Horses galloped into a tunnel drawing a carriage behind them. Dozens of people clad in orange jumpers slowly marched in. Moments later, they begin to dance.
It is not an event you’d expect in a nuclear research facility, but an April 14 Instagram post claimed this video showed the opening of CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Elsewhere on social media, an April 7 Facebook video with the caption “Ceremony at Cern” showed an outdoor performance with a similar theme. The jumpsuit-clad performers marched and danced before a rock formation backdrop. The video’s narrator said, “The more I look at it, it seems to be a portal that they’ve opened. The workers appear to be doing some sort of ritualistic dance to gain access or to have the portal open up for them.”
(Screenshot from Instagram)
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Neither of these performances happened at CERN, which was founded in 1954. Reverse-image searches showed that the videos were of the 2016 opening ceremony at Switzerland’s Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest and deepest rail tunnel in the world.
The first video matched a YouTube video by Railway Gazette International from June 2016, titled, “Gotthard Base Tunnel opening ceremony.” The second video matched a video uploaded by the Daily Mail in a June 2016 article about the tunnel’s inauguration.
Although CERN is also based in Switzerland, it is more than 120 miles away from the tunnel.
Misinformation about CERN has circulated for years, so much so that the organization has addressed some false claims about its work on its FAQ page. Its website says: “CERN will not open a door to another dimension.”
We rate the claim that this video showed the opening of CERN False.
RELATED: Is CERN activating the world’s most powerful particle accelerator for the April 8 eclipse? No
As former President Donald Trump stands criminal trial for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, some social media users are claiming Daniels has absolved Trump of wrongdoing.
An April 14 Facebook post said, “Stormy Daniels exonerated Trump herself!” (Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford.)
In the comments, the post’s author shared a link to an April 10 article headlined, “NEW: Letter Allegedly Exonerating Trump In Stormy Daniels Case Resurfaces.”
Another Facebook user shared the same article and said, “Stormy Daniels just told on herself.”
(Screengrab from Facebook)
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson made a similar claim. In an Instagram post, he shared a photo of a Jan. 30, 2018, statement from Daniels that stated, “I am denying this affair because it never happened.” In the post, Johnson said, “Never forget that Stormy Daniels said that the affair and ‘hush money’ never happened.”
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The criminal trial began with jury selection April 15. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to Daniels made through Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting the case.
The Facebook posts linked to an April 10 article from conservative website Trending Politics News. The article called Daniels’ letter “a potentially game-changing document,” noting that Trump shared it on Truth Social.
“Look what was just found! Will the fake news report it?” Trump said in the April 10 Truth Social post.
The posts omit that Daniels later recanted her statement denying the affair.
Daniels’ statement was first released Jan. 30, 2018, and it was widely reported on at the time.
Soon after the statement was released, Daniels began to cast doubt on it.
In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show the same day the letter was released, Daniels said she didn’t know where the statement came from and suggested the signature on it was not hers.
The Associated Press reported Jan. 31, 2018, that Daniels’ publicist said Daniels signed the letter.
On Feb. 14, 2018, Daniels’ manager Gina Rodriguez told the AP that Daniels believed Cohen invalidated the nondisclosure agreement when he publicly confirmed making the $130,000 payment to her, so Daniels was free to tell her story.
Then, in March 2018, Daniels recanted her statement in a “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper, saying an affair had occurred. Daniels said her previous denials were because of a nondisclosure agreement and she felt pressured by her former attorney and former business manager to sign a statement denying the affair with Trump.
“So, you signed and released — a statement that said, ‘I am not denying this affair because I was paid in ‘hush money.’ I’m denying it because it never happened.’ That’s a lie?” Cooper asked Daniels in the interview.
Daniels replied, “Yes.”
“If it was untruthful, why did you sign it?” Cooper asked.
Daniels responded: “Because they made it sound like I had no choice.”
PolitiFact in 2023 fact-checked a claim that the 2018 letter “debunked” Bragg’s case and rated that False.
We rate the claim that a document shows Daniels “exonerated” Trump False.
RELATED: A fact-checker’s guide to Trump’s first criminal trial: business records, hush money and a gag order
Singer and talk show host Kelly Clarkson has been a regular subject of misinformation; her voice and image have been appropriated to make it appear as if she’s endorsing weight loss schemes.
