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Does this mean Biden was untruthful — even lying, perhaps — when he implied that Dunn had been drinking? According to Lou Angeli, the fireman referenced above who treated Dunn at the scene, observed, no evidence definitively establishes or disproves that point:

In regards to intoxication, there was no way to determine if Mr. Dunn had been drinking, since neither of the police officers had breathalyzers aboard their cruisers. His injuries were such that his demeanor was similar to that of someone in a stupor, but those of you who serve in emergency medicine know that such behavior is often presented by victims who are in shock, or perhaps even diabetic.

I’ve learned that all of the records pertaining to this accident are lost. It doesn’t surprise me. Back then our ambulance incident report was filled out on a 5×7 card and filed away in a box. Once a month the information was transferred to a master list, which was later placed in storage.

If Mr. Dunn was intoxicated, there was no way to determine that at the hospital either, since alcohol blood tests were not mandatory in 1972. The hospital records are missing, as well as the police reports.

Angeli asserted that this alleged aspect of the accident wasn’t a “lie” Biden simply made up out of whole cloth, and that right or wrong, rumor and belief that drinking had contributed to the crash was prevalent among the local community:

To be honest, those of us in fire-rescue here in Delaware assumed that Mr. Dunn had been drinking, based on comments made by police officers at the scene. And in the Delaware fire service, rumors travel from station to station like wildfire.

Until he remarried in 1977, whenever Joe Biden attended a public safety event, parade or spoke during a firehouse banquet, police officers and firefighters would approach him and discuss the accident and the tragedy of his wife Neilia and daughter Naomi falling victim to a drunken driver. Imagine how those discussions must have affected the young Senator.

Either way, we didn’t turn up any instances of Biden’s having publicly raised the issue in the last 13 years, and Biden has since apologized to Dunn’s daughter, while his spokesman declared that Biden now “fully accepts the Dunn family’s word that these rumors were false”:

Biden called [Dunn’s daughter Pam Hamill], she told me. “He apologized for hurting my family in any way,” she said. “So we accepted that — and kind of end of story from there.” She sounded tired, and tired of talking about this.

Maybe [Biden] was merely passing along rumors he had heard from investigators and others. A now-dead emergency worker who was on the scene that day suggested as much …

Or maybe Biden was engaging in what grief expert Rob Zucker described to me as “a retelling of the horror.” It’s something people sometimes do, he said, tweaking facts, shifting blame, if nothing else to make the grief more “palatable.”

“It’s a common challenge bereaved parents in particular struggle with after a sudden, violent death. I think the fact that he has this way of sometimes understanding the story is really an expression of the challenge for any person to go forward in their lives,” Zucker added.

Biden told the crowd that he had made repeated visits to overseas troops multiple times over the years, and that he wished the citizens of the United States could do the same so that they could truly appreciate the “incredible sacrifices you make for our country.” Biden then went on to make a playful remark about how his good judgement could be demonstrated by two decisions that he made during his life: the first was marrying his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. The second was appointing Johnson — a soldier on the stage — to the academy. When this line did not receive the applause Biden expected, he jokingly said “Clap, you stupid bastards.” 

Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates told The Daily Beast: “Vice President Biden was jokingly encouraging the audience to clap for an airwoman on the stage, and a number of service members can be seen laughing and smiling at the comment. Seconds before, he praised them for ‘the incredible sacrifices [they] make for our country.’”

Here’s a transcript of Biden’s remarks:

“I’ve been in and out of the Balkans 25 times; in and out of Iraq 26 times; in and out of Afghanistan about 10 or 12 times. And I have one regret every time I’m with you all—and I mean this sincerely—is the folks back home can’t see you; can’t see you in place. Don’t get to fly on the mission with you. Don’t understand—they appreciate, but they don’t fully understand the incredible sacrifices you make for our country.

And I want you to know notwithstanding what you may hear about me, I have incredibly good judgment. One, I married Jill. And two, I appointed [Lt. Karen] Johnson to the academy. I just want you to know that. Clap for that, you stupid bastards. (Applause.) Come on, man. Man, you are a dull bunch. Must be slow here, man. I don’t know.”

