Unless you've been paying attention to far more important things, our own Wendy Bell has made a deal of some sort with WIMKIN social media.
On its Facebook page, Wendy's WIMKIN promises:
Uncensored, Non-Fact Checking, International Social Media Platform.
Well, the "Non-Fact Checking" part is certainly true.
Check out
this posting from yesterday:
With the text:
So true. Join us at Wimkin for facts, truth and FREE SPEECH SOCIAL MEDIA!
Well, not so factual. Not so true. The first picture (the one beneath "He was with them 20
years ago:") is not actually a picture of Donald Trump at Ground Zero on
9/11.
It is actually a picture of Donald Trump on Wall Street (about a half a
mile away) on September 18 (about a week later).
From the NYTimes:
A photo taken of him on Sept. 18, 2001, has been used in a widely circulated meme that claims Mr. Trump personally traveled to ground zero with hundreds of workers to help uncover victims.
Rolling Stone has another picture of him that day (note the guy over Trump's right shoulder. Note the guy's tie. Same guy. Same tie. Same day. September 18, 2001).
But was he "there for them" on (or about) 9/11?
No. Again, from the NYTimes:
In the days after the attack, Mr. Trump ventured outside of Trump Tower to provide commentary, which largely focused on real estate and estimating the building costs of recovery. In an interview with a German television station on Sept. 13, 2001, Mr. Trump was asked if he would be personally involved in the recovery effort.
“I have a lot of men down here right now,” Mr. Trump said. “We have over 100 and we have 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple of hundred people down here.” He added: “We will be involved in some form helping to reconstruct.”
And the evidence of him helping on 9/11 is lacking:
[Timothy] O’Brien [the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,”], said the size of the Trump Organization at the time was “a little bit over a dozen people,” which would have made it impossible to send hundreds of people to participate in the relief effort. At the time, Mr. Trump had a large number of casino workers based in Atlantic City, but there is no documented evidence of him marshaling his resources to aid in the relief effort.
There's no evidence that it actually occurred.
Donald Trump was lying.
Then there's the charitable contributions Trump reportedly made:
Republican nominee Donald Trump claims he gave generously to help his city in the dark days after the deadly terrorist attacks. But new records show a pledged promise to donate $10,000 to a major 9/11 charity must have somehow slipped his mind.
City Controller Scott Stringer conducted a review of hundreds of pages of previously sealed records of the two main 9/11 charities at the request of the Daily News, and found that Trump and his charity hadn't donated a dime in the months after 9/11.
"For the periods covered by the audits, we did not find any record of a donation from Trump himself or a Trump entity to either the Twin Towers Fund or the New York City Public/Private Initiatives Inc.," Stringer's office said in a statement to the Daily News in response to a Freedom of Information Law request.
This appears to contradict Trump's prior boasts of spontaneous generosity, made as his hometown reeled from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history. The records show that through mid-2002 there is no evidence that Trump personally or through the Trump Foundation gave to either group.
At that same time, however, Trump benefited from government help from Rolling Stone:
In January 2002, four months after the attacks, [US Senators] Clinton and Schumer stood in the White House Rose Garden, where George W. Bush thanked them for their work as he signed into law a budget containing some $20 billion in dedicated funding for New York’s recovery.
A not-insignificant chunk of that federal funding, $2 billion, was earmarked for distribution by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Empire State Development Corporation. About a quarter of that – some $500 million – was explicitly set aside for helping small businesses in the area recover. Among the 8,214 early recipients was 40 Wall Street LLC, the most valuable building in Donald Trump’s portfolio of properties, a skyscraper that sits less than a mile from Ground Zero. (An additional $350 million was later allocated to the same cause, bringing the total number of businesses impacted to more than 14,000.)
Trump applied for and accepted the money, despite the fact that – as he acknowledged in an interview with a German news show immediately after the attacks – the property “wasn’t, fortunately, affected by what happened to the World Trade Center.”
The NY Daily News reported that the grant was about $150,000.
So there's no evidence to Trump's claim of giving $10,000 but lots of evidence he took $150,000 of government aid he didn't deserve.
Hey, WendyKIM, my new friends! Don't you think that if you're promising to deliver to the public "facts" and "truth" that you actually, um I dunno, make sure you deliver facts and truth?
So far, you're not doing too well on that account.
Perhaps it's the company you keep.