In a video posted April 13 on Facebook, she appears to say: “I’m Kelly Clarkson and you all know I’ve lost weight — but how did I do it? I tried different methods but none worked until I came across these weight loss gummies.”
“Kelly Clarkson’s weight loss tips,” the post says.
It was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The footage of Clarkson was altered. The original, which appeared on her Instagram account Feb. 7, shows her talking about the Grammy awards, not “weight loss gummies.”
Social media users have their pitchforks and proof, as Taylor Swift lyrics famously say, and they’re hunting for Satan worshippers. The current target? Swift herself.
“Taylor Swift is doing satanic rituals during her shows,” said a man in an April 12 Facebook reel.
“This is now coming just blatantly,” he said, as footage played of Swift wearing a green cloak surrounded by dancers holding golden orbs. “You’ve got Taylor Swift doing all kinds of witchcraft rituals and satanic stuff on stage.”
Then he showed a clip from Swift’s “Karma” music video, saying: “It shows Taylor Swift in what appears to be hell wearing what appears to be a devil mask.”
Taylor Swift holds a red mask with horns in front of her face the “Karma” music video. (Screenshot from YouTube.)
“Nice devil mask there, Taylor Swift,” he said. “Why the devil mask? Why this kind of imagery?”
In another Facebook video, a man claimed one of Swift’s hand gestures during her Eras Tour show was the singer “throwing up the devil horns.”
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Swift’s catalog of lyrics includes mentions of witches, devils and angels. She sings, “Women like hunting witches, too,” in “Mad Woman” from her 2020 album “Folklore.” In the 2019 song “Cruel Summer,” she sings, “Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes.” We found no mentions of Satan, Lucifer or satanic rituals.
Although some critics have claimed her Eras Tour performance of the song “Willow” promotes witchcraft, we found no evidence that Swift’s performances intentionally feature satanic rituals. The “Willow” dance appears to be a stage adaptation of a similar scene from her music video.
Lucien Greaves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, a religious organization that the IRS recognizes as a tax-exempt church, said that he sees public concern raised about celebrities and alleged satanism almost every month. He called claims like these “incredibly asinine conspiracy theories.”
What would a “satanic ritual” even look like? It’s not clear. The Satanic Temple’s frequently asked questions page says the group does not worship Satan or believe Satan — or anything “supernatural” — exists. There is no sacred scripture nor any required rituals. It is a religion because it provides “a sense of identity, culture, community, and shared values,” the website says.
Some members may perform rituals they find “personally meaningful” and that are tailored to their individual needs, the FAQ page said. Such rituals may include “unbaptisms,” in which people renounce superstitions imposed on them without consent, and destruction rituals, in which people destroy an object they own that symbolizes a source of pain.
We found no evidence that Swift has engaged in any of those activities. She has publicly described herself as a Christian.
In the 2020 documentary “Miss Americana,” she expressed frustration with the policy positions of then-Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. (Swift endorsed Blackburn’s democratic opponent in 2018; Blackburn was elected in November 2018.)
“Those aren’t ‘Tennessee Christian values,’” Swift said. “I live in Tennessee. I am Christian. That’s not what we stand for.”
Still, like a line from Swift’s “Reputation” album — “they’re burning all the witches, even if you aren’t one” — the lack of evidence hasn’t stopped social media claims linking Swift to satanism or devil worship.
Swift previously appeared to poke fun at the witchcraft attacks. In November, she shared a video captured during a performance, when she was singing about an airplane and a plane happened to fly overhead at the open-air stadium, with the caption, “Never beating the sorcery allegations.”
We contacted Swift’s spokesperson and received no reply.
A history of musicians facing satanism accusations
Experts told PolitiFact that musicians have long been accused of performing satanic rituals.
“When someone goes looking for signs of satanic ritual, they will find those signs everywhere, from the packaging on products they buy to stop signs,” said Susan Campbell, a distinguished lecturer in the University of New Haven’s Department of Communication, Film and Media Studies.
Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories, agreed that “people see what they want to see.”
“There is a long history of satanic panics in the United States,” Uscinski said. In the 1980s, “all of my favorite bands were accused of taking part in satanic rituals: Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden.”
