Update Nov. 13, 2020 at the End

Dr.SHIVA LIVE: MIT PhD Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Unfortunate Truth of U.S. Voting Systems

MIT professor Dr. Shiva and colleagues discovered a pattern in Michigan voter data whereby tens of thousands of Trump votes were taken away and added to Biden totals.  As the video describes the program was designed to skim more votes away from large pools of Trump votes and avoid small pools, in order to be less noticeable.  The proportion of straight ticket Republican voters serves as the indicator of precincts where larger numbers of Trump only votes can be switched to Biden only votes (only refers to a vote not part of a party line ballot.  The linear relationship is quite striking and abnormal.  The more voters in a precinct voted Republican party line, the more Trump only votes in that precinct were taken away.

From Jo Nova website:

A “Transistor Function” algorithm has been used to alter voting patterns in Michigan. It has a “Weighted Race” feature.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an MIT engineer and Fulbright Scholar, with Phil Evans B.S.E.E. and Benny Smith (election commissioner and data analyst) have back-analyzed the pattern of voting in Michigan and figured out the electronic algorithm used to alter votes. Voting patterns are distorted in a way that can only be explained by a linear transformation (an algebraic equation) and he can approximate that equation and slope of the line. This means he can calculate how many votes were flipped and he does, and it’s massive.

This one form of fraud alone is enough to flip the election to Biden. That’s without all the postal vote backdating, the dead people voting, the out of state votes, the discarded ballots, the crooked media coverups, the pollsters fakery and the Pfizer hiding of the Covid Vaccine news. Trump won the election despite all the other trickery. If there had been real media coverage, honest vaccine headlines, exposure of Hunter Biden and honest polling the election probably could have been called by 8pm on Election day.

The action analysis starts at 13:30 minutes.

In disconcerting news, votes are stored as a decimal fraction. They are not even trying to record votes as whole numbers, as individual choices.

The dashed orange line should be a flat line, instead the downward slope “cuts in” and votes are increasingly distorted in precincts where more Republicans vote.  The ratio depends on the percentage of Republican voters in a precinct. The more Republicans there are, the more likely they are to abandon Trump and vote a Biden-then-Republican ticket.

The slope of that line is “too perfect” — it’s almost perfectly linear. The transistor effect kicks in and shows that the same algorithm was used in different counties across all precincts. The pattern is non-random. Even if you wanted to believe that Rep voters were tired of Trump it would not happen in a perfect line that depended on the number of Rep voters around you. (45 mins.)

Update Nov. 13, 2020

Paul Sperry writes at RealClearInvestigations, Pro-Biden Bug Also Suspected in Georgia’s Vote-Counting Software. Excepts in italics with my bolds.

A curious thing happened as Fulton County, Ga., election officials counted mail-in ballots at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in the days after the election. In the early hours of Nov. 5, a surge of some 20,000 mail-in votes suddenly appeared for Joe Biden, while approximately 1,000 votes for President Trump mysteriously disappeared from his own totals in the critical swing state, where Biden holds a razor-thin lead.

A poll watcher noticed the suspicious shift in votes while monitoring the interim election results on the Georgia secretary of state website.

“I concluded from looking at these results that this was an irregularity, since there was no obvious reason for President Trump’s totals to have decreased while former Vice President Biden’s totals increased dramatically,” Voter GA co-founder Garland Favorito swore in an affidavit he filed this week with the secretary of state’s office.

Favorito suspects a variety of factors, including that votes were “artificially inflated” for Biden while using the same Dominion Voting system used by Antrim County, Mich., which erroneously transferred 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Last year, Georgia contracted with Dominion to automate vote tabulations in all 159 of its counties.

“The software appears to have thrown votes from Trump to Biden here too,” he said in a RealClearInvestigations interview. “Or Biden ballots were manufactured.”

The large disparity of gains between the two candidates “was something I had never witnessed before in my years of election monitoring,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who has been a leading advocate for election integrity in the state over the past two decades. He says he is not a Republican or Trump supporter.

On Nov. 10, Favorito sent his affidavit to Georgia Secretary of State recommending a full, by-hand ballot recount. The next day, his office announced it will conduct such an audit for the presidential race. Biden currently leads Trump by more than 14,000 votes in the state.

In addition to helping certify the presidential race, he said it’s imperative investigators identify the source of the irregularities before the state holds its two U.S. Senate run-off elections on Jan. 5 so they don’t repeat themselves.

