Latest Stories By Bill McCarthy

The historic leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion that would strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973 rippled through Washington and the country at large in the hours after the document’s publication by Politico.  The impact of the leak was seismic. The ruling spelled out in the draft […]

“2000 mules,” a new documentary from a right-wing filmmaker with a history of spreading false claims, promises to give evidence to millions of Americans who believe something went wrong in the 2020 election. The trailer for Dinesh D’Souza’s movie resembles a sci-fi flick, set to dramatic horror movie music with grainy video footage of what […]

In the days after a deadly missile strike blasted a railway station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, a viral online video — dressed as a news report — sought to pin the blame on Ukrainian forces. The one-minute-27-second video claiming that Ukrainian forces had bombed their own station was stamped with the branding […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long cited NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe as a pretext for his country’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Ukraine remains outside of NATO despite its efforts to join the Western military alliance, which was established in 1949 and has swelled to include 30 member countries. In March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy […]

Former President Barack Obama returned to the White House for the first time since 2017, joining President Joe Biden for an April 5 event to celebrate the Affordable Care Act. The event, at which Biden signed a new executive order to expand coverage under the Obama-era health care law, lasted roughly 45 minutes. But in […]

Russia’s invasion in Ukraine has unfurled yet another round of Ukraine-related allegations targeting Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. The latest claim from Russian officials, Russian media and some conservative U.S. outlets echoes a more recent conspiracy theory about alleged bioweapons laboratories funded by the U.S. in Ukraine. There are no U.S.-run bioweapons facilities in […]

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, made a series of false and conspiratorial claims shortly after the 2020 election in text messages to Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, imploring him to press forward in an effort to overturn the election. The Washington Post […]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fueled a surge of false and misleading content on TikTok. Countless videos are exploiting the platform’s defining features around audio creation and sharing in order to spread fake wartime footage purportedly filmed in Ukraine.  This flood of misinformation features much of the same types of deceptive postings that have plagued […]

In an October 2020 campaign speech in Georgia, just days before the election that sent him to the White House, candidate Joe Biden used a quote from Pope Francis. The quote came from a letter the pope had sent to Roman Catholic bishops, in which he urged world leaders to “ask ourselves, ‘Why I am […]

Citing newly acquired intelligence, the U.S. in early February accused Russia of plotting a fake attack by Ukrainian forces as a pretext for invading the neighboring country. U.S. officials provided few details about the alleged “false flag” attack, saying it could jeopardize sources and methods used to obtain the intelligence. But they said the disinformation […]

Anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the experience of vaccine deniers to the plight of Anne Frank and other Jews persecuted by the Nazi Germans during the Holocaust. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” said Kennedy during a Jan. […]

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol dealt a fact-based blow to efforts to rebrand the insurrection as a false flag orchestrated by the FBI. The committee on Jan. 11 revealed that it had interviewed Ray Epps, an Arizona man accused by right-wing politicians and pundits of being an […]