Here’s the full video of Biden’s speech. The moment seen in the viral clip can be viewed at around the six-minute mark:

Todd Harrison, the director of Defense Budget Analysis for CSIS, examined Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2017, the budget that would be in place when Trump took office, and found that “nearly every measure of force structure — the number of brigades, aircraft, ships and subs, marine battalions, and end strength — [was] smaller than when the [post 9/11] buildup began.” However, this “smaller force consumes a budget more than 50 percent larger in real terms than before 9/11. The military is spending more for a smaller force.” 

Why Was Military Spending Reduced During Obama Administration?

Though it is certainly not accurate to say that the military did not receive any funding during the Obama administration, there was truly a reduction in spending. Two major factors resulted in reduced spending. First, congress placed restrictions on military spending in 2011 in an attempt to reduce the national deficit. And second, the Obama administration started to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Here’s how The New York Times explained the impact of the congressional sequester on military spending:

In 2011, in response to a debt ceiling crisis, lawmakers reached a bipartisan agreement to reduce deficits by at least $2.1 trillion over the next decade. In addition to limits on domestic spending, limits were placed on the Pentagon’s base budget, but not its wartime spending.

Congress increased spending caps by $32 billion in 2013 and $40 billion in 2015, referred to by budget watchers as “partial sequester relief.” In February, the cap was blown off entirely, when Mr. Trump signed a budget deal that raised it by $165 billion over two years. Effectively, that ended the sequester without repealing the original law.

From 2012 to 2017, the Pentagon’s annual budget had decreased as a percent of the economy. But it still hovered around $600 billion — a far cry from “no money” at all.

In other words, Kushner didn’t wipe his Twitter account clean on the evening of Sept. 27 after the NYT published a story about his father-in-law’s taxes. This account rarely posts tweets, and the three tweets that were shared to the account in 2011 (again, none of which were related to taxes) were deleted years ago. 

This isn’t the first time that someone has stumbled across Kushner’s Twitter account in the aftermath of a controversy, noticed that it was barren, and then incorrectly assumed that Kushner had recently scrubbed it clean. In October 2017, shortly after Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III revealed charges against former Trump presidential campaign chair Paul Manafort and two other campaign officials, social media users noted then that Kushner’s Twitter account was suspiciously void of content, and falsely claimed that he had recently deleted all of his tweets.

A few months later, when it was reported that Mueller may have interviewed Kushner in the course of his investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, this false rumor again was circulated on social media: 

The @JaredKushner account has been devoid of content since at least 2016. Claims that he recently deleted his tweets in the wake of breaking news stories are false. 

Thousands upon thousands of lovingly-collected caps were unceremoniously dumped in the trash once the hoax was revealed. Collection bins were taken down, and new donations of caps were turned away.

It is true that occasionally a large company will “redeem” up to a certain number of lids or labels from its products for a cash amount to be directed to a particular charity or cause (e.g., Yoplait‘s annual commitment to donate 10¢ per lid from its products to breast cancer research via its “Friends In The Fight” program, up to a maximum donation of $1.6 million). However, such beneficences are specific product promotions meant to encourage purchase of the items bearing those labels or lids and to position the host company favorably in the shopper’s mind as a warm, caring corporation committed to aiding mankind. Such promotions don’t encompass every lid or label from all manner of consumer goods (including those of competitors), and the name of the business entity sponsoring the largesse is prominently featured in everything having to do with the promotion.

In August 2010 another version of the bottle cap hoax appeared at Bagram Airfield, a U.S. Air Force base in Afghanistan. Motivated by a rumor that came from no one knew where, personnel at that base began collecting caps from empty water bottles in the belief that those items would be recycled into prosthetic limbs for disabled servicemembers. Bins to collect these caps sprang up around the base, and thousands (likely hundreds of thousands) of caps were tossed into them.

Missing in all of this charitable activity was any notion of who was responsible for assembling the large collection of caps and transporting it, or where the shipment was to be sent for processing into artificial limbs. The local Judge Advocate General (JAG) office investigated the rumor and attempted to pin down the main point of contact (POC) for the cap drive, but while drop-off locations for the plastic tops were easily found, the trails dead-ended at them. Lt. Col. Thomas Rodrigues, the JAG officer running the investigation, said: “Not surprisingly, with every interview at each collection site, no one had an overall POC, knew who the actual beneficiary was, or what to do with the collected caps.”

