters about U.S.-China economic relations. However, it seems much more likely to us, especially in light of his somewhat theatrical glance to the skies, that he was either using the phrase as a figure of speech born out of his apparently rather certain belief in his own talents, or that he was simply speaking with tongue firmly in cheek, or a little bit of both.
If the U.S. president refers to himself as “the chosen one” again, and with less ambiguous, more clearly messianic connotations, we will update this article accordingly.
‘The King of Israel’ and ‘the second coming of God’
Trump never declared or called or described himself as “the King of Israel” or “the second coming of God.” Further, he did not even quote someone who personally professed that belief, and the person he did quote was not even claiming that others held that belief. As such, many sources, including those mentioned above, grossly misrepresented the pronouncements made in this episode.
However, in a decision that concerned many observers, the president did directly quote the conspiracytheorist and radio host Wayne Allyn Root as saying that “The Jewish people in Israel love [Trump] like he’s the King of Israel” and “like he is the second coming of God.” Trump did this in a series of tweets, also on Aug. 21, which he prefaced by writing “Thank you Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words”:
…. like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God … But American Jews don’t know him or like him. They don’t even know what they’re doing or saying anymore. It makes no sense! But that’s OK, if he keeps doing what he’s doing, he’s good for …..
Trump almost entirely accurately quoted remarks Root made on his “Newsmax” TV show on Aug. 20. In response to a caller who lamented the purported irrationality and blind loyalty of Democrat voters, Root held forth on the traditional support for the Democrat party among Jewish voters in the U.S., in contrast with what he presented as widespread support for Trump among Jews in Israel. He said:
“… 75 percent of all Jews vote Democrat and they don’t like Trump. And this is the greatest president for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America. Trump’s the best president for Israel in the history of the world. And the Jewish people love him like he is the king of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God. And in America, American Jews don’t like him. They don’t even know what they’re doing or saying any more, it makes no sense.”
The remarks in question can be watched here (beginning at 36:45). Root was echoing similar statements Trump himself made earlier that day. Speaking to reporters at the White House, the president addressed the controversy over Israel’s reversed decision to bar U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from entering the country.
Trump proclaimed: “Where has the Democratic party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people [Tlaib and Omar] over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
Root’s original remarks came in the form of a simile, meaning it should have been clear by definition that he was not claiming that Trump actually is the King of Israel or the second coming of Christ, nor even that Jewish people in Israel believe he is those things. Rather, in order to emphasize what he perceives as the U.S. president’s popularity among Israeli Jews, Root was indulging in rhetorical license, using the device of a simile, by saying Israeli Jews loved Trump as if he were the King of Israel or the second coming of Christ.
(It is a matter for a separate discussion that the second component of Root’s simile was woefully theologically illiterate. An important distinction between Christianity and Judaism is that Judaism traditionally rejects the notion of Christ as a messiah, thereby rendering the concept of a second coming inapplicable, and this part of Root’s simile nonsensical by definition.)
Root later emphasized the fact that he was engaging in simile, rather than claiming Trump was, in fact, the king of Israel or the second coming of Christ, or even that Israeli Jews regard him as such. During a discussion with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Root’s “Newsmax” TV show, Root said:
“… They [liberal opponents] took everything I said out of context … Did I really say, on national TV, on my ‘Newsmax’ show last night, that Donald Trump is the second coming of Christ, and he’s the king of the Jews? No. I said in Israel they treat him like he’s the second coming of Christ and the King of the Jews. And it’s a New York expression, you know, it’s like you and I could have been having an expression [sic] and I’d say, ‘Are you kidding me? In Israel they treat him like he’s the King of the Jews.’ Does that really mean that I believe he’s the King of the Jews? … Obviously, I didn’t say that.”
We know that certain Christians in the United States and beyond have professed a fringebelief in Trump as a Christ-like or messianic figure. It’s even possible, theoretically, that Trump himself might harbor similar suspicions of his own destiny. But the series of statements he made on Aug. 21, 2019, did not constitute evidence of any such belief on his part.
The president did say “I am the chosen one,” but he made the remark as an aside, combining it with a theatrical glance towards the heavens, while making a broader point about his engaging in a supposedly overdue trade war with China. The context, along with Trump’s penchant for flippant and tongue-in-cheek asides, makes it highly unlikely he was choosing that moment to earnestly articulate some sincere belief in his own messianic destiny.
In a series of tweets, Trump quoted a controversial conspiracy theorist, Root, who had lavished praise upon the president, professing that Jewish people in Israel so admired Trump that it was as though he was the “King of Israel” or “the second coming of God.” But Root (as he later confirmed) was using exaggerated language as part of a simile. He was not making the factual claim that Israeli Jews literally believe that Trump is the King of Israel, or the second coming of Christ (the latter of which claims would make no sense for theological reasons, anyway.)
So the widely promulgated claim that Trump, simply by quoting Root’s remarks, was in effect declaring himself to be the King of Israel or the second coming of Christ, was inaccurate by a considerable distance. Trump did not even quote someone who professed that belief, and the person he did quote was not even claiming that others held that belief.
St. Patrick led the genocide of a contingent of Twa ‘pygmies’ from Central Africa, who were the original inhabitants of Ireland.
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In the summer of 2019, we received renewed inquiries from readers about an unusual interpretation of the legacy of St. Patrick, one that claimed the patron saint of Ireland was responsible for the genocide of an African tribe who were purportedly the original inhabitants of that island.
