WASHINGTON, D.C. — Former Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler was awarded the “Philip J. Klass Award for outstanding promotion of critical thinking and scientific understanding” Thursday night. But when confronted with his persistent Russia collusion hoax propaganda, Kessler insisted “there is no Russia collusion hoax.”
Kessler was given the award by a group called the National Capital Area Skeptics at an event titled “Fact-Checking in a World of Misinformation” in the Media and Public Affairs Building of George Washington University.
The Federalist has extensively tracked Kessler’s career of partisan deception, which includes lying about Russian collusion and the bogus Steele dossier, refusing to consider evidence that the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab, altering statements about election integrity to fit the narrative of a “fact check,” waving off concerns about the coronavirus shot, and much more.
Kessler also leaned into his mathematically absurd claim that President Donald Trump had said “over 30,000” false or misleading statements in his first term, 16,000 of which came in the first three years and 14,000 of which came in the final year.
Meanwhile, Kessler admitted at the GW event he actively refused the same treatment for President Joe Biden, stating, “I was injured by Trump. I had to go through four months of physical therapy … when Biden came in, they wanted me to do it for Biden. I said, ‘I’ll do 100 days for Biden. I’m not going to do anything more.'”
Interviewer Joel Achenbach, a former staff writer/science journalist at The Washington Post, told him “obviously, you did a heroic job for years, in what had to been an exhausting job too, particularly after 2016.”
When asked by The Federalist if he was worried “fact checkers” have lost their credibility after perpetuating the Russia collusion hoax and cooperating with social media companies to censor Americans who countered approved narratives about Covid, Kessler became extremely defensive.
He attempted to explain away the hoax by pointing to the Senate Intelligence Committee report stating Russia attempted to interfere with the 2016 election, but that entirely alters the claim that “fact-checkers” like Kessler had been making all along.
When confronted by the fact that the hoax that he perpetuated falsely asserted Trump colluded with the Russians to alter the election, and asked if he has read the documents showing the hoax was a concoction of the Obama administration to kneecap Trump, Kessler became exasperated.
“I’m sorry, just to be frank, what you’re saying you’re repeating things that are simply false,” he asserted. When pushed again on if he had actually read the documents, he responded with an annoyed “yes.”
“This is a great example of the kind of strange, you know, partisan mindsets that that you know people that aren’t thinking critically will accept. But those things are not true,” he added.
A GW student journalist in the room seemed to find it ironic that the person talking about objectivity and critical thinking skills was wholly incapable of participating in the very thing he was advocating, stating in a passed note, “He could not deal with any criticism — so typical!”
Kessler’s refrain that “it is increasingly a world of misinformation, and it is indeed getting worse,” stood in stark contrast to the mountains of evidence that the entire narrative was a fabrication.
Achenbach asked Kessler whether he’d ever made any major errors, and Kessler said he had not — only some partial missteps that prove “no fact check is ever finished.”
“There was never any thing that I recall where we had to retract the article or anything like that,” Kessler said. “You know, I always said, you know, no fact check is ever finished, and we update with new information.”
But the “fact checking” industry is continuing to lose credibility. Just this week, the “fact checkers” were again proven to be unquestioning shills of their Democrat friends, as even more evidence comes out suggesting Rep. Ilhan Omar really did marry her brother and allegedly committed immigration fraud. Snopes, another “fact checker” rated this claim “unfounded.”
As The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway observed, “that ‘fact checkers’ tried to make their judgments on complicated matters of rhetoric and policy sound definitive to the point of pseudoscientific objectivity was always absurd … The first Trump presidency made it painfully obvious that ‘fact checking’ did not exist as a fair and independent vocation. It was strictly an attempt to control the public debate.”
In his dubious defense of “truth,” “objectivity,” “critical thinking,” and the rest, Kessler ended the night by decrying the hyper-partisanship of American discourse, which he blamed entirely on Trump because he was apparently the first to break the dam on saying “the other side is evil.” Achenbach dutifully agreed, stating, “Trump changed the tone of what you’re allowed to say.”
But while Achenbach made some attempt to say political rancor had plagued American discourse since the founding, which is true, Kessler, with all his objectivity, blamed first and foremost Trum, and then the House speakership of Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s.
True to form, Kessler happened to omit the fact that Democrats have been calling Republicans “Nazis,” a synonym for evil in the Western political lexicon, since the 1940s.
In 1948, just three years after World War II, President Harry Truman likened Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey to Adolf Hitler directly. The same happened in 1964 with Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, while President Lyndon Johnson said a Goldwater presidency would bring about American nuclear holocaust. The invective was extended to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, as well as Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Trump has had it worse than all of those Republicans combined.
While those are just presidents or presidential candidates, the trend trickles down to all levels of Republican candidacy. What it has achieved, which Kessler seemed intent on papering over, is the wave of left-wing violence that has been unleashed in recent years, which has no counterpart on the right.
From the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to the shooting of Trump, to the shooting of congressional Republicans at baseball practice, to the Black Lives Matter riots, and much more, the rhetoric has achieved its intended result.
Every time, Democrat politicians are given cover by the corporate media, including the fact checkers like Kessler, to continue their push toward violence.
Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.