But Favorito, who lives in the Atlanta area, said the Fulton County shift was so dramatic it seemed as if someone had “dumped” a huge batch of mail-in ballots for Biden into the system overnight.  “One candidate could not go up by 20,000 and the other do nothing — in Fulton County or any county in Georgia,” he asserted. “That’s just not going to happen.”

Added Favorito: “I think they’re going to find the root cause of the irregularity was something electronic, and I think it’s going to change the results substantially.”

“They knew good and well they should never have bought this system in the first place,” he said. “We explained that Dominion was rejected in Texas for failing to meet basic security standards before they bought it.”

Favorito suspects similar surges in Biden ballots may have taken place during the counting of mail-in ballots on other nights, including Election Night. On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed observers that they were shutting down the tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.

“Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m.,” Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer complained in a recent Tweet. “Officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.”

Favorito fears that what he observed on Nov. 5 was not an isolated incident. “There could have been multiple 20,000-batch irregularities,” he said, “but they never got reported because they cleared out the observers.”

He does not rule out “ballot harvesting” as the culprit behind the sudden surges of mail-in votes for Biden.

He said the hundreds of drop boxes Raffensperger agreed to distribute at shopping centers and other cities throughout the state may have encouraged third parties to collect ballots in the name of other voters and stuff them into the boxes, which is illegal.

“That’s just begging for fraud,” Favorito said.

Kimberley A. Strassel writes at Wall Street Journal Harvesting the 2020 Election  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Pelosi’s top priority was remaking the electoral system. The virus gave her a boost.

Democrats grandly named their bill the For The People Act, but conservatives had better titles. This page called it the “Majority Preservation Act,” while the editors at National Review described it as an “Unconstitutional, Authoritarian Power Grab.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” and dubbed it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”

Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.

Meaning, “the fix” (as it were) was in well before anyone started counting votes. Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close—potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.

And of course there was harvesting—as these pages warned. This isn’t a new practice; candidates and campaigns have been honing it for years. Three years ago, the Palm Beach Post ran an expose on the practice in Florida. A North Carolina congressional race in 2018 was roiled by a ballot-harvesting operation, and a new election was ordered. This year simply offered the perfect environment to roll it out at new levels, and throughout the fall conservative groups were documenting examples.

Yet the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud.

How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid—or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules. As the Heritage Foundation’s election expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, mail-in voting is the “single worst form of election possible” because “it moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials.”

Case in Point:  Erie, Pennsylvania

Steve Cortes writes at the National Pulse The Statistical Case Against Biden’s Win.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Statistics continue to cast real doubt on the probability of a President Trump loss in the election.

The statistical case is, admittedly, circumstantial rather than conclusive.

But the numbers also firmly point to the intense improbability of the accuracy of the present Biden lead. The statistical case provides more than enough reasonable suspicion to require hand recounts and immediate investigation into fraudulent activities, including the new damning revelations of on-the-record whistleblowers.

There are four key elements to the numerical thesis:

1. TURNOUT

Clearly, high turnout was expected in an intensely political year with vastly expanded access to mail-in voting. But the kinds of numbers reported simply defy reasonable expectations.

For Wisconsin overall, the turnout was above 90% of registered voters. Even in a state with same-day registration, such a number seems implausible.  After all, in Australia, a place where voting is mandatory, and failing to vote is punishable with stiff fines, the total turnout for the most recent election was still only 92%.

Even more importantly, looking within the Wisconsin vote, the decisive locale for Biden was, unsurprisingly, Milwaukee. Wisconsin’s largest city reported an 84% turnout to secure a 145,916 vote lead there for Biden.  Consider a comparison to another very similar Midwestern city, Cleveland, OH. Milwaukee has a population of 590,000, 67% of them minorities. Cleveland has 381,000 people with 60% of them minorities.

But Milwaukee’s 84% turnout dwarfs Cleveland’s more believable 51% turnout rate. Like many of the suspect statistical trends evident from last Tuesday, the abnormal factors favoring Biden seem only present in the key swing states that Biden allegedly won.

2. OUTPERFORMANCE VS. OBAMA

The breakouts higher for Biden relative to Obama’s performances in key areas simply do not seem credible.  Could a candidate as doddering and lazy as Biden really have massively outpaced the vote totals of a politician who boasted rock star appeal?

For example, consider that in key Pennsylvania counties of Chester, Cumberland, and Montgomery, Biden bested the Obama election performances by factors of 1.24-1.43 times. For Montgomery County, Obama won this swing county by 59,000 votes in his 2012 re-election. But in 2020, Biden won Montgomery County by a whopping 131,000 votes, more than twice the prior Obama margin.