The theory has given rise to many memes and social mediaposts that in recent years have been shared widely, especially around March 17, the feast day of St. Patrick. The memes are often accompanied by images that appear to show white men posing with African pygmies.
A typical version of the meme claims:
“The Twa pygmies of Ireland, the original inhabitants. The source of [the] leprechaun legend. When you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day that’s the celebration of their genocide.”
The theory was neatly summarized by the author and speaker B.F. Nkrumah in a widely shared Facebook video in March 2018:
The theory is not backed by any historical evidence, and as a set of factual claims, it can be dismissed. One prominent historian told Snopes it was, simply, “complete nonsense.”
The origins of the “Twa” theory of Irish prehistory are not entirely clear. However, it appears to be informed by what is sometimes referred to as “Afrocentrism,” an approach to historical study that emphasizes the role and achievements of African people in the evolution of Western civilization. The theory also seems to be influenced by euhemerism, an unusual strand of pseudohistory that was particularly popular in the 19th century.
Background
The Twa (or “Batwa”) are a people indigenous to the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. They are sometimes referred to as Twa pygmies, an anthropological term denoting their relatively short stature.
Although some exact details are lacking about the life of St. Patrick, it is generally accepted among historians that he lived in the 5th Century A.D., grew up in Roman-occupied Britain (probably in Wales or the West coast of England), was kidnapped as a boy and taken to the island of Ireland as a slave for six years, then returned to Britain. He trained as a Christian cleric and went back to Ireland as a missionary.
One of the legends attached to Patrick in the centuries following his death was that he banished the snakes from Ireland. This is not based in fact. No fossil records have shown that snakes were ever indigenous to the island of Ireland, and the myth was likely a metaphor for the Christianization (and decline in paganism) for which Patrick and other early Irish saints are credited.
The earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation on the island of Ireland dates to between 10,640 and 10,860 B.C. No evidence exists to show that Twa pygmies settled the island at any point in history, beyond which it makes little sense to imagine that a traditional hunter-forager people that emerged from landlocked Central Africa would have had the geographical awareness or technical knowledge to construct and sail ships thousands of miles northwest.
Development of the theory
We found several iterations of the Twa theory of Irish prehistory. One version, published in 2007 by the website of the Amen Ankh community in Kansas City, Missouri, offered the following outline:
Indigo melaninated people are the original “Snake Headed” people of Ireland. We are the ones who were driven off (and/or slaughtered,) in the name of a Catholic “saint” named Patrick, who ironically wore the symbols of Ptah and Ausar. Our Black Ancestors of the east knew about the powers of all of the indigenous Herbs, Roots, and plants like Clover and Thistle. We are the first mound builders and healers all over the planet. This shines a new reference on the 1st REAL “Europeans.”
The Twa/Khoisan were known as elves, midgets, or pygmy (a slur on small people of African Descent) who have a history pre-dating the Greco Roman Judeo timeline history of Adam and Eve by more 200,000 years. The Ancient Twa people were nomadic, They journeyed and migrated all continents and island over the planet, spreading to Northern Ireland, Germany and the rest of Europe, and the Asian continent, and had settled in these western lands, prior to any of the influences of the Romans or later, the Roman Catholic Church. They had a cultural, technological, and philosophical impact, and influenced the establishments of societies, known as Pagans or Druids.
One of the cultural influences the Druids/Twa had was the fact that they were known for their hair, who many grew into locks that looked like snakes. Much later, the Heru Loc, worn to one side of the temple, was represented in the fez or head covering that also depicted the Kemet symbols known is a Uraeus or cobra raised to strike, which is the same snake image you see worn as a Menes, by the Queens and Kings of ancient Kemet (Egypt/Nubia Ka Ma Ta). In many African cultures, the serpent is not a symbol of evil but one of eternal life, regeneration, power, protection, and wisdom. The Snake also represented the Kundalini awakening vortex found in the chakra energy traveling up our spines and the helix of our DNA.
Much of this account is simply incoherent, and the only would-be evidence put forward for the claim that St. Patrick engaged in genocide against the Twa is that the knotted hairstyle of Twa and ethnic Bantu peoples bears something of a resemblance to snakes.
This is a quintessential example of pseudohistory — starting off with the requirement of proving that Twa pygmies were the original inhabitants not only of Ireland but of the whole European continent, and then retrospectively finding any available connections (even tentative symbolic links), including links to a different cultural tradition to the Central African Twa pygmies, that of ancient Egypt. This is not even to mention the unexplained and inexplicable introduction of Hindu concepts (Kundalini and chakra) into the theory.
Another good example of this incoherence can be found in the same blog post’s explanation of how the purported etymology of the word “leprechaun” establishes a link between African pygmies and the island of Ireland:
“The word ‘leprechaun’ can be taken from several sources. Breaking down the syllables and removing the vowels, you can reveal the earliest Twa/Nubian/Kemetic origins: le-pr-rah ka-hn. Le (Leo/lion/king), Pr (House/temple), Re/ra-rah (Sun/Leo/lion), Ka (an attendant spirit supposedly dwelling as a vital force in a man or statue, the spiritual part of an individual believed by ancient Egyptians to survive the body after death). ‘Kahn’ is a title for a sovereign or military ruler or chief.”
This is not how etymology actually works. For one thing, the purported etymological components of the word are supposed to amount to some meaning. That meaning is never provided in this case — are we to conclude that “leprechaun,” based on its Egyptian linguistic roots, means “Lion spirit in a king’s house”? Or “Sun ruler of the lion’s spirit temple”? The explanation fails woefully, even on its own terms.
