It’s time for our roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.
False claims made by President Biden and conspiracy theories about the president dominate the list. Misleading claims about the coronavirus, by a Republican and a Democrat, also made the cut. Former president Donald Trump earned this dubious honor for the eighth straight year by spreading a baseless conspiracy theory about one of his supporters at the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who also appeared on last year’s Biggest Pinocchio list, earned two spots this year, while Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) appears in the tally for the second straight year with a coronavirus claim.
This list has no particular order. To read the full fact check, click on the link embedded in the quote.
“It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested”
— President Biden, Jan. 11
For some unknown reason, President Biden likes to claim he was once arrested. During a speech in Atlanta this year, he did it again — referring to an unverified tale that as a teenager he was arrested for standing on the porch with a Black couple. They supposedly were subject to demonstrations because they bought a home in a White neighborhood near his house. We dug deep into the records and found too many contradictions in Biden’s story, including the fact he lived far from the home in question. Biden landed on the Biggest Pinocchio list in 2020 with a similar false claim — that he had been arrested while trying to meet Nelson Mandela.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed on his show that the Department of Homeland Security was urging children to report their parents if they post covid misinformation on social media. Blake Masters, then a GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, chimed in: “This is Chinese Communist Party stuff.” It turns out that this tale stemmed from a rather benign video posted in 2021 aimed at adults about how to evaluate coronavirus claims spread on social media. But it was twisted into something much more sinister through a game of telephone tag in the right-leaning media — before emerging as a ridiculous conspiracy theory on Carlson’s show.
“An attorney general who goes after parents and calls them terrorists if they want to go to a school board meeting”
— Kevin McCarthy, April 17
Over and over, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) asserted that Attorney General Merrick Garland called parents “terrorists” because they wanted to attend school board meetings. But McCarthy was relying on a Rube Goldberg artifice to put words in Garland’s mouth. (Garland had received a letter from a school association, later withdrawn, that had said threats of violence against school officials “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”) Garland has never equated parents to terrorists. In fact, before McCarthy started spreading this falsehood, Garland had told Congress he “can’t imagine” a circumstance under which that would happen.
“My plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500”
— Biden, May 30
Biden, in an opinion article, claimed that utility executives had told him his American Rescue Plan would make a dent in inflation by reducing utility bills by $500. But it turned out that the executives said no such thing. The $500-figure had been plucked by White House staff from a research report examining Biden’s climate change policies. The savings was predicted to take place eight years from now — not a lot of help with the current inflation problem, which was the frame of Biden’s op-ed. Moreover, the report said the savings on utility bills was no more than $5. So the president was off by a factor of 100.
“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia”
— Vladimir Putin, Feb. 21
Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine with a lengthy, often-bitter televised speech filled with falsehoods. He tried to minimize Ukraine as a recent creation, an obscure entity that came about after what he described as a struggle between Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin over the contours of a national state. The reality is that Ukrainian culture and language have existed for centuries and a Ukrainian nationalist movement sprang up in the mid-1800s, angering the czars. He also claimed that Ukraine wanted to “create its own nuclear weapons” — which is sheer fantasy. Putin’s speech signaled the start of a vast Russian disinformation effort designed to sway world opinion. (In 2014, Putin’s speech on the annexation of Crimea — which included the whopper that the referendum confirming the seizure was “in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms” — also earned him a spot on this list.)
The Chips and Science Act will provide nearly $53 billion for U.S. semiconductor research, development, manufacturing and workforce development. But Biden was wildly off base when he claimed it would create 1 million construction jobs during remarks at the signing ceremony and in a tweet. The real number was just 6,200 construction jobs, according to the industry-commissioned report cited as the source. Moreover, other experts were skeptical of the way even these numbers were calculated in the report. Yet the White House never deleted the widely shared tweet or corrected the record.
“We have over 100,000 children … in serious condition and many on ventilators”
— Sonia Sotomayor, Jan. 7
During a Supreme Court hearing on whether the Biden administration’s nationwide rules ordering a vaccination-or-testing requirement on large employers were constitutional, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a wildly incorrect statement about the number of children hospitalized with the coronavirus at the time. As of Jan. 8, there were about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test — much smaller than Sotomayor claimed. The number of total hospital admissions of children confirmed with covid had not yet exceeded 100,000.
Special hypocrisy award
Mark Meadows, as Trump’s last chief of staff, helped spread Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and fanned fears of voter fraud. He asked in one interview: “Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” But the Fact Checker revealed that in 2022, he was simultaneously registered to vote in three different states — North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina. He lost his North Carolina registration after the New Yorker magazine reported he had registered to vote at a home where he did not reside. He then voted in the 2020 election via absentee ballot. In November, state investigators submitted to state prosecutors the findings of a voter fraud probe into Meadows’s actions but the state’s attorney general has not yet announced whether he will bring criminal charges.