Campbell said fans of the rock band Kiss might recall warnings that the band’s name stood for “Knights In Satan’s Service” and related rumors that listeners were “guilty of worshiping Satan.”
“Love the band, hate the band, there is no evidence that members or fans of Kiss worship the devil,” Campbell said.
Taylor Swift performs as part of the “Eras Tour” at the Tokyo Dome, Feb. 7, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP)
Campbell said she thinks that Swift’s 2020 endorsement of President Joe Biden and her success in encouraging her fans to register to vote “opened the door for people” to falsely attack Swift.
“The better approach when faced with such nonsense is a fairly simple two-step process,” Campbell said. “1. Consider the source of these rumors and 2. Do a little digging for yourself.”
Our ruling
A Facebook post says, “Taylor Swift is doing satanic rituals during her shows.”
Swift’s songs mention neither Satan nor Satanic rituals. Swift has publicly described herself as a Christian.
The leader of The Satanic Temple dismissed the allegations about Swift as conspiracy theories, and there is no clear evidence Satan worship has ever been practiced in an organized and widespread way.
At PolitiFact, the burden of proof is on the speaker. Absent proof, we rate this claim False.
RELATED:Taylor Swift: Singer, songwriter, psyop? How conservative pundits spread a wild theory
RELATED:What could a Taylor Swift endorsement mean for voter turnout in the 2024 election?
RELATED: ‘You’re on your own,’ Joe. Taylor Swift hadn’t endorsed Biden for president as of mid-April 2024
Did filmmaker Mike deGruy die for exposing hidden truths he found underwater? A viral Facebook video suggests so.
“This is why exposing the truth is scary!!,” the text on an April 12 video read. In the next scene, a computer-generated voice says “people who expose the truth.” After that, the post shows a clip of deGruy speaking about his work filming underwater in the Gulf of Mexico for the BBC’s 2001 “Blue Planet” series.
The filmmaker discussed the wonders of an underwater brine lake he and his crew members saw and their difficulties filming it. The video then flashes text about deGruy’s 2012 death in a helicopter crash and ends with the scene of a helicopter crash in a field.
The Facebook video was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
But deGruy’s death is neither conspiratorial nor linked to his deep-sea filming of this brine lake. DeGruy died Feb. 4, 2012, in a helicopter crash in Australia 11 years after “Blue Planet” was released. DeGruy, 60, died alongside Australian filmmaker Andrew Wight, 52, who was piloting the helicopter. Both were collaborators with “Titanic” director James Cameron, and the trio shared a passion for undersea exploration.
Similar claims have been shared on TikTok and have drawn thousands of comments.
The crash happened because the pilot’s door wasn’t properly closed before takeoff from an aerodrome, an Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigation found. “It says the pilot probably let go of the cyclic control while trying to close the door, causing the nose to pitch up, and the tail to hit the ground,” the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
DeGruy was not the first to discover brine lakes, pools of toxic, highly salty water caused by “the dissolution of buried salt deposits,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The specific lake he filmed had been found several years before the documentary. Scientists have discovered brine lakes elsewhere, including the Red Sea and other parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
We rate the claim that Mike deGruy died for “exposing the truth” Pants on Fire!
On the day of the tax filing deadline, former President Donald Trump went on Truth Social to misleadingly warn that if President Joe Biden is reelected, “you will soon be facing colossal tax HIKES.” But in his latest budget proposal, Biden supports extending the tax cuts championed by Trump for people making less than $400,000.
“Happy TAX DAY to everyone,” Trump wrote on April 15, the last day for most people to file their federal tax returns. “This year, the typical family’s tax bill is thousands of dollars lower because of the Trump Tax Cuts. We doubled your Standard Deduction. We doubled the child tax cuts—and we lowered income tax rates for EVERYONE. But if Crooked Joe Biden gets his way, you will soon be facing colossal tax HIKES…”
He’s talking about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which became effective in 2018. Whether it reduced the “typical family’s” tax bill by “thousands” depends on how one defines the typical family. According to a Tax Policy Center analysis, the law reduced the individual income taxes owed by Americans by about $1,260 on average in 2018. Taxpayers in the middle 20% of earners (those with income between about $49,000 and $86,000) saw an average tax cut of about $800.