Moreover, this etymological analysis begins with the imposition of an unacceptable and arbitrary linguistic rule (“removing the vowels”), which the analysis itself promptly violates by including multiple vowels. Once again, the supposed origins of the word “leprechaun” are claimed to reside in ancient Egypt, not in the culture and linguistic history of the sub-Saharan Twa peoples.
So even if this etymological breakdown was accurate or logical, it would establish a linguistic link between Egypt and Ireland, not the Central African Twa pygmies and Ireland. What implications would this have for the core claim that the Twa were the original settlers and inhabitants of Ireland?
This type of goalpost-shifting and cherrypicking is typical of much pseudohistory, including Afrocentrist pseudohistory. In her book “Not Out of Africa,” the classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz described the Afrocentrist push to claim for the ancient Egyptians major intellectual innovations which belonged, in fact, to the ancient Greeks:
“Afrocentrism is not simply an alternative interpretation of history, offered on the basis of complex data or ambiguities in the evidence: there is simply no reason to deprive the Greeks of the credit for their own achievements. The basic facts are clear enough, at least to dispassionate observers. In effect, Afrocentrists are demanding that ordinary historical methodology be discarded in favor of a system of their own choosing. This system allows them to ignore chronology and facts if they are inconvenient for their purposes. In other words, their historical methodology allows them to alter the course of history to meet their own specific needs.”
In reality, the word “leprechaun” is ultimately derived, relatively straightforwardly, from two roots: the Old Irish “lú” (“small”) and “chorpán” (“body,” from the Latin “corpus”).
Euhemerism
As well as elements of Afrocentrist pseudohistory, the theory also shows signs of having been indirectly influenced by a relatively obscure pseudohistorical movement that was particularly popular in the 19th century.
Euhemerism was an approach to folklore and mythology that sought to explain popular fairy tales and myths as being ultimately grounded in historical fact. It constituted an unusual combination of rationalism (elves and fairies were not supernatural beings) with pseudohistory (the stories around them originated in an actual, historical race of pygmies that occupied parts of Europe thousands of years ago).
At least two recentaccounts of the Twa theory of Irish prehistory cited a euhemerist text from 1911, “Riddles of Prehistoric Times,” a book written by James H. Anderson, a retired attorney from Iowa. Anderson posited a broader theory of early pygmy races being the first settlers of several parts of the world, including Ireland:
“The first inhabitants of southern Europe, northern Africa, Arabia, France and the British Islands were a race of small men, who did not average in height more than about 4 feet 5 inches. They were of slight build, with dark complexion. They were cave-dwellers emanations [sic] from Lemuria [a fictional land mass in the Indian Ocean, similar to the mythical island of Atlantis] … They were an African people, and there appears evidence that they sometimes practiced cannibalism.
“It is said that the first people in Ireland were the Formatians. They were a dark, stunted race, utterly savage, using rough, unwrought stone implements. So far as can be learned, they did not know the use of fire. It is said they came from Africa on ships.”
Several points discredit this account and therefore any theory or historical claims based on it. Firstly, the reference to Lemuria as an actual, historical inhabited place (as opposed to a mythical land mass) is a red flag, as are Anderson’s similar references to Atlantis elsewhere in the book.
Moreover, Anderson refers to the “Formatians” as the first inhabitants of Ireland. We found no reference in any other historical accounts to such people, and the author probably intended to refer to the “Fomorians,” who were a race of supernatural, villainous, sea-faring giants in Irish mythology. They did not exist in history.
Later in the book, Anderson described the “Formorians” (a misspelling) in the following way:
“The ancient Irish historians tell of Ireland being settled before the flood by Formorians [sic] led by the Lady, Banblia or Kesair, her maiden name being h’Erni or Berba … The Formorians [sic] were said to be descended from Noah; they lived by piracy. Their chief god was Baal, Bel, from whom Belfast was named, the god of the Sun …”
In reality, the place name “Belfast” (the capital city of present-day Northern Ireland) is derived from two Irish words: “Béal” (meaning mouth) and “feirste” (a form of the word “fearsaid,” meaning “sand-bank ford”). The river mouth in question is that of the famous River Lagan, on whose banks Belfast is located.
Those types of basic and glaring factual errors are scattered throughout Anderson’s book, which also repeatedly presents mythological places and figures as having actually existed in history. Present-day versions of the Afrocentrist theory of Irish prehistory, and St. Patrick’s genocide of the Twa pygmies, in particular, actually undermine their own credibility by citing accounts such as Anderson’s as supportive evidence.
Severalversions of the theory also cite the work of an influential euhemerist, the Scottish folklorist David MacRitchie. In particular, multiple present-day iterations of the “African pygmy” theory of Irish prehistory refer to passages from MacRitchie’s two-volume 1884 book “Ancient and Modern Britons,” in which he laid out the theory of a race of pygmies who populated Ireland, Britain and parts of Scandinavia during the Stone Age. That theory has been discredited by the fact that no archaeological discoveries have ever substantiated it.
In one instance, MacRitchie attempted to draw inferences from the etymology of certain Irish phrases, writing: “That the wild tribes of Ireland were black men is hinted by the fact that a ‘wild Irishman’ is in Gaelic a ‘black Irishman’ (“Dubh Eireannach”).
