The midterm elections are finally over, but it won’t be long before the 2024 campaign cycle — which will really start in 2023 — gets going. Before that happens, we’ve put together this list of the year’s biggest whoppers that politicians and others made over the past 12 months.
In a clip from Fox News’ coverage of the Georgia Senate runoff, the vote tallies for both candidates briefly drop by thousands of votes. Social media posts use the clip to falsely claim election fraud. The Associated Press, which provided the data to Fox, said the clip shows a brief overestimate of votes caused by human error.
Under President Joe Biden, U.S. exports of goods and services have increased, but U.S. imports have grown even faster. However, on multiple occasions, Biden has given the false impression that rising exports means declining imports and fewer U.S. jobs being outsourced to foreign countries.
A blood transfusion from a vaccinated person doesn’t transfer the inoculation to an unvaccinated person. But high-profile purveyors of misinformation have been promoting the long-standing false claim that it does.
Explaining why he is likely to vote against an $858 billion defense spending bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders wrongly said there are “85 million Americans who have no health insurance.”
Republicans claim Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs — who was recently elected to become the state’s next governor — used her government office to censor free speech on Twitter to benefit her election effort. But there’s less here than meets the eye.
Country singer Jake Flint died unexpectedly on Nov. 27, just hours after his wedding. Social media posts baselessly insinuate Flint died because of the COVID-19 vaccine. The 37-year-old singer received his second dose more than a year before his death, and his representative said Flint’s death was “not related in any way” to the vaccine.
By some counts, about 60% of U.S. counties are so-called “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” which oppose gun laws that they claim are unconstitutional. But that does not necessarily mean that “60% of counties … are refusing to implement the nation’s gun laws,” as Sen. Chris Murphy claimed.
When asked whether Republicans would “make it more difficult” for Congress to approve Ukrainian aid, Rep. Mike Turner criticized the $40 billion package enacted in May, saying: “We don’t need to pass $40 billion large Democrat bills … to send $8 billion to Ukraine.” Much more than that, however, was allocated for military support.
What appear to be ordinary postmortem blood clots are held up in a viral online video as supposed evidence that there’s a depopulation plot underway using COVID-19 vaccination to kill people. There’s no evidence for this theory. The hourlong video also repeats numerous falsehoods that have previously been debunked.