The idea of fact-checking sounds pretty good. People say a lot of stupid stuff, but a lot of stupid stuff turns out to be true and it's difficult to determine which stupid stuff is real and which isn't. Fact-checking does this for you, at least in theory.
In reality, fact-checkers tend to be childless women and eunuchs who are too bitter to even be cat ladies. Their biases are pretty obvious to anyone who cares to look.
For example, Snopes – one of the worst offenders which was once a great source to check if something was true or an urban myth until it started getting into politics – was forced to take a look at a claim about Kamala Harris.
In particular, did she say that authorities could enter people's homes without a warrant to make sure they were storing their guns properly?
Even Snopes was forced to admit that yes, she did.
I mean, it's obvious. There's video (which was acknowledged):
The video and quote come from a 2007 news conference by then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Harris, then the city's district attorney, about new legislation that would seek to enforce safe storage of guns. Harris' full quote (beginning at 32:40) was as follows:
For the most part, we're not creating something new. It's just time. And I think that with the rate of homicides that we've been seeing, and certainly our focus on that and our concern about it — it's just time and it's the right thing to do. And getting back to that earlier question, I mean, I think that the people who are going to oppose mostly what we're doing are the NRA, and they are not African American, and people who live in this community and are traumatized by violence every day. It's people who own guns who are quietly sitting on those guns, and those guns might end up being the weapons of the destruction of a community, because they get in in the hands of some kid who decides that they like what they see on television and they want to act that way. So this is about just basically saying that we're going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.
In other words, Harris did say the quote. At the beginning of the news conference, Lenore Anderson, then director of the mayor's office, made clear that Harris had been instrumental in writing this legislation. With them stood San Francisco Police Commissioner Joe Marshall, who expressed support for the legislation.
That should have been it. Fact-check found the statement to be true, she actually said that. Time to move on to the next question, right?
Oh, no, not so fast. Snopes can't just leave it alone. It has to find a way to defend Harris, so it added this bit at the end:
Harris, who is a gun owner, said during her 2024 presidential campaign that while she would support stricter gun laws, she would not seek to confiscate people's guns, as her opponent — former President Donald Trump — claimed.
Now, Harris has supported two different gun bans - one on handguns when she was District Attorney of San Francisco and the other an assault weapon ban with an associated mandatory buyback during her failed presidential campaign in 2019 – and she's still supporting an assault weapon ban, which would prohibit some of the most popular rifles in this country. To believe she'd still try to confiscate people's property if she gets the chance is only natural.
But it's also irrelevant to the fact-check in question.
The fact that Snopes put that in there suggests that it figures it has an obligation to defend Harris, but it can't actually dismiss the claim because it's as clear as can be. Plus, it's not even new. I've reported on it for weeks now, as have many others who cover Second Amendment news. Snopes waited as long as it could to even acknowledge the claim.
This is why no one trusts fact-checkers anymore.
It started as a good idea, but it's attracted the worst sort of people.