However, the use of the word “dubh” in the Irish language is complicated. Literally, it means “black” or “dark,” but it has various somewhat poetic and figurative meanings when used as a modifier and prefix, such as in the phrase “Dubh Eireannach.” In support of his etymological proposition, MacRitchie cited an 1825 Irish dictionary published by the Scottish lexicographer Robert Archibald Armstrong.
That document lists dozens of compound words using “dubh” as a prefix, with widely varying meanings, for example: “dubh-cheist” (literally “black/dark question”) for “puzzle”; “dubh-fhocal” (literally “black/dark word”) for “riddle” or “parable”; and “dubh-bhuille” (literally “black/dark blow”) for a “fatal blow.”
It would clearly be a mistake, then, to interpret a given use of the word “dubh” as literally meaning “black or dark in physical appearance,” as opposed to having some other metaphorical sense. The very source used by MacRitchie himself establishes that much, and therefore undermines his etymological argument, as cited by many proponents of the present-day “Twa pygmy” theory of Irish prehistory.
Moreover, even if the phrase “Dubh Eireannach” was intended to literally mean “an Irishman dark in appearance,” it’s important to remember that racial spectrums vary between cultures, and what might have been regarded as dark complexion in Stone Age Ireland would have been described very differently indeed by an inhabitant of Africa at that time.
Conclusion
The “African pygmy” theory of Irish prehistory, and in particular the theory of St. Patrick’s genocide of the Twa people, represent a fascinating, if confused and at times incoherent, jumble of various long-discredited strands of pseudohistory and euhemerized versions of Irish, Bantu, Egyptian and other mythologies.
Kairn Klieman, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston and author of a history of the Batwa pygmies of Central Africa, dismissed the theory as a “mish-mash of ideas,” but said it was an interesting attempt to understand the ways in which various geographically separated cultures developed similar ideas about “little people,” in particular conferring on them magical and supernatural powers.
Writing by email, she told us the theory explores “real similarities that exist in terms of myths about small people associated with the earth (sprites, leprechauns, mythical pygmies, mythical batwa). These myths existed since Egyptian times and there is a long intellectual history of how they came, in Western minds, to be associated with primordial humans. When the Europeans met Batwa, they unloaded all of this myth onto them.”
However, Klieman added that: “The idea that ‘pygmies’ or small dark people inhabited the world in ancient days is a 19th century trope that builds on the ancient myth of the pygmy in the western world.”
We also put the theory to Dáibhí Ó’Cróinín, professor of history at the National University of Ireland in Galway, and the author of a history of early medieval Ireland. His emailed response was unequivocal: “Complete nonsense,” he wrote.
On March 26, 2018, Michael Stone (also known as “Progressive Secular Humanist”) published a blog post on the religion and spirituality website Patheos with a provocative title: “Conservative Christians Accept Trump’s Incest Fantasy — It’s Biblical.”
The post, which periodically goes viral, does not deliver on the headline premise of providing evidence that “conservative Christians” have defended alleged incestuous fantasies by the U.S. president with the Bible. It does, however, cite several comments based in public record, including the alleged Donald Trump quote displayed in the meme accompanying the article:
Both Karen McDougal, a model and Playboy Playmate, and Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, have alleged in press interviews that they had affairs with Trump, and that he said each reminded him of his daughter, Ivanka Trump. In some cases, these claims predated Trump’s political career. In 2011, Daniels gave an interview to In Touch Weekly magazine. Though unpublished until 2018, Daniels stated in a transcribed interview to reporter Jordi Lippe-McGraw that Trump compared her to his daughter:
DANIELS: [Donald Trump] bragged about his daughter quite a bit though. He was very proud of her, which is nice. He told me once that I was someone to be reckoned with, beautiful and smart just like his daughter. She is smart and beautiful, so I guess that’s a compliment.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, repeated this claim in a March 2018 interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s “60 Minutes”:
STEPHANIE CLIFFORD: Yes. So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little — you know had underwear on and stuff and I just gave him a couple of swats.
ANDERSON COOPER: This was done in a joking manner.
CLIFFORD: Yes. And from that moment on, he was a completely different person.
COOPER: How so?
CLIFFORD: He quit talking about himself and he asked me things and I asked him things and it just became like more appropriate.
COOPER: It became more comfortable.
CLIFFORD: Yeah. He was like, “Wow, you — you are special. You remind me of my daughter.” You know — he was like, “You’re smart and beautiful, and a woman to be reckoned with, and I like you. I like you.”
McDougal also alleged that Trump compared her to Ivanka during the course of their affair. From a March 2018 interview also conducted by Cooper:
COOPER: Did he ever compare you to any of his kids?
MCDOUGAL: You know, he, he’s very proud of Ivanka, as he should be. I mean, she’s a brilliant woman. She’s beautiful. She’s — you know, that’s his daughter, and he should be proud of her. He said I was beautiful like her and, you know, you’re a smart girl. And there wasn’t a lot of comparing, but there was some, yes. I heard a lot about her. Yes.
Finally, the quote ascribed to Trump and used as the social media image for this Patheos blog post — “it is wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter more than your wife?” — was allegedly overheard by “someone” whom Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen “knew.” The quote, BuzzFeed News reported, was included in an advanced draft of Cohen’s syndicated column, but removed in the final published version:
“Can I ask you something?” Trump asked someone I know, about his then-13-year-old kid, “Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?
Absent some form of audio or video recording of these conversations, we are able only to document the provenance of the quotes, not their veracity.
By 6 March, the number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 2019 had surpassed the total number of U.S. combatant deaths on D-Day.
