President Trump rose to popularity by pointing out that the media often spoon-feeds us "fake news".
If there was ever any doubt that he was right, this weekend the media went out of their way to prove otherwise.
Let's start with BuzzFeed - on Friday a "bombshell" report was published by every millennial's favorite website for memes and pictures of cats.
BuzzFeed claimed President Trump “personally instructed” his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress during his 2017 testimony. It was the smoking gun the Left had been waiting for - CNN and MSNBC gave the story non-stop coverage, every top-tier journalist and Hollywood elitist took to social media to that they were right when they previously aid and Trump was going to be impeached and now everyone will finally know that Republicans are evil.
Just one problem with the report - it was negated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller less than 24 hours after it was published.
Despite non-stop media coverage over the past two years, Mueller's office has stayed pretty much silent on various news reports regarding the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
But on Friday, Mueller's office called the BuzzFeed's story "not accurate."
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller's office, said, "BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate."
The BuzzFeed report claimed Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Organization’s pursuit of a deal to build a luxury high-rise in Moscow.
The story also claimed Mueller's office knew about the president’s alleged actions.
But Mueller claims this just isn't true - the entire report is based on faulty and inaccurate information.
We shouldn't be surprised - the very fact that BuzzFeed published this story, and not CNN or the Washington Post, tells us that bigger news outlets rejected this story when it was being previously pitched to (and rejected by) their editors and management before ending up on the desk at BuzzFeed.
Now let's talk about Baby Hitler.
At the #MarchForLife last weekend conservative author Ben Shapiro spoke to a large audience about the virtues of not aborting your baby. During his speech he referenced "Baby Hitler".
Ben was making the point that, "Pro-choicers sometimes argue that abortion lowers crime rates. It is immoral to kill children because of what they might become in the future."
Ben's argument was simple: there'd be no way to know that Baby Hitler was going to grow up and kill people - it was just a baby – therefore it doesn’t make sense to say abortions reduce crime and violence because how would you know which babies to abort?
Progressive activist Jordan Uhl seized on the occasion and cut a :21 seconds out of Ben's speech to make it sound like he was praising Baby Hitler.
It was a stupid, foolish trick, but it worked - news outlets like the Huffington Post pounced on the sound-bite and ran it as full blown proof that Ben Shapiro, a Jew, was praising Hitler. Of course, this was just a ridiculous analysis - ideologically, Ben is as far away from a Nazi as a person can get.
In Ben's own words, "Here’s the good news: you don’t have to take my word for it! Simply watch the entire video or listen to today’s podcast, in which I say all of this. Or, alternatively, keep lying."
And then there was the Covington Catholic school boy.
On Sunday a vague, confusing video went viral that depicted a teenage Catholic school boy wearing a red MAGA hat while he stared in the face of an elderly Native American man who was performing a ritualistic tribal chant.
The video provided little to no context to explain how these men got where they were, but everyone just immediately assumed that the boy was harassing the elderly man.
Celebrities, journalists and even politicians called for his head. Kathy Griffin demanded that the boy's real name and address be published online and Wheeler Walker Jr (a Los Angeles comedian who mocks Southerners for a living) told his followers on Twitter to feed the boy and sexually assault him.
Moments later someone posted an extended version of the same video to social media. That's when it was revealed that the boy wasn't harassing the elderly man. In fact, the elderly man approached the boy and started chanting in his face, meaning he was the one doing the harassing and the boy took it like a champ before being vilified by the media and Hollywood. The kid just stood there and silently smiled. His only crime was being a white male Republican.
All three of these examples of blatant fake news are frustrating but the Catholic school boy story is the most upsetting. Trump and Ben Shapiro can defend themselves, but a teenage kid being crucified by the media is less likely to have the resources needed to protect himself and his family if some low-information nut job catches wind of the viral fake news and tries to become a hero by seeking out the boy’s family and doing something reckless (like when members of Antifa boast about “punching Nazis”).
So there you have it, folks - the weekend of fake news. If we learned anything over the past few days it's that we should always wait until the dust clears before we form an opinion about what's happening. Sometimes being the first to comment or report on an issue just means you didn't wait long until to get the whole story before you started ringing the alarm to the offense industry.
In other words, if you don't really know what happened maybe stopped telling people otherwise? You're not helping.