Fact-checkers are responsible for proving President Joe Biden’s false claims about gas prices. You can then decide if Politifact is correct or if Townhall is. Townhall aired this clip of Biden discussing gas prices during a Kansas City visit last week. Biden boasts that gas prices have fallen an average of 6 or 7 cents per gallon in the past few weeks. To be safe, Townhall ran a longer clip of Biden’s speech the next day.
The problem is that the White House got its hands twisted tighter than four spiders playing Twister, over Townhall’s outlandish language and out-of-context boast. White House rapid response director Mike Gwin jumped into action and accused Townhall of “lazy deceptive, editing” in order to “omit that the President was noting declining gas prices.”
According to Hoaxy, Townhall was most responsible for the popularity of the abbreviated clips on Twitter. The Post Millennial uploaded a similar clip in the few minutes that followed. The retweets continued to roll in. At no point did Townhall post a misleading clip. They made a big deal of Biden’s vague language and his absurd boast of a 7-cent price drop in gas. But, I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Nationally, gas prices have risen from $2.46 per gallon on Inauguration Day to $3.44 now that Biden was sworn into office. This is an increase of 71%. What’s the context?
The traders’ fear that omicron-related travel restrictions may reduce demand for oil has caused prices to drop, and not because Biden suddenly changed his inflationary policies into anti-inflationary ones. Jacbonson said that “experts” have “studied police-related deaths as well as race relations and concluded that focusing too heavily on the linguistics of controversial cases can lead to its own problems.” So, Dems can lie and we aren’t allowed to question the facts.