Rating:
What’s True
According to a reliable database of U.S. gun violence, 2,487 gun-related deaths took place between 1 January and 6 March 2019 , a number very close to the 2,501 U.S. combatants known to have died in D-Day.
What’s False
According to our analysis of reliable U.S. gun violence data, the number of gun-related deaths in 2019 passed the threshold of 2,501 on 7 March, rather than 6 March. The figure of 2,501 U.S. combatant deaths in D-Day is an estimate which, despite being the most reliable available, should not be regarded as definitive or final.
The 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 2019 was accompanied by widespread commemoration and news coverage, including one interesting take on the scale of the loss of life that took place during the Allied invasion of Normandy, a turning point in World War II, on 6 June 1944.
The Washington Post published an analysis with the headline “More Americans Were Shot to Death by March 6 This Year Than Died on D-Day,” which reported that:
A 19-year-old in Delaware, a 25-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, a 33-year-old in California, and a 64-year-old in Indiana. They are among the 29 people fatally shot in the United States on March 6. Meaning that any one of them might have been the shooting death that pushed the year’s total past the number of deaths suffered by American forces during the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 …
Some 2,501 Americans gave their lives that day, according to historic estimates. Another 1,913 soldiers from other Allied countries also died, bringing the total death toll from the immediate invasion to 4,414. It took until late April before the number of people killed by guns in the United States in 2019 topped that number, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive. (This data excludes suicides.)
The article prompted multiple inquiries from Snopes readers about the accuracy of the claim that gun violence had claimed more lives in the United States between 1 January and 6 March 2019 than the full U.S. death toll from the initial D-Day landings.
The Post‘s analysis was highly accurate in presenting the data collected by a reliable source of gun violence data, and in fact will likely end up being a significant understatement of the true extent of gun deaths in the first few months of 2019, because comprehensive figures for gun-related suicides (the leading cause of gun deaths) are not yet available. The Post accurately presented the most reliable figures available for U.S. combatant deaths in D-Day, but those figures may also be an understatement of the true extent of D-Day fatalities, because they are estimates rather than definitive and final totals.
D-Day Fatalities
According to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, at least 4,414 Allied combatants died as part of the Normandy landings: 2,501 U.S. forces and 1,913 from seven other Allied countries. The Foundation provided Snopes with the following breakdown of known fatalities:
U.S. — 2,501 (two U.S. citizens killed in D-Day had been serving in the Canadian army) U.K. — 1,449 Canada — 391 (or 393, if one includes the two U.S. citizens who fought and died alongside Canadian forces) Norway — 38 France — 19 Australia — 13 New Zealand — 2 Belgium — 1
Even after 75 years, these figures are not exhaustive, and the death toll of 4,414 should not be regarded as complete. (For example, the total passed from 4,413 to 4,414 as recently as 27 May 2019, the Foundation’s Director of Education John Long told us, when Sgt. John Onken of Peotone, Idaho, was officially added to the tally).
The figure of 4,414 does not include soldiers who, for example, died on 7 June 1944, having been injured during the fighting on D-Day itself the previous day. Long explained to us that, “The standards set at the beginning for inclusion was a confirmed death date of 6/6/44 in or near Normandy in a military record. The problem that soon became evident is that military-death dates were often guess work. If a body washed ashore on June 13 or a paratrooper was found hanging in a tree, the record might reflect the date the remains were recovered, since exact time of death would be impossible to determine.”
The actual Allied D-Day death toll could well be higher than the 4,414 combatants who are known to have perished during the events of 6 June 1944, and any statistical comparison involving that figure should be viewed with that disclaimer in mind. For his part, Long declined to give even a rough estimate of what the full death toll might be, adding “As it says on the Tomb of the Unknowns, the full list is ‘Known but to God.’”
Notwithstanding those important disclaimers, the Post did accurately present, in its analysis, the most reliable figures available for known and recorded Allied and U.S. combatant deaths on D-Day.
Gun-Related Fatalities in 2019
The Post article’s headline claimed “More Americans Were Shot to Death by March 6 This Year Than Died on D-Day.” The use of the word “Americans” might suggest that their analysis of the data took into account the nationality of the victims of gun violence. Instead, this somewhat unhelpful phrasing obscured the fact that the analysis actually related to what the body of the article itself described as “people fatally shot in the United States,” regardless of whether they were U.S. citizens.
As its source, the Post cited the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a robust, reliable, non-partisan source of data on gun violence. According to our analysis of GVA data, 2,487 gun-related deaths took place in the U.S. between 1 January and 6 March 2019.
That’s very slightly short of 2,501 — the number of U.S. combatants known to have been killed on D-Day — but only by about half of one percent. By our count, that milestone was passed on 7 March, the next day.
Although the Post stated that the GVA data “excludes suicides,” that’s not quite right. GVA’s website explains that the project’s staff only publishes aggregate figures for gun-related suicides at the end of each year, but that the daily updates do include self-inflicted fatal gun violence if it comes in the context of a murder-suicide or an officer-involved incident. If one does completely exclude suicides from the data, then the total number of gun deaths between 1 January and 6 March was 2,373, with the D-Day milestone of 2,501 being surpassed on 10 March, just a few days later.
However, because the GVA’s full tally of gun-related suicides will only become clear at the end of 2019, and because we know that the majority of gun deaths are suicides, the full death toll from gun violence in the U.S. is likely to have far surpassed the D-Day milestone of 2,501 significantly before 6 March 2019. This would provide even more substantial evidentiary support to the stark message behind the Post‘s article.
