This weekend I was informed of a truly outrageous statement by Karoline Leavitt. At least it would have been truly outrageous if it were true, but it now looks like fake news. A response I got on Bluesky pointed at an article on the news aggregator Newsbreak, with the headline “Karoline Leavitt shocks as she tells press ‘Jesus didn’t have electricity either’.” This seemed outrageous even for the Trump team; it wouldn’t fit their line to admit that tariffs could result in privations. I checked for confirmation and found an MSN article with the same claim. This made me think it was reliable. I was wrong.

On Sunday I again looked for confirmation; a claim like that ought to be drawing outrage from all over the Internet. I couldn’t find anything from other even vaguely reliable news sources. I looked at the MSN article again; it said “Karoline Leavitt hit with claims she told press ‘Jesus didn’t have electricity either.'” Wait? Had I misread the article so badly the day before? Was it only reporting unconfirmed claims that she’d said it? I wondered if my memory was failing.

But I looked at the Bluesky post again. The thumbnail there still had an outright claim that Leavitt had made the statement. The Newsbreak and MSN articles had changed in sync. The Irish Star seems to be the source of the rumor, but I can’t find a direct reference to it. There was no acknowledgement of error, no notation that the article had been changed. The sites just memory-holed the earlier version of the article and replaced it with a fundamentally different story. Fortunately, Bluesky hadn’t updated its thumbnail for the article, so I had evidence my reading comprehension and memory hadn’t failed.

The article doesn’t say where Leavitt made the alleged statement, or even who made the claim. The first sentence (as of the moment I’m writing this) is “The youngest White House press secretary ever Karoline Leavitt – who is married to a man 32 years her senior – has been accused of claiming ‘Jesus Christ didn’t have electricity’ in a press conference.” Two things jump out from that sentence. First, what does Leavitt’s marriage status have to do with anything in the article? Second, what does it mean to “accuse” someone of making a statement in a press conference? Anything said there is a public statement, made to people whose job is to report it. How did all of them miss it while some anonymous bystander picked it up?

Leavitt is a dishonest Trump pawn, which made me more inclined to believe the claim about her. In January 2021, she said, “I believe President Trump won the election, but I recognize that President Biden was certified, which is why I’m running for Congress — to fight against his agenda.” If Trump told her to say we should be happy with first-century technology, I’m sure she’d say it, but that doesn’t mean she did.

Any news source will make mistakes occasionally, but an honest one will admit them rather than quietly altering its stories in place. MSN and Newsbreak are not honest sites. And you wonder why people don’t trust the news.

Update, Feb. 4, 2025: Snopes has weighed in on the issue. According to their account, somebody posted the alleged quote on Reddit (/r/politicalMemes) as a joke. Somebody reposted it to Xitter. The Irish Star reported it as fact. Newsbreak and MSN boosted it. The Snopes article has before and after screenshots, confirming the silent alteration. IDIOTS! IDIOTS! ALL IDIOTS!

The Before image (screenshot from Bluesky):

The After image (screenshot from Newsbreak, February 2):