We will never trust anything they say.

Former President Donald Trump has been hit with numerous “fact-checks” on the campaign trail that have cited FBI statistics to maintain violent crime is falling in America.

However, the bureau quietly adjusted its figures for 2022 in recent weeks — and the new numbers show that offenses actually ticked up overall.

The apparent stealth edit to the bureau’s statistics, first reported by RealClearInvestigations, shows that the raw number of violent crime incidents — including murders, assaults and rapes — rose to 1,256,671 in 2022 from 1,197,930 in 2021, an increase of 4.9%.

FBI quietly revised 2022 crime data to show violent offenses rose rather than dropped (nypost.com)

For a long time, I was worried that US institutions would go the way of the British Home Office and start messing around with the raw data in order to accommodate results to the political power in charge. Not the process of the massaging of the data, but the actual data itself. Incomplete data not being reported as such and adjusted to compare to previous years has yielded a propaganda victory for this administration because the Usual Fact Checkers never seek the truth.

“That's true, isn't it?
No. But it's accurate”
Absence of Malice (1981)

But I guess being perennially distrustful will hurt less than being eternally credulous.

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Hat tip Tom W.