Conclusion
The factual claim at the core of the Post’s 6 June 2019 article was that the number of gun-related deaths in the United States between 1 January and 6 March was about the same as the total number of U.S. soldiers killed on D-Day, 75 years earlier.
That claim was highly accurate, although the number of gun deaths presented was not perfectly so according to our analysis of GVA data, and even the most reliable figures available for Allied combatant deaths are estimates that should not be treated as definitive or final.
Image caption: SFC Andre Goncalves, a member of the U.S. Army Europe band, stands among graves at Normandy American Cemetery on the 75th anniversary of the World War II Allied D-Day invasion on June 06, 2019 near Colleville-Sur-Mer, France. Normandy American Cemetery contains the graves of over 9,600 U.S. soldiers killed on D-Day and in the Battle of Normandy.
As the news spread online, so did a rumor about her time as the mayor of San Francisco decades ago.
Years prior, in February 2019, a group supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont resurrected the controversy in a widely shared Facebook post critical of Feinstein.
“The People for Bernie Sanders” group posted a meme containing black-and-white photographs of a man atop a flagpole surrounded by demonstrators, along with the following text: “1984: Protestor seizes confederate flag their city’s mayor repeatedly flew in front of City Hall. (The city was San Francisco and the mayor was Senator Dianne Feinstein.)”
The People for Bernie Sanders added a link to a 2015 article from the website of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper preceded by the comment: “Ooooof, yes it’s true. When she wouldn’t stop replacing the flag, they took down the pole”:
The meme itself was taken (without attribution) from a December 2017 tweet posted on the Twitter account @steckel:
1984: Protestor seizes confederate flag their city’s mayor repeatedly flew in front of City Hall.
The meme posted by “The People for Bernie Sanders,” as well as the article cited as evidence, both left out important context and made specific claims about Feinstein’s role in the controversy that we were unable to verify.
Background
Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco in 1978, after the assassination of George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, events portrayed in the 2008 film Milk. A Confederate battle flag had flown outside San Francisco’s Civic Center since 1964 as part of an 18-flag display intended to symbolize the various stages of American history, according to contemporaneous news reports.
Because of its historical associations with slavery and white supremacy (a history we have previously examined in greater depth), the flying of the Confederate battle flag outside San Francisco’s City Hall engendered controversy and protests in 1964, and demonstrators actually stole the flag in July before it was quickly replaced.
By 1981, many of the flags displayed in the “Pavilion of American Flags” at the Civic Center had fallen into disrepair, and that year the San Francisco construction company Bechtel paid to have them all replaced, including the Confederate battle flag.
Speaking at a Memorial Day unveiling ceremony for the new flags, then-Mayor Feinstein said “San Francisco is proud to fly these flags where both visitors and residents alike may see and appreciate the more than 200 years of America’s rich history which they symbolize.”
1984
In April 1984, a group of socialist activists from the Spartacist League coordinated the removal of the Confederate battle flag from its pole at the Civic Center. The man shown in the photographs included in the meme was Richard Bradley, who symbolically wore a Union soldier’s uniform when he ripped down the flag two days in a row beginning on 15 April 1984, as the Los Angeles Timesreportedat the time:
A Confederate flag that was part of a historic display in front of San Francisco’s City Hall was cut down and burned by protesters who called it ‘a banner of racist terror.’ While about 50 protestors watched, one man climbed up the 40-foot flagpole and cut the flag down. Then he and another man burned it. Richard Bradley, 34, a member of the Spartacist League, and Peter Woolston, 41, an officer of the International Longshoreman’s Warehouse Union Local 6 in San Francisco, were arrested.
The flag was replaced the next morning, but Bradley once again climbed the pole and removed it before being re-arrested, as the San Francisco Examinerreported:
Richard Bradley shinnied up a flagpole in front of San Francisco City Hall for the second time in as many days yesterday to tear down a Confederate flag he finds offensive. When he got to the ground, after ripping the flag to shreds and throwing the pieces to the ground, he was arrested and charged with malicious mischief. He was arrested on the same charge Sunday after he climbed the same flagpole and tore apart another Confederate flag.
Bradley belongs to the Spartacist League and the Labor Black League for Social Defense, two organizations that consider the Confederate flag a symbol of racism. The groups have vowed to continue tearing down the flag, if the city insists on replacing it.
The flag is part of an 18-flag display in front of City Hall that is designed to depict flags that played important roles in the history of the United States, according to Tom Malloy, director of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. Malloy said he will continue to fly the Confederate flag until or unless the Board of Supervisors orders it down.
Later on the day of Bradley’s second arrest, Feinstein announced the Confederate flag would not be replaced again after the intervention of Doris Ward, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (akin to a City Council) who would later go on to make history as the first black person to preside over that body, the San Francisco Examinerwrote on 18 April:
The Confederate flag, which was torn down twice this week by groups who consider it offensive, will not fly again above Civic Center plaza, Mayor Feinstein says. The mayor made her decision yesterday, after Supervisor Doris Ward asked her not to replace the flag. “I want to make it very clear that my decision is based only on Supervisor Ward’s request,” Feinstein said. “I’m not impressed because some group shinnies up a flag pole and tears down a flag.”
… Ward got involved in the issue Monday evening [16 April], after talking with members of the Spartacist League. Yesterday Ward sent a letter to the mayor, asking her not to replace the Confederate flag. “The Confederate flag was carried as the banner of slavery, and is still used to today to represent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, which attempt to restrict the basic freedoms of American people,” Ward said in a prepared statement.