False claims made by President Biden and conspiracy theories about the president dominate the list. Misleading claims about the coronavirus, by a Republican and a Democrat, also made the cut. Former president Donald Trump earned this dubious honor for the eighth straight year by spreading a baseless conspiracy theory about one of his supporters at the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who also appeared on last year’s Biggest Pinocchio list, earned two spots this year, while Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) appears in the tally for the second straight year with a coronavirus claim.
This list has no particular order. To read the full fact check, click on the link embedded in the quote.
“It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested”
— President Biden, Jan. 11
For some unknown reason, President Biden likes to claim he was once arrested. During a speech in Atlanta this year, he did it again — referring to an unverified tale that as a teenager he was arrested for standing on the porch with a Black couple. They supposedly were subject to demonstrations because they bought a home in a White neighborhood near his house. We dug deep into the records and found too many contradictions in Biden’s story, including the fact he lived far from the home in question. Biden landed on the Biggest Pinocchio list in 2020 with a similar false claim — that he had been arrested while trying to meet Nelson Mandela.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed on his show that the Department of Homeland Security was urging children to report their parents if they post covid misinformation on social media. Blake Masters, then a GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, chimed in: “This is Chinese Communist Party stuff.” It turns out that this tale stemmed from a rather benign video posted in 2021 aimed at adults about how to evaluate coronavirus claims spread on social media. But it was twisted into something much more sinister through a game of telephone tag in the right-leaning media — before emerging as a ridiculous conspiracy theory on Carlson’s show.
“An attorney general who goes after parents and calls them terrorists if they want to go to a school board meeting”
— Kevin McCarthy, April 17
Over and over, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) asserted that Attorney General Merrick Garland called parents “terrorists” because they wanted to attend school board meetings. But McCarthy was relying on a Rube Goldberg artifice to put words in Garland’s mouth. (Garland had received a letter from a school association, later withdrawn, that had said threats of violence against school officials “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”) Garland has never equated parents to terrorists. In fact, before McCarthy started spreading this falsehood, Garland had told Congress he “can’t imagine” a circumstance under which that would happen.
“My plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500”
— Biden, May 30
Biden, in an opinion article, claimed that utility executives had told him his American Rescue Plan would make a dent in inflation by reducing utility bills by $500. But it turned out that the executives said no such thing. The $500-figure had been plucked by White House staff from a research report examining Biden’s climate change policies. The savings was predicted to take place eight years from now — not a lot of help with the current inflation problem, which was the frame of Biden’s op-ed. Moreover, the report said the savings on utility bills was no more than $5. So the president was off by a factor of 100.
“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia”
— Vladimir Putin, Feb. 21
Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine with a lengthy, often-bitter televised speech filled with falsehoods. He tried to minimize Ukraine as a recent creation, an obscure entity that came about after what he described as a struggle between Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin over the contours of a national state. The reality is that Ukrainian culture and language have existed for centuries and a Ukrainian nationalist movement sprang up in the mid-1800s, angering the czars. He also claimed that Ukraine wanted to “create its own nuclear weapons” — which is sheer fantasy. Putin’s speech signaled the start of a vast Russian disinformation effort designed to sway world opinion. (In 2014, Putin’s speech on the annexation of Crimea — which included the whopper that the referendum confirming the seizure was “in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms” — also earned him a spot on this list.)
The Chips and Science Act will provide nearly $53 billion for U.S. semiconductor research, development, manufacturing and workforce development. But Biden was wildly off base when he claimed it would create 1 million construction jobs during remarks at the signing ceremony and in a tweet. The real number was just 6,200 construction jobs, according to the industry-commissioned report cited as the source. Moreover, other experts were skeptical of the way even these numbers were calculated in the report. Yet the White House never deleted the widely shared tweet or corrected the record.
“We have over 100,000 children … in serious condition and many on ventilators”
— Sonia Sotomayor, Jan. 7
During a Supreme Court hearing on whether the Biden administration’s nationwide rules ordering a vaccination-or-testing requirement on large employers were constitutional, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a wildly incorrect statement about the number of children hospitalized with the coronavirus at the time. As of Jan. 8, there were about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test — much smaller than Sotomayor claimed. The number of total hospital admissions of children confirmed with covid had not yet exceeded 100,000.
Special hypocrisy award
Mark Meadows, as Trump’s last chief of staff, helped spread Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and fanned fears of voter fraud. He asked in one interview: “Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” But the Fact Checker revealed that in 2022, he was simultaneously registered to vote in three different states — North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina. He lost his North Carolina registration after the New Yorker magazine reported he had registered to vote at a home where he did not reside. He then voted in the 2020 election via absentee ballot. In November, state investigators submitted to state prosecutors the findings of a voter fraud probe into Meadows’s actions but the state’s attorney general has not yet announced whether he will bring criminal charges.