Contact with Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics, Inc., the largest prosthetic limb manufacturer, confirmed that the rumor had indeed been a snipe hunt. The prosthetic company’s public relations representative said that military members in need of artificial limbs receive new, top-of-the-line prosthetics, and recycled bottle caps would never be used in such products.

The two pictures on the right-hand side of the top row, for example, are manipulated photographs of a 1993 University of Chicago dinosaur dig in Niger to which someone has added an image of a giant skull. No such skull appears in the original photographs:

In a 2007 article, National Geographic offered an account from the creator of a similar “giant skeleton” hoax photograph:

IronKite started with an aerial photo of a mastodon excavation in Hyde Park, New York, in 2000. He then digitally superimposed a human skeleton over the beast’s remains.

The later addition of a digging man presented the biggest technical challenge.

“If you look, he’s holding a yellow-handled shovel, but there’s nothing on the end,” IronKite said.

“Originally, the spade end was there. But [it] looked like it was occupying the exact same space as the skeleton’s temple, making the whole thing look fake.

“Now it looks like he’s just holding a stick, and people don’t notice. It’s funny.”

IronKite also altered the color of the man’s clothing to create a “uniform tie-in” with the white-shirted observer peering down from the wooden platform.

The two figures work to exaggerate the scale of the skeleton, he added.

IronKite said he’s tickled that the picture — which took only about an hour and a half to create — has generated so much Internet attention.

“I laugh myself silly when some guy claims to know someone who was there, or even goes so far as to claim that he or she was there when they found the skeleton and took the picture,” IronKite said.

“Sometimes people seem so desperate to believe in something that they lie to themselves, or exaggerate in order to make their own argument stronger.”

As we frequently point out, we don’t need to know the specific origins of all of these photographs to definitively determine that they’re fakes. The square-cube law makes it a physical impossibility that humanoids of the size and proportions represented by these bones could ever have existed:

[T]hink of a six-foot man, who suddenly became twice as big. His surface area is quadrupled, and his weight is increased eight times. With all that weight, he wouldn’t be able to stand on his own legs, because although they may have become twice as long and four times as wide, his weight in the meantime became eight times heavier. He wouldn’t be able to stand, much less chase anybody around. His legs would snap off.

Although this revelation might be important, life-saving information for diabetics, an important caveat is that human insulin behaves differently than the newer analog insulin currently retailing for more than $300 a vial.

Dr. Todd Hobbs, chief medical officer for Novo Nordisk, wrote that the different types of insulin have the same effect of lowering blood-glucose levels, but, “Training is required whenever someone is prescribed insulin, whether that be human insulin or the newer analog insulin products. Differences in the timing of all types of insulin must be considered for patients to effectively use them … The difference in the types of insulin is related to how slowly or rapidly they are absorbed once injected. Scientific advances over the years have made improvements on the speed and length of time this absorption occurs.”

Diabetes Forecast, a health-oriented magazine associated with the American Diabetics Association, explained the history of the two types of insulin and the difference in health benefits this way:

In the 1970s, researchers discovered how to program bacteria in the lab to manufacture human insulin, and in 1982, regular human insulin became the first “recombinant DNA” drug product. “It’s a very pure, clean product, and it’s exactly what we as humans make,” [Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy associate professor and a spokesman for the American Association of Diabetes Educators Evan] Sisson says. Human insulin is now available as short-acting “regular” (or “R”) insulin, which is used at mealtimes, and intermediate-acting NPH (or “N”) insulin, which is used as a basal insulin …

While the development of human insulin was a major advancement, it wasn’t perfect. Regular insulin didn’t hit the bloodstream quick enough to cover the rapid absorption of carbohydrates after meals, and it stuck around too long after meals, causing hypoglycemia [low blood glucose, which can lead to unconsciousness and death if untreated]. In 1996, Eli Lilly introduced the first rapid-acting insulin analog to the market: insulin lispro (Humalog). Insulin aspart (Novo Nordisk’s Novolog) and insulin glulisine (Sanofi’s Apidra) quickly followed. With rapid-acting insulin analogs, onset occurs 10 to 20 minutes after injection, instead of the 30 to 60 minutes it takes for regular human insulin to take effect. This allows people to inject their insulin right before a meal, rather than having to dose 30 minutes or more before eating …