Ward aide Chelsea Baylor said the supervisor has received several calls each year from people who are offended by the Confederate flag. “I think it’s a legitimate concern,” Feinstein said after receiving Ward’s request. “We will take a look at how history can be depicted with another flag.”
On 27 April, Feinstein announced a new flag would fly, that of “the California Hundred,” a famous group of West Coast volunteers who journeyed across the United States to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.
It’s not clear whether Bradley heard about this announcement, but he took matters into his own hands for the third time just two days later. By his own account, he scaled the pole once again on 29 April, raising a replica of the garrison flag of Fort Sumter, the South Carolina fort where Confederate artillery fire heralded the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War in April 1861.
The following day, city authorities ordered the removal of the unauthorized Fort Sumter flag, but the back-and-forth over the issue didn’t end there. In late June, someone raised another Confederate flag on the same pole at the Civic Center, this time the first Confederate national flag (known as the “Stars and Bars“).
Thomas Malloy, the head of the city’s department of Recreation and Parks, later told a committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that the installation of the Confederate national flag had been done “quite by accident,” as reported by the Oakland Tribune:
Malloy … acknowledged a confederate banner was run up the pole during the last few days of June. That banner, which Malloy said was raised ‘quite by accident,’ was not the familiar Confederate ‘battle flag’ with blue diagonal cross bars, but the less well-known Confederate ‘national flag’ known as the Stars and Bars, which features three red and white stripes and a circle of white stars on a blue field in the upper left-hand corner.
Malloy told [Supervisor Doris] Ward and Supervisor Nancy Walker that he first noticed the flag on June 21, but did not recognize it as a Confederate symbol. Initially, he said, he was simply pleased that the empty hole in the display had been filled. Ward and Walker said they too did not recognize the flag.
On 29 June, unidentified persons cut down the flagpole itself. According to a 2015 article in the Spartacist League’s Workers Vanguard newspaper (the source cited by “The People for Bernie Sanders”), the pole was taken down by “anti-racist militants” after Mayor Feinstein purportedly “raised the ‘Stars and Bars.’”
In early July, the pole was replaced, and the pro-Union flag of the “California Hundred” flew where the Confederate battle flag once had.
Conclusion
When Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco in 1978, a Confederate battle flag had been flying outside City Hall for 14 years, along with 17 other flags designed to collectively serve as symbols of American history.
We know that the installation of the Confederate battle flag had been controversial from the outset, and that protesters removed it shortly after it was unveiled in 1964. At the time, San Francisco Mayor John Shelley pronounced his misgivings about it, labeling it a symbol of “legalized sedition” and saying “It makes me shiver every time I see that flag flying.”
Feinstein certainly did not order the flag to be removed during the first six years of her tenure as mayor, and in 1981 she accepted a donation of 18 new flags, including the Confederate battle flag, saying “San Francisco is proud to fly these flags where both visitors and residents alike may see and appreciate the more than 200 years of America’s rich history which they symbolize.”
It could be argued that the decline into disrepair of the “Pavilion of American Flags” represented a good opportunity to reevaluate the inclusion of the Confederate battle flag in that display, and that Feinstein did not, at that juncture, decide to exclude it from the display or refuse to accept it as one of the 18 donated flags. However, that inaction was not the same as affirmatively expressing support for the flying of the Confederate battle flag in particular.
In 1984, we know that Richard Bradley removed the Confederate battle flag on 15 April, and that another one was re-erected the following day. Crucially, however, we don’t know who ordered its replacement. We asked Feinstein’s U.S. Senate office whether it was she, in her capacity as mayor, or someone else who was responsible for the replacement of the Confederate flag on 16 April 1984 but did not receive a substantive response in time for publication.
The official directly responsible for the flag display at the Civic Center was Thomas Malloy, who ran the department of Recreation and Parks. In public remarks made after Bradley removed the Confederate flag for the second time on 16 April, Malloy indicated he would insist on keeping the Confederate flag flying, despite the protests over it: “The flags as a set were intended to depict American history. As long as that avenue is purported to represent the full range of significant American flags, I don’t want to fall victim to revisionist history. We have no intention of removing that flag.”
Malloy died in 1989, so we were unable to ask him whether it was he who ordered that the Confederate flag be reinstated on 16 April 1984, or that the “Stars and Bars” be installed in June 1984 (an incident that he described as accidental).
Both @steckel’s Twitter meme and “The People for Bernie Sanders” neglected to mention a crucial fact: that it was Feinstein who finally ordered the Confederate battle flag not be replaced after 16 April 1984. And only 11 days later, she announced that it would be replaced with a flag honoring Union soldiers from California. It is misleading and disingenuous to omit those facts from any content examining Feinstein’s role in the 1984 Confederate flag controversy.
Furthermore, the additional claim made by “The People for Bernie Sanders,” that Feinstein “wouldn’t stop replacing the flag” until the pole itself was removed, is misleading. First, because the Confederate battle flag was only replaced once in April 1984, not repeatedly. Second, because it’s not clear that Feinstein herself, as opposed to another city official or even a rogue employee, was responsible for its replacement. It’s true that the first Confederate national flag (the Stars and Bars) was installed in June 1984, but we could find no evidence that Feinstein was responsible for that act, and the director of Recreation and Parks, Thomas Malloy, said it was done “quite by accident.”
