Is there an "adultification bias" that "uniquely plagues Black girls"?

I'm reading "The Columbus mayor called Ma’Khia Bryant a ‘young woman.’ Here’s why people are angry. Some said it exemplified ‘adultification bias’ against the Black 16-year-old girl who was fatally shot by police" (The Lily/WaPo): 

Earlier that night, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) took to Twitter to share news of the killing, calling Ma’Khia a “young woman.” 

Replies quickly poured in, noting that Ma’Khia was a child — not an adult. At the news conference a few hours later, Ginther acknowledged Ma’Khia was a child: “The city of Columbus lost a 15-year-old girl today,” he said. “This young 15-year-old girl will never be coming home.” 

But some still took to social media to criticize his initial characterization of Ma’Khia, calling it “adultification bias” — a form of discrimination that uniquely plagues Black girls, leading them to be perceived by adults as less innocent and more adult-like than their White peers, according to a widely covered 2017 Georgetown study. 

It may be that black kids are often regarded as older than white kids of the same age. When there's an emergency, like the one in the case of Ma’Khia Bryant, those who need to help can only judge by what they see. We've seen the video, and Bryant looks like a powerful attacker about to slaughter someone who looks utterly defenseless. 

But the question of how to talk about the dead person afterwards is different. City officials ought to be circumspect and use careful language. But what is the best way to refer to a 16-year-old female? I would have thought "young woman" is the most respectful locution and that "girl" for someone that age is questionable. 

But I understand the desire to encourage the police to see minors in a different light from adults.

They're equal, oftentimes, in size and power, and they are out in the world acting independently and capable of causing great harm, but they haven't had the chance to mature mentally, and we ought to give them special care.... if we can. Video can be deceiving, but based on the video, I'd say there was no time to give Ma’Khia Bryant special care befitting her young age. The life of the other girl/young woman was on the line. 

But The Lily goes on like this: 

To [Ijeoma Opara, an assistant professor in the school of social welfare at Stony Brook University], the shooting exemplified [the sexism black girls face], given the familiarity of the situation: kids fighting. But police aggressively responded to Ma’Khia because of sexism and racism, she argued. “Children fight all the time, regardless of race, regardless of class level,” she said. “When we think about Ma’Khia or other Black girls like her … they’re not given the chance to be in situations that could be de-escalated.”...

Ma’Khia’s mother, Paula Bryant, said she was an honor roll student and that she had a “motherly nature about her.” “She promoted peace. That’s something I want to always be remembered,” she told local TV station WBNS.

It’s those memories, Opara said, that journalists should make sure to include in coverage of the girl’s death. “Journalists need to stop for a second and reflect and think: ‘Would I talk about Ma’Khia this way if she was a White girl?’” she said. “We all really have to make a conscious effort to undo what we’ve learned in school and in the media.”

Does anyone really think that a white girl seen on video doing what Bryant did would get more respect than has been shown to Bryant? I think she'd get much less.

FROM THE EMAIL: Jim writes: 

I read your post and shortly thereafter came across a related comment from Justice Thomas in a footnote to his opinion in Jones v. Mississippi, released this morning, on p. 5 where he comments : 

The Court’s language in this line of precedents is notable. When addressing juvenile murderers, this Court has stated that “ ‘children are different’ ” and that courts must consider “a child’s lesser culpability.” Montgomery, 577 U. S., at 207–208 (emphasis added). And yet, when assessing the Court-created right of an individual of the same age to seek an abortion, Members of this Court take pains to emphasize a “young woman’s” right to choose. See, e.g., Lambert v. Wicklund, 520 U. S. 292, 301 (1997) (Stevens, J., joined by Ginsburg and BREYER, JJ., concurring in judgment) (emphasis added); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 899 (1992) (joint opinion of O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ.); Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U. S. 502, 532 (1990) (Blackmun, J., joined by Brennan and Marshall, JJ., dissenting). It is curious how the Court’s view of the maturity of minors ebbs and flows depending on the issue. 

I think there is a tendency to attribute adulthood/maturity to a minor when it serves another purpose of the speaker/writer.