Biden’s 2020 total vote in Montgomery is reported at 313,000, crushing Obama’s 233,000 take in 2012 – and population growth does not explain the gains, as the county only grew by 22,000 residents during those eight years.  Such eye-popping outperformance vs.Obama, in just the right places, naturally raises a lot of suspicion.

3. BIDEN-ONLY BALLOTS

Trump campaign legal counsel Sidney Powell reports that, nationwide, over 450,000 Biden-only ballots were cast, meaning the voter allegedly selected Biden but then neglected down-ballot candidates, including closely-contested Senate and House races.  Again, this phenomenon appears far more prominently in battleground states, raising the alarm for manipulation. Why would so many people vote Biden–only in battleground Georgia, but not in deeply-red Wyoming, for instance?

In the Peach State, President Trump’s vote total almost exactly tracked the vote totals for the Republican senate candidates, separated by merely 818 votes out of 2.43 million votes Trump earned there. But, Joe Biden saw an astounding surplus of 95,801 votes over the Democratic Senate candidates.

By comparison, in Wyoming Biden only registered a surplus “Biden-only” take of just 725 votes over the Democratic Senate candidate there, or about 1/4th his take in in Georgia, on a percentage basis. The Biden-only ballots do not conclusively prove fraud, but they sure reek of something very amiss.

4. ABSENCE OF MAIL-IN VOTE VETTING

Democratic governors clamored for massive amounts of mail-in voting, knowing full well that most states would become overwhelmed and wholly unable to establish the validity and legality of almost all the votes that poured in via mail.

In the case of Pennsylvania, Governor Wolf made such changes unilaterally, in stark violation of Pennsylvania law and in contradiction of the clear US Constitutional assignment of voting regulatory authority to state legislatures, not governors. Governor Wolf’s election boards clearly just accepted the ballots… en masse, without appropriate vetting. 

By their own admission, the scant 0.03% of rejected ballots represents a refusal rate that is just 1/30th the level of 2016 in Pennsylvania.  First-time mail-in voters typically see a rejection rate of about 3% historically, or 100 times the rejection rate of Pennsylvania in 2020.

When neighboring New York state moved to widespread mail-in voting this summer, their election officials rejected 21% of mailed ballots in June, representing a rate 700 times higher than Pennsylvania’s. This total lack of filtering or controls raises enormous suspicion regarding a seriously-tainted ballot pool in the Keystone State.

RIGGED?

The statistical case, in isolation, does not prove fraud. But the confluence of highly unlikely results does, emphatically, paint of picture of utter improbability.

Any one of these four factors alone would cast intense doubt upon election results.

Put all four together, and the result is a seemingly impossible statistical perfect storm.

To use a sports analogy, it would be a team pitching a perfect game in the World Series.

Not one game, nor two…but in all four games to “sweep” via pitching perfection.

Is it possible?  Theoretically, sure. Is it probable?

Hell no – and so, we must commence with a vigorous audit as the future of our republic hangs in the balance.

Johnathon Turley explains the election process at The Hill America should welcome review for close counts. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

We are finishing only the second of four stages in an election for president. After the voting stage, states began the tabulation stage. We will soon enter the canvass stage, in which local districts confirm their counts and face challenges or recounts. Finally, there is the certification stage, in which final challenges can be raised. In other words, Trump is not deceased yet. Biden has reason to claim his lead as the odds are heavily against Trump. One or two states could flip on a “Hail Mary” challenge. But Trump needs four of those to win in a feat that would hyperventilate Aaron Rogers.

[My Comment: Most of the mass media and all of social media actively campaigned for the Biden-Harris ticket so their declarations of victory are the same as those from the candidates themselves.  With so many states heading for recounts and scrutiny of irregularities, the outcome is not yet determined.  After four years of fake news burying and hiding real news, we now have the challenge to sort between fake votes and real votes.

Nor is Trump “unclassy” for not conceding at this point. Democrats and all Americans were surprised the newspapers of record got it wrong in 1948 when Truman prevailed after all four stages of the election.  Nor did Al Gore give up in 2000.  It took 36 days and went all the way to the Supreme Court.  He lost when a crooked election supervisor in Palm Beach county of Florida was found guilty of favoring the Democrat by voiding Bush votes.  As well thousands of military ballots, which favored Bush by a roughly 2-1 margin, were arbitrarily excluded.]

Yet the public should welcome close scrutiny of these swing states. There are valid reasons to examine the figures based on the many unknowns in a new kind of election. The outcome will be determined by millions of mailed ballots in various states, some of which have never used such mailed ballots to this magnitude, and legitimate concerns were raised before the election.

