Whoops!
See, here’s the thing with “fact-checking”: It only works if you check claims with facts. Known facts. I’d like to think that’s the very definition of what a “fact” is.
At CNN, apparently, they have a different definition. To them, a claim is “false” if they’ve never heard any facts to the contrary.
This doesn’t necessarily mean those facts don’t exist, apparently. In fact, they may very well be out there — and in this case, they were. It just so happens that the network’s “fact checkers” (huge, emphatic air-quotes there) hadn’t actually checked the facts President Donald Trump touted about the Department of Government Efficiency’s work during his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday — and whether they’d identified “$8 million for making mice transgender.”
They had. CNN said they hadn’t. The White House brought the receipts. CNN then decided this “needs context,” instead.
Again: Whoops!
In case you missed it, this came during a part of the speech where Trump was listing off some of the more dodgy line items identified by DOGE, including, according to The New York Times’ transcript, “Sixty million dollars for Indigenous peoples and Afro-Caribbean empowerment in Central America — $60 million. Eight million dollars for making mice transgender — this is real. Thirty-two million dollars for a left-wing propaganda operation in Moldova. Ten million dollars for male circumcision in Mozambique. Twenty million dollars for the Arab ‘Sesame Street’ in the Middle East. It’s a program. Twenty million dollars for a program.”
“8 million dollars on making mice transgender”😂😭
Trump exposes massive fraud in our government in the most sarcastic and cleverly funny way
Wait for the end.. #trump #StateOfTheUnion pic.twitter.com/baElsvFFWz
— I Came, I Saw, They died 🇺🇸📢🇺🇸 (@4ortunefame) March 5, 2025
Would you ever watch CNN?
Yeah, and wait until they find out Elmo’s father supports Israel over Hamas; the only red on screen won’t be his fur, I’ll tell you that much.
Anyhow, this immediately raised a “j’accuse!” from CNN, which alleged that “Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of ‘$8 million for making mice transgender.’
“Between the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, the National Institutes of Health awarded a total of $477,121 to three projects that involved administering feminizing hormone therapy to monkeys to understand how it may affect their immune system and make them more susceptible to HIV. Feminizing hormone therapy is a gender-affirming treatment used to block the effects of the male hormone testosterone and promote feminine characteristics among transgender women,” an archived version of the fact check read.
“Transgender women are nearly 50 times more likely to be infected with HIV than other adults, according to one study from 2013 across 15 countries, including the U.S. It’s not clear where the $8 million figure came from.”
Ask and ye shall receive. From The White House’s website:
“The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).” You have to admit this much — whatever else you think about the president, WhiteHouse.gov has been putting out a whole lot more colorful copy since Jan. 20.
The big-ticket item here is $3.1 million for a study, “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma,” a study which — wouldn’t you know it? — involves studying mice that receive treatments that individuals undergoing so-called “gender-affirming health care” (CNN’s later language, not mine) would receive.
Another $1.2 million for “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis,” which — wouldn’t you (again) know it? — involves studying mice that … you get the idea.
There was also another $735,113 for a study that wasn’t even slightly covert about its aims: “Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice.”
Thus, CNN’s article was updated to say simply: “This claim needs context,” not that it was false.
CNN just quietly edited their “fact check” article after they reported that Trump’s statement on spending $8 million for making mice transgender was “false.”
It sounds so crazy that they thought Trump made it up…
It’s 100% true and now even CNN is forced to admit it pic.twitter.com/oVETMXbKQG
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 5, 2025
“The morning after Trump’s speech, the White House provided a list of $8.3 million in federal grants to health studies that involve mice receiving treatments that can be used in gender-affirming health care,” CNN’s article read as of Thursday morning.
“The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender.”
Which, as you might be aware … is not what CNN’s original fact check said.
And again, let me reiterate the most basic fact about fact-checking: It must be based on facts. I know I’m driving home a point here in the most repetitive, tautological way possible — but it’s a point CNN didn’t make, because this wasn’t putting itself forward as “yeah, I don’t know exactly what he’s talking about during this part of the speech, but this sounds triggering to me, so I’m gonna call it false”-checking, but (I cannot reiterate this word — or fact, just in case you needed to hear that one syllable one more time — enough) FACT-checking.
(OK, two more times. And maybe a few more.)
This was supposed to be fact-checking, as in, “someone says something, that thing is wrong, here’s the reason why,” not “someone says something, I don’t have the data, unless they put out a media release shaming me tomorrow morning I’m just going to say they’re a liar.” That’s just some hack’s opinion, which is the opposite of what a major media operation is supposed to exist for in this situation.
This, by the way, is the entire reason why the “fact-checking” edifice that social media conglomerates tried to enact after the 2016 election finally crumbled — and it’s not because of, or not just because of, the “vibes shift” after the 2024 election.
People didn’t trust that edifice because it was rife with this kind of thing — and anybody who said Trump was right before this got corrected by the White House, especially publishers, risked getting dinged in terms of traffic and rankings if they didn’t play along. This led to a low trust system, particularly after l’affaire MacBook de Hunter Biden. Why wouldn’t it? Liberal media guesstimators were being used as justification for censorship by Silicon Valley tech progressives, and this was supposed to save us from “fake news.” It was laughable.
It still is. The only difference is, these charlatans no longer have their thumbs on the digital scales at Meta or X. Now, they’re braying like stuck, dying donkeys about funding issues in the wake of their irrelevance. Once more, this time with even more sarcastic oomph: Whoops!
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