Deliver a dose of NPH [human] insulin, and it’ll reach its peak about six to eight hours later. This means your insulin may peak while you’re sleeping, posing a serious danger if you don’t wake up to treat. Long-acting analogs, on the other hand, don’t peak, resulting in more-stable blood glucose levels and fewer unexpected highs or lows. In fact, one study showed that long-acting analog insulin glargine reduced overnight bouts of hypoglycemia by up to 48 percent compared with NPH. In another study, detemir reduced nighttime hypoglycemia by 34 percent. This is especially beneficial for people with type 1, who need to be much more precise about matching insulin dosages with their insulin needs to avoid nighttime lows, says Sisson.

Note, there are two types of diabetes. Type 1 diabetics’ bodies cannot manufacture insulin, the hormone responsible for glucose absorption. Type 2 diabetics’ bodies, on the other hand, become resistant to insulin. In most cases, Type 1 diabetes starts in childhood, whereas Type 2 is sometimes referred to as “adult-onset” diabetes.

Writing for Insulin Nation, Nicki Nichols explained why the older form of human insulin is difficult to control in children:

When my child was first diagnosed, she was on NPH. It was incredibly difficult to limit a growing child’s diet to such a strict schedule. Here’s what it looked like:

8 a.m.- 45-carb meal
10:30 a.m. – 15-carb snack
12 p.m. – 45-carb meal
2 p.m. – 15-carb snack
5 p.m. – 45-carb meal
7:30 p.m. – 15-20 carb snack before bed to keep blood sugar up overnight.

I cannot tell you how many times my child refused to eat the 45 carbs in her dinner. There is something wrong when you are fussing at your 5-year-old to stop eating her green beans and to eat her bread, or mashed potatoes, or pasta.

The screen shot from the KDFW report no doubt went viral as a result of an ongoing controversy over the cost of analog insulin, which as of 7 February 2019 soared to a retail price of more than $300 per vial. Americans have been awash in medical horror stories such the death of Jesse Lutgen, a 32-year-old Type 1 diabetic who lost his job at a distribution center in Dubuque, Iowa, and with it, his health insurance. He was found dead in his home in February 2018, having run out of insulin. His last vials of the medication were given to him by a friend.

WKRG wrote: 

A boat fell 40 feet from the Dog River bridge onto the road below.

On the way down it took out some power lines and caused a mess on the road. The boat was badly damaged and the catch of the day was thrown across the road.

It’s not clear what caused the accident, but WKRG reported that nobody was hurt. Here’s a video news report about the incident that includes a few additional images of this fishy scene:

We’ve covered several other false rumors pairing hurricanes and sharks, such as sharks swimming down a highway, sharks invading inland flood waters, and sharks lifted by a hurricane from the ocean (a la “Sharknado“) and endangering unsuspecting land-dwellers.

Even though the first conviction for spousal rape occurred during the 1970s, it wasn’t until 1993 that spousal rape was officially illegal in all 50 states. While marital rape has been technically illegal in all 50 states since 1993, advocates argue that there are still legal loopholes in some states that allow for marital rape to be treated differently than rape. 

Obtain health insurance at the same monetary rate as men

This item refers to the practice of “gender rating” by health insurance companies, which typically resulted in higher premiums for women seeking individual health insurance. In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) sought to do away with the practice.

NPR reported: 

Any woman who has bought health insurance on her own probably didn’t find herself humming the old show tune, “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” That’s because more than 90 percent of individual plans charge women higher premiums than men for the same coverage, a practice known as gender rating.

Women spend $1 billion more annually on their health insurance premiums than they would if they were men because of gender rating, according to a recent report by the National Women’s Law Center.

Under the health care overhaul, the practice is banned starting in 2014.

