[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

The left hasn’t given up on its “fact-checking” scam. But it’s getting more absurd by the minute.

It’s well known by now, at least among people who are paying attention, that the proliferation of “fact-checking” sites and organizations in recent years was just another leftist con game, an attempt to discredit and destroy sources that dissented from the establishment line by tarring them as “disinformation.”

The Biden regime even set up an abortive “Disinformation Governance Board” supposedly to help Americans (whom regime wonks clearly regard as stupid and undiscerning) distinguish the truth (that is, the left’s line) from lies (that is, whatever Trump was saying). The whole thing went up in flames, however, when some of the nation’s top intelligence professionals labeled Hunter Biden’s laptop “disinformation,” yet it turned out to be real. Yet the left still remains committed to its fact-checking game.

One of the foremost exponents of this scam is NewsGuard, an initiative of the hard-Left self-appointed news arbiter Steven Brill that received $749,387 from the Department of Defense in 2021. What conceivable benefit could a leftist propaganda outfit masquerading as a neutral fact-checking have to the Department of Defense? Well, if you’re a corrupt and politicized government agency that is more concerned about defending the Biden regime from its political opponents than with defending the United States of America from its enemies, you might find NewsGuard to be quite handy.

On Thursday, NewsGuard senior apparatchik Valerie Pavilonis called Ben Shapiro on the carpet for the Daily Wire’s coverage of the Hamas-Israel war. Pavilonis was agitated because the Daily Wire had reported accurately that it was not Israel, but Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that had bombed the parking lot of Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital. Wrote Pavilonis: “There have been enough conflicting accounts that, in NewsGuard’s view, we still don’t know enough to pin the blame definitively on [Palestinian Islamic Jihad].”

As the Daily Wire notes, “at the time of her email, U.S. intelligence officials had already gone public with their assessment that the hospital blast was the result of a Palestinian rocket. Based on analysis of four different video feeds as well as the effect of the blast, it was determined with ‘high confidence’ that the rocket came from inside Gaza and was fired by Palestinian militants.”

The British and French governments have agreed, and even the New York Times walked back its coverage that had blamed Israel for the blast. So why are Pavilonis and NewsGuard running cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

I have heard from Valerie Pavilonis myself. In September, she wrote demanding to know how I knew that a chap named Daniel Abed Khalife, who had escaped from a prison in the UK where he was being held on terrorism charges and suspected of passing information to the Islamic Republic of Iran, was a Muslim.

Khalife’s father was Iranian and Khalife was not cavorting with the “white supremacist terrorists” of leftist myth, but Pavilonis pretended that the obvious was unclear. What she really wanted to do, of course, was find an excuse for labeling my site, Jihad Watch, inaccurate. Anything would do.

Despite the fact that NewsGuard is a gang of fanatical and dishonest leftist ideologues, not actual fact-checkers, the Defense Department is not alone in taking it seriously. Wirepoints reported Saturday that “among NewsGuard’s partners are the U.S. State Department, the Defense Department, and the World Health Organization, whose establishment views it dogmatically endorses as undisputed fact.” Even worse, it is insinuating itself into school libraries, so as to bamboozle a new generation of unsuspecting Americans.

Yet there is hope. The Consortium for Independent Journalism has filed suit against NewsGuard for defamation. And there is even more hope for independent thinkers: while NewsGuard’s insidious influence is spreading, there are still news sites that refuse to be intimidated or cowed into submission, and who still tell the truth, come what may, without fear or favor. Independent thinkers will find them.