Only those in the top quintile of earners — those making over $149,400 — saw average tax savings in the “thousands” ($5,790 on average).
And while it’s true that tax rates were cut for nearly “EVERYONE,” not everyone got a tax cut as a result of the TCJA. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that about 65% of taxpayers got a tax cut, while about 6% saw a tax increase.
As for Trump’s warning that if Biden “gets his way, you will soon be facing colossal tax HIKES,” Trump has been making that misleading claim for years. Yet, in his three years as president, Biden’s major tax changes have included setting a minimum corporate tax rate and lowering taxes for some families by expanding the child tax credit and making it fully refundable.
During the 2020 campaign, Trump falsely claimed that Biden’s tax plans would result in “doubling and tripling your taxes.” As we wrote then, while Biden proposed to raise an additional $4 trillion in taxes over the next decade, the increases would have fallen mainly on very high-income earners and corporations. The plan would not have doubled or tripled people’s taxes at any income level (on average), according to analyses of Biden’s plan by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation.
More recently, after winning New Hampshire’s GOP primary in January, Trump claimed Democrats “want to raise your taxes times four,” but the Tax Policy Center said Biden’s 2024 budget would, on average, increase after-tax incomes for low-income households and “leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households.” The Tax Policy Center noted, “The top 1 percent, with at least roughly $1 million in income, would pay an average of $300,000 more than under current law, dropping their after-tax incomes by 14 percent.” That’s a sizable amount, but the top 1% wouldn’t be the “typical” American family.
In March, Biden released his fiscal year 2025 budget, which contains many of the same proposals and adds a few new wrinkles. But it still does not contain any “colossal tax hikes” on typical American families.
Achira22 / stock.adobe.com
Biden’s latest plan proposes — as he has in the past — to increase the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28%, and to restore the top individual tax rate of 39.6% from the current rate of 37%. It would also increase the corporate minimum tax rate to 21% for companies that report average profits in excess of $1 billion over a three-year period. (The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act established a minimum of 15%.) And the plan would impose a 25% minimum tax on very wealthy individuals. The plan also proposes to extend the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan through 2025, and to make the child tax credit fully refundable on a permanent basis.
As he has since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s FY 2025 budget vows not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000.
In order to keep that pledge, Biden would have to extend most of the individual income tax provisions enacted in the TCJA that are set to expire at the end of 2025. And that’s what Biden says he would do — but only for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000.
The budget says Biden “[s]upports paying for extending tax cuts for people earning less than $400,000 with additional reforms to ensure that wealthy people and big corporations pay their fair share, so that the problematic sunsets created by President Trump and congressional Republicans are addressed in a fiscally responsible manner.” (In order to pass the TCJA with a simply majority, Republicans wrote the law to have most of the individual income tax changes expire after 2025.)
“Bottom line: Biden is promising to protect the TCJA tax cuts for at least 95 percent of households,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us via email. “Whether he actually could deliver is another matter, but that is his promise.”
The Biden budget plan “would raise marginal income tax rates faced by higher earners and corporations while expanding tax credits for lower-income households,” according to a Tax Foundation analysis of the tax provisions in Biden’s budget. “The budget would redistribute income from high earners to low earners. The bottom 60 percent of earners would see increases in after-tax income in 2025, while the top 40 percent of earners would see decreases.”
In other words, if one considers the “typical American family” to be among the middle 20% of earners, those taxpayers would see a small increase in after-tax incomes in 2025 (0.5% on average) and a slight decrease (0.2%) by 2034, according to the Tax Foundation. The difference, explained Garrett Watson, senior policy analyst and modeling manager at the Tax Foundation, is largely due to the expiration of the expanded child tax credit after 2025. As we said, Biden has proposed extending the expanded child tax credit.
However, the pro-business Tax Foundation also wrote that because Biden’s plan would increase taxes on businesses and high-income people, the proposed changes would harm the economy in the long run, reducing the GDP by 2.2%, the capital stock by 3.8%, wages by 1.6%, and employment by about 788,000 jobs. Factoring in the economic effects of the lower long-run GDP, the Tax Foundation estimates middle-income earners would see their after-tax income reduced by about 2.1% in 10 years.