Finally, the claim that the destruction of the pole itself is what brought an end to the flying of the Confederate battle flag is both illogical and contradicted by the available facts. First, the pole was replaced in July 1984, shortly after the original one was removed. If Feinstein had been intent on continuously and repeatedly re-erecting a Confederate battle flag there, a new pole was shortly available for that very purpose, and the temporary removal of a pole from that location would have proved no obstacle to her supposed agenda.
Second, Feinstein had already said no new Confederate battle flag would be displayed at the Civic Center more than two months before the pole was removed. She had even specified that the flag would be replaced by one honoring Union soldiers. It was those decisions, not the temporary removal of a flagpole, that brought a permanent end to the presence of any Confederate flag outside City Hall in San Francisco.
A California couple gave their newborn child an emoji for a name.
Origin
The comparative popularity of baby names waxes and wanes on a continuous basis, as aptly illustrated by a U.S. Social Security Administration chart listing the most frequently chosen names each year for the past century.
Many societal factors can influence baby naming trends, including changes in the demographics of a population, news and current events, and even pop culture fads. The popularity of the name “Katrina” fell sharply after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, for example, but since the 2011 premiere of the popular HBO television series Game of Thrones, names associated with two of its female characters, “Arya” and “Khaleesi,” have surged in popularity.
The internet and social media have also had an impact on naming conventions. According to CNET, a Swedish couple named their son “Oliver Google” in 2005. UPI reported in 2012 that a couple had named their child “Hashtag.”
Topping all of these was a 2018 internet post reporting that a newborn baby in Berkeley, California, was given an emoji (actually, three emojis) in lieu of an alphabetical name. We first became aware of the claim when we ran across tweets such as the following:
The tweets linked to an article on a website called PrettyCoolSite.com, which reported the following:
California newborn becomes first baby to be named an emoji: Her first name is “???”. The United States is among the lightest of the naming laws worldwide governing given names and this freedom has given rise to a wide variety of names and naming trends. Cultural diversity in the U.S. has led to great variations in names and naming traditions. Names have been used to express creativity, personality, cultural identity, and values.
Since the recent Windows XP update all US states allow to use special characters for filling birth certificates. …
The name is officially pronounced as “Hearteyesemojiheartesemojihearteyesemoji” but it’s written as “???”. If a system doesn’t support Unicode 6.0.0 emoji characters, the girl can use the Unicode number (U+1F60D) or HTML-code of the characters (😍).
There are several reasons to approach this story with incredulity. One is that no similar accounts are to be found in any mainstream news sources, despite the media’s usual predilection for such stories.
Another is the fact that it is not the case (contrary to what’s claimed above) that special characters are universally accepted on birth certificates throughout the United States. We checked the statutes in California (where this unconventional naming allegedly took place), for example, and found that state law only permits “the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language” and “appropriate” standardized punctuation (hyphens, periods, and commas) to be used in filling out birth certificates.
Moreover, California’s Birth Registration Handbook specifically proscribes the use of pictographs, ideograms, and diacritical marks:
Lastly, the website itself, PrettyCoolSite.com, does not purport to be a legitimate news source — quite the opposite, in fact. In the fine print beneath the copyright notice at the bottom of the page on which the article appeared was this disclaimer: “This is a fake news site and it has to be treated as a joke!”
For good measure, we looked around for other reports of babies’ receiving emoticons as names and found one: “In World First, Child Is Named Using Emojis,” published in 2017 on Medium.com. Its author, Matt Querzoli, wrote that a Japanese couple had named their child ? ? (an emoji pairing that can be read as having sexual connotations). But, again, all we had to do was scroll to the bottom of the page to find a notice disclaiming the article as satirical.
For the time being, at least, we’re not aware of any credible reports of parents using emojis to name their children.
Arnold White admitted he had kidnapped and sexually assaulted 79 people while he was disguised as an alien.
Rating:
In December 2018, the World News Daily Report (WNDR) website published a provocative article reporting that a man in Texas had confessed to kidnapping 79 people while he was disguised as an alien and subjecting them to anal probes:
TEXAS MAN ADMITS KIDNAPPING 79 PEOPLE TO ANALLY PROBE THEM WHILE DISGUISED AS AN ALIEN
A man who was arrested by the FBI Yesterday has confessed to kidnapping and sexually assaulting several dozen people while using costumes, drugs, and special effects to have his victims believe they had been abducted by aliens. 73-year old Arnold White was arrested after a joint investigation led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the El Paso Sheriff’s Office and the El Paso Police Department.
Originally interrogated about 4 crimes committed in the region in the 1990s, the retired trucker confessed a total of 79 kidnappings across California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas over a period of 40 years. Mr. White confessed to using a mix of hallucinatory drugs containing LSD and PCP to subdue his victims, before approaching them and carrying them inside his truck to assault them. In order to confuse his victims even more, he had set up the inside of his truck to look like an operating room and would wear an alien costume.
The report was a fabrication. We could find no corroboration for in local El Paso news media or law enforcement statements, and the photograph captioned as showing “FBI spokesman Darrell Johnson” actually pictured Emmerson Buie Jr., special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso division, speaking at a press conference in November 2017.
The identity of the elderly man shown in a mugshot was not immediately clear. However, the same mugshot appeared in a 2011 blog post, meaning it did not relate to a December 2018 arrest.
World News Daily Report is a well-known producer of junk news, whose web site features the following disclaimer which describes its articles as “fictional” and “satirical”:
WNDR shall not be responsible for any incorrect or inaccurate information, whether caused by website users or by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilized in this website or by any technical or human error which may occur.
WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website — even those based on real people — are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.