States used rolls that are notoriously out of date and inaccurate. Some changed rules governing signature authentication or are accused of reducing the discrimination levels for machine authentication. In Nevada, the Trump campaign alleged that thousands of votes were cast from out of state and ballots were sent to dead voters. We cannot judge the merits of these claims until we see the evidence. It is difficult to see any problems without greater access to the ballots and the records of tabulation.

Just as some of us remain skeptical of such claims of fraud, it seems as implausible that this untested form of voting was used across the country without major glitches. Officials in cities like Detroit and Philadelphia with histories of election violations said the counts of mailed ballots were almost flawless, a claim difficult to rebut without review.

We need a review of counts in critical states to resolve a crisis of faith. A recent survey found that almost half of Americans lack confidence their ballots will be counted fairly. A Harvard study also found that only half of young black voters believe their ballots are even counted.

This lack of faith in the electoral process has been fueled by the shift to mailed ballots but builds on growing distrust of our political system.

Seeking some comic relief from the US election fiasco, I turned to Babylon Bee and found this satirical piece skewering leftist fears about the US Supreme Court with ACB confirmed. (Just this week Pelosi declared that ACB is an “illegitimate” justice”.)  Give the BB writers credit for flipping leftist control-freak behavior into rulings constraining personal rights and freedoms, but in the opposite direction.

The article is Frightening: Here Are The 23 SCOTUS Decisions Handed Down Since ACB Was Sworn In.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Since Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court, she and the other judges have wasted no time in remaking America in their image. This is what we were warned about. In only two days, 23 landmark cases have been decided by the new conservative Supreme Court. God help us all.

• United States v. Trump, 6-3 ruling — Determined that Trump has already won reelection
• Walsh v. Dweedlestein, 5-4 ruling — We are to be a theocracy under God
• United States v. Trump, 5-4 ruling — Trump is now the Galactic Emperor Of Man
• Acosta v. Elisha, 9-0 ruling — All journalists shall be thrown into a pit with a she-bear
• Gorka v. Kagan, 5-4 ruling — All justices must now wear MAGA hats
• Subway v. Hebrew National, 6-3 ruling — A hotdog is now legally classified as a sandwich
• Amazon v. Smith, 6-3 ruling — Die Hard is now legally classified as a Christmas movie
• Gates v. Cook, 7-2 ruling — .GIF must now be pronounced with a hard “G”
• American Airlines v. Moore, 6-3 ruling — The person in the middle seat of an airplane gets both armrests
• Casey v. Brown, 6-3 ruling — Washing your feet in the shower is unconstitutional
• United States v. West, 5-4 ruling — The dress is blue and black
• United States v. Barrett, 6-3 ruling — All women must have at least 7 children
• Papa Johns v. Tony’s, 5-4 ruling — All pizzas must now have pineapple on top
• United States v. Silverman, 9-0 ruling — Annoying celebrity videos telling you to vote are now illegal
• Bartolli v. Xanderatrix, 5-4 ruling — Single women are now limited to only 3 cats
• Taco Bell v. Chad, 9-0 ruling — All Taco Bells must put the Crunchwrap back on the dollar menu
• United States v. Trump, 5-4 ruling — Everyone must have a Christopher Columbus Statue in their yard
• LaPierre v. Morgan, 6-3 ruling — Gun ownership is now mandatory
• United States v. Crystal Marina, 9-0 ruling — Grants McConnell Protected Status as an endangered turtle
• United States v. Trump, 6-3 ruling — All faces on Mt. Rushmore must now be replaced by Trump
• Babylon Bee v. Facebook, 9-0 ruling — Babylon Bee no longer allowed to tell jokes about AOC
• Burger King v. Carson, 5-4 ruling — “Impossible Meat” now illegal
• Thomas v. Breyer, 8-1 ruling — In favor of stealing Justice Breyer’s milk money and shutting him in a locker

Amazing. Let’s see what they come up with next week!

There’s more:

Experts Call For 15 Days Of Counting To Flatten The Curve Of Votes For Trump

Fox News Calls Arizona For Biden After 1 Vote Counted

Miracle: Ballot Counter Turns 5 Biden Votes Into 5,000

 

Jay Ambrose explains in his article at the Record-Courier (Kent, Ohio) Trump has the virus and Democrats have their faults.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

President Donald Trump has been infected by the COVID-19 virus, and no doubt there are thousands out there saying it serves him right, that he has shrugged his shoulders at the pandemic, even refused to wear face masks and has caused thousands of deaths.