But as Watson explained in an email, the Tax Foundation’s estimates about lower after-tax incomes due to the impact on economic growth “are distinct from direct tax hikes, but they have similar effects to tax hikes in that the amount of income after-tax is lower from either source.”
A Washington Post analysis of Biden’s budget plan found it fails to say how it will pay for the proposal to extend tax cuts in the TCJA for those making under $400,000, calling into question whether Biden can keep that promise while also upholding his budget pledge to cut deficits by about $3 trillion over 10 years. (Trump, too, would have to find new revenue or cut spending to avoid higher deficits if the tax cuts are extended.)
And we should also note, as we often do when discussing a president’s budget plans, they are largely symbolic statements of priorities, not legislation on which Congress actually votes. Case in point: Biden’s budgets have included most of the large tax proposals this one does, and those proposals were never enacted even when Democrats held a majority in both the House (barely) and Senate in Biden’s first two years in office.
Of course, Biden did create a corporate minimum tax rate of 15% in 2022, and Trump was able to get his tax cut plan into law.
Still, whether Biden’s plan can be enacted or not, the president’s budget represents what Biden would do if he “gets his way,” as Trump put it, and that stated plan does not include “colossal tax hikes” for the “typical family.”
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World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab, whose organization annually hosts a conference for global leaders in Davos, Switzerland, has been a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists opposed to globalization.
PolitiFact has debunked numerous claims about Schwab, including that Schwab wants to end car ownership, called for AI to replace elections and that he and global elites want to control the world through a plan they call “The Great Reset.”
A new claim surfaced this week that says Schwab, 86, had been hospitalized and is in critical condition.
“WEF founder Klaus Schwab in hospital,” said an April 15 Facebook post that directed readers to an article linked in the comments.
The post linked to an April 15 article in The Raging Patriot, a conservative news website, with the headline, “World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab in Critical Condition.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
We found multiple social media posts across platforms sharing the claim that Schwab had been hospitalized.
But we found no news coverage from reliable outlets on Google or in Nexis news archives about Schwab being hospitalized, an event that would generate news coverage given his prominence. Nor did the World Economic Forum announce on its website or social media channels that Schwab had fallen ill.
(Facebook screenshot)
World Economic Forum spokesperson Yann Zopf told PolitiFact in an email that “these claims are entirely baseless” and that the organization is among many that are frequent targets of mis- and disinformation.
The Raging Patriot article was light on details about Schwab, saying only that he “was reported to be critically ill and has been admitted to the hospital recently,” but that “the nature of his hospitalization and his current condition have not been disclosed.” The article went on to criticize the World Economic Forum for several paragraphs.
The article shared an X post from Jim Ferguson, a British businessman and former political candidate with 204,000 followers. Ferguson’s post shared word-for-word several paragraphs from an article from another website, The Weekly Crier, which had no byline and provided no source for the claim.
The Weekly Crier’s “About Us” section says it provides unbiased, factual news, “as well as satire, and comedic opinion pieces and editorials.” The website was registered Jan. 18.
We rate the claim that Schwab was hospitalized in critical condition as of April 15 False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
With Americans telling pollsters that they’re weary of inflation, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., accused President Joe Biden of misleading voters about how much rising prices have eased.
“It’s very misleading when (Biden) says (inflation) used to be at 9%,” Rubio told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner April 11. “This is compounding. It’s not like it went down from 9% to 3%. This is building month after month. The better way to think about it is that it’s 18%, 19% over the last three years.”
Inflation has improved significantly on Biden’s watch. In summer 2022, inflation peaked at about 9% compared with one year earlier. But since June 2023, year-over-year inflation has run between 3% and 3.7%. That’s a marked improvement, even though it’s not quite down to the 2% level the Federal Reserve Board wants to see before it lowers interest rates.
Rubio has a point that inflation accumulates, and that the increase over the past three years has been around 19%.
However, Rubio is misleading by failing to note another key factor: rising wages. Prices don’t increase in a vacuum; they can be canceled out, or nearly so, by rising wages.
“Measuring changes in well-being requires bringing in wages — the capacity to pay these higher prices,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum.
Although it may not be obvious to consumers frustrated with rising grocery prices, wages are outpacing inflation when compared with the prepandemic level.
Rubio’s office did not answer an inquiry for this fact-check.