The birth control pill

This post correctly states that the FDA first approved an oral contraceptive (a birth-control pill called Enovid) in 1957. However, at the time, the pill was only approved for use as a “treatment of severe menstrual disorders,” and the FDA required that it be labeled with a warning that Enovid will prevent ovulation. 

A few years later in 1960, the FDA approved Enovid as a contraceptive. Still, the pill was only available to married couples. It wasn’t until 1972 that birth-control pills were available to all women, regardless of marital status:

Then came the landmark date, marking the biggest change to America’s contraceptive potential in history. On May 9, 1960, the FDA approved Enovid, an oral contraceptive pill released by G.D. Searle and Company. By 1965, almost 6.5 million American women were on “The Pill,” the oral contraceptive’s enduring vague nickname, which is thought to have stemmed from women requesting it from their doctors as discreetly as possible. That same year, the Supreme Court struck down state laws that prohibited contraception use, though only for married couples. (Unmarried people were out of luck until 1972, when birth control was deemed legal for all.)

That meme was both inaccurate and misleading.

It is true that no charges were brought against Planned Parenthood in California — for the sound reason that Planned Parenthood was investigated by multiple states — but none of them found sufficient evidence to support a prosecution over claims that the organization had unlawfully sold (or offered to sell) human fetal tissue. As NPR reported, by the end of 2015, 12 different states had opened investigations into allegations that Planned Parenthood was “selling body parts,” and none of them turned up evidence of wrongdoing by that organization. (Another eight states, including California, decided not to pursue similar investigations.)

On the other hand, after Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick asked the district attorney in Harris County to open a criminal investigation into Planned Parenthood in 2015, a grand jury there took no action against Planned Parenthood, but did find sufficient evidence to indict Daleiden and Merritt on felony charges (which were later dropped) of tampering with government records over their use of fake identification.

In late 2019, a federal jury in San Francisco ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood in a civil lawsuit filed by that organization, rejecting arguments that Daleiden and Merritt were simply acting as investigative journalists, and ordering Daleiden, the Center for Medical Progress, and others, to pay Planned Parenthood $2.3 million in damages for violating federal and state laws by trespassing on private property and secretly recording video of others without their consent.

In March 2017, Daleiden and Merritt were charged in California with 15 counts of violating state invasion of privacy laws that prohibit the recording of conversations without consent. A Superior Court judge dismissed some of those criminal charges, but another count was subsequently added in July, and several criminal counts remain current as of September 2020.

Although then-Attorney General Harris was involved with the initial investigation of Daleiden and Merritt, she had left that office to take her seat in the U.S. Senate two months before charges were first brought against the pair by her successor, Xavier Becerra.

Trump’s demeanor at that moment in his speech, combined with his mock quotation of the text of the putative executive order, as well as the exaggerated and ironic tone of much of his speech in Fayetteville, suggest that he was, in fact, joking when he said he might sign (or attempt to sign) an executive order barring Biden from becoming president.

If the line had been delivered by most other politicians, it’s likely there would not be much doubt that it was intended as humorous, but Trump has long been the subject of scrutiny and criticism for purportedly pronouncing serious observations and earnest desires in the form of “jokes,” in speeches and press conferences.

For example, in July 2016 Trump appeared to ask the Russian government to hack the email server of his opponent, former U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton — a remark he later brushed off as “sarcastic.” And in June 2020, the president said he had asked officials to slow down COVID-19 coronavirus testing, in order to artificially lower the apparent rate of infection in the United States. Administration officials later claimed Trump was joking, but the president himself insisted, “I don’t kid.”

In order to help clarify the substance and intent of Trump’s remarks in Fayetteville in September 2020, and to assuage the concerns of the public that he might seek to defy constitutional norms by signing an executive order barring his opponent from succeeding him in office, Snopes put a straightforward question to both the White House and the Trump campaign — “Was the president joking, or not?” Remarkably, neither has responded to that question. If either does, we will update this fact check accordingly. 