I would say something different, that this is still another event marking 2020 as one of the strangest years in American history, one that signals good reasons to shake and shiver, and not only because of a frightful pandemic and an ultra-bizarre president.

Have you noticed principle-shattering leftists, bureaucratic rot, a racial justice movement overtaken by unjust riots, the war on law enforcement, congressional extremism, media degeneration, social media mayhem, and that some of the science deniers about climate change are the totalitarian alarmists?

Yes, Trump has been a helter-skelter messenger on the pandemic, an occasional absurdity promoter and a misleading dueler with a gotcha press. In the early going, he seemed almost as unconcerned as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Joe Biden and half of everyone else. But the administration was up to all kinds of meaningful, media-neglected actions early on, with some of the goofs actually coming from the CDC.

Trump was definitively instructed by critics that he had no authority over the states. That is correct, and it is the states that have made the mistakes in resolving this deadly medical mystery, not him.

The Washington Free Beacon recently ran a list of Biden’s phony campaign assertions about Trump and the virus, and keep them in mind in assessing how miswrought his own leadership could be. He said Trump silenced a CDC expert when he didn’t, that he called the virus a “hoax” when he was referring to Democratic shenanigans, that he eliminated a pandemic office that had instead been reconstituted, that he put no pressure on China when he did, that he reduced our CDC scientists in China when he didn’t and that he refused virus test kits from the World Health Organization that never said we could have them.

I know, only Trump “lies” are important, but he is not lying when he says it is crucial to get the economy started again. If you think that doesn’t matter as much as virus dangers, look at the white working class in which 150,000 people have long been dying of alcohol, drugs and suicide each year at least partly in reaction to economic shifts taking away jobs. We could have years of struggle if we don’t get started while at least being as careful as Sweden that has handled the virus pretty well without a shutdown.

Trump helped put together an outstanding economy before the virus while Biden wants debt more than Trump does and taxes and more regulations that would in effect be another shutdown that he says he might call for anyway.

Biden also says he might favor packing of the Supreme Court, an extreme leftist position that could lead to parties rearranging the court and thereby destroying it whenever they resumed control of the White House and Senate. This is the Democrats today, the party that worked with the FBI to indulge in a farcical investigation of the Trump campaign coordinating with the Russians in illegal means of winning in 2016. Information is mounting about the connivance in all of this.

It’s no small thing to try to unseat a president illegitimately and intimidate governance for more than two years, and the current treatment of Biden’s conflicts of interest as nothing much shows a morally twisted prejudice.

My point in all of this is that the election-year issues aren’t as straightforward as some pretend, that, while Trump is scary, the other side is in some ways far scarier, that preserving Republican control of the Senate is imperative and that the public should consider varied points of view. Meanwhile, I wish Trump, his wife and other virus victims the best while hoping he may return for another debate with a touch of humility.

Glenn Greenwald explains in his Intercept article Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Outlets claiming to have “confirmed” Jeffrey Goldberg’s story about Trump’s troops comments are again abusing that vital term.

The same misleading tactic is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.

So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.  Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story.

But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense.

AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.

But whatever happened, neither AP nor Fox obtained anything resembling “confirmation.”

They just heard the same assertions that Goldberg heard, likely from the same circles if not the same people, and are now abusing the term “confirmation” to mean “unproven assertions” or “unverifiable claims” (indeed, Fox now says that “two sources who were on the trip in question with Trump refuted the main thesis of The Atlantic’s reporting”).

It should go without saying that none of this means that Trump did not utter these remarks or ones similar to them. He has made public statements in the past that are at least in the same universe as the ones reported by the Atlantic, and it is quite believable that he would have said something like this (though the absolute last person who should be trusted with anything, particularly interpreting claims from anonymous sources, is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has risen to one of the most important perches in journalism despite (or, more accurately because of) one of the most disgraceful and damaging records of spreading disinformation in service of the Pentagon and intelligence community’s agenda).

But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is “believable” or “seems like it could be true.” Its core purpose, the only thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true, or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted when news outlets claim that they “confirmed” a previous report when they did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet.

Quite aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves The Troops, conflating the crucial journalistic concept of “confirmation” with “hearing the same idle gossip” or “unproven assertions” is a huge disservice. It is an instrument of propaganda, not reporting. And its use has repeatedly deceived rather than informed the public. Anyone who doubts that should review how it is that MSNBC and CBS both claimed to have “confirmed” a CNN report which turned out to be ludicrously and laughably false. Clearly, the term “confirmation” has lost its meaning in journalism.