What the data shows
We looked at how two standard federal statistics have evolved in recent years: The consumer price index, a monthly price inflation gauge for a fixed basket of goods, and average hourly earnings for all private employees, a monthly measurement of how worker pay changes.
Although Rubio’s has accurately assessed inflation’s compounding, these measurements are highly sensitive to different time frames. So, it’s easy for politicians to cherry-pick time periods that suit their arguments.
“Sen. Rubio can define inflation over any time span he wishes,” said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. President Biden is also free … to measure inflation over any time span he wishes.”
Wages have risen 15.9% since January 2021, Biden’s first month in office. That increase in wages has eased the inflationary hit to consumers. But compounding inflation means overall prices have outpaced this increase.
Biden, however, fares better when using two other credible time frames.
One is to compare today with February 2020, the last full month before the coronavirus pandemic hit. The pandemic represented such an economic upheaval that February 2020 is a plausible benchmark for a “normal” economy.
Using the prepandemic comparison, inflation is up by 20.4% since February 2020, but wages are up by 21.5%. So, over this period, worker pay has absorbed all the price increases and then some.
Another comparison focuses on the most recent data and should better predict future trend lines.
From March 2023 to March 2024, inflation rose by 3.5%, but wages increased 4.1%. Again, over this period, workers’ wage gains outpaced rising prices.
Dean Baker, an economist with the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, added that Biden isn’t using an obscure or twisted statistic to make his point on inflation.
“Biden is talking about inflation the way we always talk about inflation, as an annual rate,” Baker said. “He’s not pulling a fast one here. That is absolutely the standard way to discuss inflation.”
Our ruling
Rubio said, “It’s very misleading when (Biden) says (inflation) used to be at 9%. This is compounding. It’s not like it went down from 9% to 3%. This is building month after month. The better way to think about it is that it’s 18%, 19% over the last three years.”
Inflation compounds, and it has risen by about 19% during Biden’s presidency.
However, it’s not “very misleading” for Biden to say inflation has eased, given that wage gains have cushioned the blow of higher prices.
Since February 2020, and also over the last year, wages have increased faster than prices.
The statement is partially accurate but omits important details, so we rate it Half True.
A collection of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data is being characterized as if it proves COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous.
“Covid vaccine injuries exposed in newly uncovered data,” declared multiple April 5 Facebook posts that linked to an article by American Military News, a publication about the U.S. military and foreign affairs, published the same day. That article cited information from an Epoch Times story that said data released by the CDC shows 780,000 vaccine injury reports were made after individuals were vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Epoch Times, a news outlet tied to China’s religious movement, Falun Gong, has a history of sharing misinformation; PolitiFact has rated some of its past claims about COVID-19 vaccines False and Pants on Fire.
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The data these posts reference is from v-safe, a CDC COVID-19 monitoring system that allows people to self-report health symptoms weekly for six weeks following COVID-19 vaccination.
In 2022, the Informed Consent Action Network, a Texas-based anti-vaccine group, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, seeking public release of CDC data from more than 10 million people who used the system to self-report symptoms from December 2020 to September 2022.
After the CDC released the data, the group created an interactive visualization of this data on its website showing that more than 780,000 people said they required medical care after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
But public health officials said it’s inaccurate to characterize the data as proof of causation.
Martha Sharan, a CDC spokesperson, told PolitiFact that the adverse events reported in v-safe have not been verified by the CDC as having been caused byCOVID-19 vaccines. To verify the symptoms’ causes, an individual’s medical histories and records would have to be reviewed.
CDC spokesperson Nick Spinelli said that v-safe participants who reported receiving medical care after vaccination were called by the CDC and encouraged to submit a Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System report.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, also called VAERS, is another CDC safety monitoring system that allows anyone to submit reports about post-vaccination health effects. Researchers use it as a means of detecting possible trends that could merit a closer look. But none of the reports themselves constitute verified cases of vaccine-related symptoms or injury.
“V-safe is not designed to capture reports of unusual events, but more common symptoms like fevers, chills, or sore throats,” Kawsar Talaat, a co-director of clinical research for the Institute of Vaccine Safety said in a story published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “You cannot take the material from one of these systems and expand it beyond the limitations of the data collection.”