However, the graphic did not represent the entirety of the exchange between Ginsburg and reporter Emily Bazelon concerning the justice’s belief that reproductive choice laws in the U.S. needed to be “straightened out” so that economic factors would not influence a woman’s ability to seek an abortion:

Ginsburg: The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Bazelon: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

Ginsburg: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the Court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

In an op-ed published three years later, Bazelon apologized for not following up on her question and asking Ginsburg to clarify her stance, adding:

To imagine that Justice Ginsburg would endorse eugenics as a motivation for supporting legal abortion, you have to be out to get her. I say that because this notion is so entirely at odds with her life’s work advocating for equal rights for women, especially poor women. That’s why it didn’t occur to me at the time. It’s a gotcha, and nothing more.

Bazelon’s follow-up piece also included her account of a second interview she conducted with Ginsburg during an appearance by the justice at Yale University:

“Emily, you know that that line, which you quoted accurately, was vastly misinterpreted,” [Ginsburg] said. “I was surprised that the court went as far as it did in Roe v. Wade, and I did think that with the Medicaid reimbursement cases down the road that perhaps the court was thinking it did want more women to have access to reproductive choice. At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth.” She continued, “In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”

The group Ginsburg referenced during her appearance, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), was founded in 1968. From 1975 to 1977, ZPG was headed by anti-immigration activist John Tanton, who advocated for what he called “passive eugenics.” In that context, and given her record, Ginsburg’s original remark was a description of ZPG’s philosophy and not her own.

In 2002, ZPG renamed itself Population Connection, saying on its website that “the media avoided using us as a helpful resource, and members of Congress were wary of meeting with us and our members because we sounded to them like an extremist group.” The site now includes no mention of Tanton.

Ginsburg has said that while she supported the High Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, she did not feel it went far enough in protecting women’s rights. During a 2013 appearance at the University of Chicago she noted, “Roe isn’t really about the woman’s choice, is it? It’s about the doctor’s freedom to practice … It wasn’t woman-centered, it was physician-centered.”

First-time users are required to enter their mailing address, so that the bot can work out their congressional district and state, and to verify their identity using email verification. (Repeat users are not required to provide or verify their address and identity).

From there, Resistbot automatically adds the user’s signature to an online petition and automatically generates a boilerplate email, on the user’s behalf, and sends it to the relevant federal lawmakers. In the case of the “RBG” campaign in September 2020, the letter reads:

“I am sure that as a patriot, you are mourning the death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I call on you now to commit to not confirming a new Supreme Court justice until after the inauguration, following the precedent set after the death of Justice Scalia four years ago. Allow the people to make this monumental decision as you did four years ago.”

In the case of the Supreme Court nomination campaign in the autumn of 2020, the email is sent only to each user’s two U.S. senators. 

Resistbot is a real automated political advocacy service run by a registered non-profit organization. The “RBG” campaign was an authentic piece of political activism, not a scam, and social media posts promoting it were accurate. 

Those claims contained a mixture of truth and falsehood. Kohl’s did announce, on Sept. 7, 2020, that it had collaborated with a local business near the company’s headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to produce “a line of tees for the whole family to support racial equality”:

“We’ve partnered with Cream City Print Lounge, a Milwaukee-area Black-owned business, to create a line of tees for the whole family to support racial equality. Mark your calendars for 9/21 to shop the line in select stores and at Kohls.com. With this launch, Kohl’s is proud to donate $100,000 to the The National Urban League, which strengthens economic empowerment, equity and civil rights.”

The T-shirts themselves do not appear to feature the words “Black Lives Matter” or “BLM.” A spokesperson for Kohl’s told Snopes the clothing would not feature the name of the movement itself and clarified, “The collection is not affiliated with the Black Lives Matter organization.”

Photographs of some of the T-shirts being printed, which were posted on Facebook by local reporter Cassidy Williams, featured the slogans “Black culture is not a trend” and “Racism is not cool” as well as the raised fist symbol, which has been used as a symbol of “unity and solidarity“, the BLM movement, and as a symbol of “Black power.”

The T-shirt shown in the Kohl’s announcement on Sept. 7 also featured the same “raised fist” symbol with the words “Justice, Respect, Change.” On Facebook, Cream City Print Lounge advertised a launch party for its collaboration with Kohl’s, and the graphic for the event featured T-shirts bearing the slogans “Black culture is not a trend,” “Together we can create change,” “Peace, love, equality,” and the raised fist with “Justice, Respect, Change” — but again, rather conspicuously, no T-shirts bearing the name “Black Lives Matter” or “BLM.”