A 2022 peer-reviewed study of COVID-19 vaccines using v-safe data published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that individuals seeking medical care after an mRNA vaccine were rare. V-safe surveys also did not ask participants which symptoms led them to seek medical care.
Studies of COVID-19 vaccines have found them to be safe and effective by public health officials across the world. Adverse effects are rare, and the World Health Organization estimated that COVID-19 vaccines saved about 14.4 million lives worldwide in 2021 alone.
We rate the claim that COVID-19 vaccine injuries were exposed in newly uncovered data False.
Former President Donald Trump repeated familiar false claims ahead of his first visit to Wisconsin this campaign cycle: that he actually won the state in 2020 and there was widespread voter fraud.
On April 1, 2024 — a day before Wisconsin’s presidential primary and Trump’s first 2024 rally in the state — Trump appeared on WISN-AM’s “Dan O’Donnell Show.”
Trump incorrectly said he won Wisconsin in 2020. He did win the state in 2016, but lost in 2020.
“We had a reelection the second time. We actually did much better than the first time. We won in Wisconsin, as you know, the first time. The second time we did much better,” Trump said.
Trump also falsely claimed that he won after “wrongdoing” was discovered in the 2020 election.
“But I guess it was delayed,” Trump continued. “They found out a lot of wrongdoing. And after the wrongdoing was found, people said, ‘Well, he actually did win.’”
O’Donnell, a conservative talk radio host, did not rebut Trump’s false claims that he won the state in 2020 or that there was wrongdoing in the presidential election.
PolitiFact Wisconsin has checked these claims before. But ahead of Trump’s rally in Green Bay let’s take a trip down memory lane.
Trump did not win Wisconsin in 2020, though he did win the state in 2016
Let’s tackle the first part of Trump’s claim: that he performed better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016.
That is unequivocally false. And it’s something PolitiFact Wisconsin has checked on multiple occasions, including back in 2021.
We noted then, and we’ll repeat here, that President Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020. Biden took 1,630,866 votes compared with Trump’s 1,610,184 in the state, so Trump lost by 20,682 votes.
Trump did win the state in 2016, taking more than 22,000 votes over Democrat Hillary Clinton. He netted 1,405,284 votes in Wisconsin in 2016.
So, although Trump picked up more raw votes in 2020, his performance was not better because he ultimately lost by about 20,000 votes.
PolitiFact Wisconsin reached out to Trump’s campaign for backup but did not hear back by deadline.
Bottom line: Trump did not win Wisconsin in 2020. PolitiFact Wisconsin has repeatedly rated that claim Pants on Fire.
Recounts affirmed Biden’s victory, no widespread fraud or wrongdoing
In the second part of Trump’s claim, he says that he won after “a lot of wrongdoing” was discovered.
Let’s look back again. In 2020, PolitiFact Wisconsin explained that recounts Trump requested upheld Biden’s victory.
The net pickup for Biden was 74 votes in the heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Dane counties. So, Trump actually fell further behind.
So, again, recounts affirmed that Biden won the election.
PolitiFact Wisconsin has also debunked several claims that there was “wrongdoing” or pervasive voter fraud.
That includes clarifying that late returns for Biden were because of how Milwaukee counts its absentee ballots, not fraud.
We’ve also debunked his claim that absentee ballots were being dumped in rivers or creeks.
On top of that, a probe led by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman — who has aligned with Trump and promoted his false claims — turned up no evidence the election was incorrectly called.
The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty also found no evidence of widespread fraud. State auditors also found voting machines worked properly.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Even reviews led by conservatives found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
PolitiFact Wisconsin found false Trump’s claims of pervasive “wrongdoing” many times before, and the same applies here.
Our ruling
In a radio interview, Trump repeated familiar false refrains.
That is, that he won Wisconsin in 2020 and “after the wrongdoing was found, people said, ‘Well, he actually did win.’”
Biden won the state in 2020. Recounts actually expanded Biden’s margin, and multiple reviews — including by conservatives — found there was no widespread voter fraud.
PolitiFact Wisconsin has checked these claims before, and we’ll continue doing so if Trump airs them as he hits the ground in Wisconsin ahead of November.
We’ve given a Pants on Fire rating for similar Trump claims in the past, and we do the same again here.