As a result, it’s hard to argue that it would be more accurate to describe the forthcoming Kohl’s line as “BLM T-shirts,” rather than “T-shirts advocating racial equality.” Anti-racism is not synonymous with the BLM movement, and vice versa, just as anti-racist rhetoric and symbolism should not be conflated with, or reduced to, the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” And in this case, the company happens to have made that distinction explicit. 

Furthermore, the political and social atmosphere that prevailed in the United States in the autumn of 2020 was one of intense and widespread division surrounding acts of police violence towards Black people and resulting protests. The BLM movement, in general, and the Black Lives Matter Global Network in particular, were the subject of a great deal of criticism, especially among right-leaning observers and supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump. So the distinction between “BLM T-shirts” and “T-shirts advocating racial equality” could hardly have been more substantive. 

Nonetheless, the description of the T-shirts as “BLM merchandise” was clearly not arbitrary, and obvious areas of overlap existed between the principles and messages advocated by the broader BLM movement, on the one hand, and the collaboration between Kohl’s and Cream City Print Lounge. So the mistake was an understandable one, but a significant mistake all the same. We issue a rating of “Mixture.”

The bot adds the user’s name to the petition and the mailing address allows it to identify the user’s congressional district. The bot then automatically sends the letter via email to the corresponding members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate:

From start to finish, the process took around five minutes with the only significant delay coming when the user awaits a verification code sent to their email address. 

Snopes could confirm that the letter was sent to the representatives in question because the office of one of them, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pennsylvania, happened to respond later on with an acknowledgement that explicitly addressed the topic of the letter, the Postal Service:

Claims that “Resistbot” allowed users to quickly send letters to their political representatives were true, although it should be noted that the user is, for obvious reasons, required to actively provide a valid name, mailing address, and email address, and the letter is sent to federal representatives only, not state legislators.

According to the Resistbot website, the bot is a “product of the Resistbot Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization” with an address in Florida. The group’s Executive Director Jason Putorti sent Snopes a copy of the Resistbot Action Fund’s certificate of incorporation, showing that it was registered as a non-profit organization in the state of Delaware in February 2018.

However, Ginsburg never actually said that the age of consent should be lowered to 12.

Ginsburg’s report was about changing gendered language, not the age of consent, in our existing laws. In the quoted passage, she was not arguing for or against lowering the age of consent; rather, she was quoting a proposed Senate bill as an example of how appropriate gender-neutral pronouns should be used. Ginsburg wrote that she used this bill because it “conform(ed) to the equality principle,” not because she agreed with the presented age of consent.

Furthermore, Ginsburg mentioned another section of the penal code a few paragraphs earlier which referenced a different age of consent: 16. In both cases, Ginsburg’s focus was on the gender of the victim, rather than the age, as her report was specifically concerned with gendered-language in U.S. law:

18 U.S.C. § §1154 and 2032 make it a crime for a person to have carnal knowledge of a female, not his wife, who has not attained the age of sixteen years.

[…]

The “statutory rape” offense defined in these sections follows the traditional pattern: the victim must be a female and the offender, a male. Protection of the girl’s virtue as an asset to be traded by her family at marriage time can no longer survive as a justification for such provisions. The immaturity and vulnerability of young people of both sexes can be protected through appropriately drawn, sex-neutral proscriptions.

The claim that Ginsburg said that “pedophilia was good for children” appears to be the result of a decades-long game of telephone that started with a misreading of a 1974 report.

It started in 1993, after Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court, when this report was quoted out of context as evidence that Ginsburg wanted to lower the age of consent to 12. As this errant argument was reiterated by pundits such as Sean Hannity it morphed from a single out of context quote to an alleged personal belief at the core of Ginsburg’s political views. When the “Pizzagate” controversy exploded during the 2016 presidential election, this rumor underwent another devolution as conspiracy theorists claimed that Ginsburg once wrote that she wanted to legalize child rape.

In February 2018, this rumor took one more step away from reality when a meme featuring a quote ostensibly uttered by Ginsburg arguing that pedophilia was good for children went viral online.