Yes, there is a new Supreme Court case on exactly this subject. The majority opinion is by Kavanaugh, joined by Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. Thomas's opinion is a concurrence. And the 3 liberal justices — Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan — dissent. Thomas is the only member of the Court who brings up abortion.

AND: Bill emails:

I have two comments: 

1. When I was a kid, even before puberty, it was common for authority-figure adults to call me "young man." Coaches in middle school and high school called us guys on the team "gentlemen." Depending on the context, it could feel like a reprimand or a sign of respect. It was "adultifying" in the sense that it carried with it an expectation that I would act a certain way. 

2. Apparently one must tread very, very carefully when remarking about a black person who appears to be in their late teens. Once a black person turns 18 years old, it is a terrible insult reminiscent of Jim Crow to refer to him or her as "boy" or "girl." But the day before that black person turns 18, it is "adultification" (also reminiscent of Jim Crow, probably) to refer to him or her as "young man" or "young woman."

"All that transpired played a role in his condition," said the medical examiner, in the case of Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died after the January 6th breaching of the Capitol.

"His office said that it attributes death to natural causes when it can be ascribed to disease alone and that 'if death is hastened by an injury, the manner of death is not considered natural.'" Yet the medical examiner, Francisco J. Diaz, determined that Sicknick died of "natural causes."

I'm reading "Officer Attacked in Capitol Riot Died of Strokes, Medical Examiner Rules The determination is likely to complicate efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of the officer, Brian Sicknick" (NYT).

"The determination is likely to complicate the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of Officer Sicknick, 42; two men have been charged with assaulting him by spraying an unknown chemical on him outside the Capitol. But an autopsy found no evidence that Officer Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or any internal or external injuries.... Two men were charged last month with assaulting Officer Sicknick, but prosecutors have avoided linking the attack to his death...."

That's written confusingly. If "prosecutors have avoided linking the attack to his death," then what are the "efforts to prosecute anyone in the death of Officer Sicknick"? The assault is an assault regardless of whether it caused a death that happened to occur soon afterward. But there's also that discrepancy between what the medical examiner said — "All that transpired played a role in his condition" — and the assertion that the finding of death by "natural causes" excludes the idea that death "was hastened by an injury."

Not discussed in the New York Times article is the way the media ran with the notion that the Capitol protesters had killed a cop. That's the legend they created, and I bet that legend will live.

FROM THE EMAIL: I'm getting a lot of email, much of it expanding what I've already said in that last paragraph. I get the sense many readers need that to be said more elongatedly, more emphatically. But let me give you this emailed comment, from James. It's short and pithy, and it kicks things up with an observation that I didn't make — speculation that there was deliberate delay to give life to the legend:

Maybe the reason prosecutors have not tried to link anyone to Officer Sicknick’s death or charge anyone with homicide is that they have known for months that he died of natural causes and there was no homicide. The powers that be just did not bother to let the rest of us know this until after the “they killed a cop” narrative was firmly rooted in the public mind.

ALSO: Glenn Greenwald is especially outraged for the way other journalists treated him: 

Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as "Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.

For the crime of trying to determine the factual truth of what happened, my character was constantly impugned by these propagandistic worms, as was anyone else's who tried to tell the truth about Sicknick's tragic death. Because one of the first people to highlight the journalistic truth here was former Trump official Darren Beattie of Revolver News and one of the few people on television willing to host doubts about the official story was Tucker Carlson, any doubts about the false Sicknick story — no matter how well-grounded in truth, facts, reason and evidence — were cast as fascism and white supremacy, and those raising questions smeared as "truthers”: the usual dreary liberal insults for trying to coerce people into submitting to their lies....

"Any law is only as good as the people that are enforcing it. Does it make sense we took away the gun because he’s too dangerous to have one, but we didn’t take the step to prevent him from going out and buying one the next day?"

Said Brad Banks, a former prosecutor in Marion County (location of Indianapolis), quoted in "In Indianapolis Shooting, a Red Flag That Never Flew/Red flag laws are supposed to keep guns away from people who should not have them. That did not happen with the gunman who killed eight people in Indianapolis." 

The headline is obfuscatory. Why can't they say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws? The Indianapolis Shooter Was Legally Barred From Purchasing a Gun, But the Seller Sold One to Him Anyway. 

But is my proposed clear headline correct? I had to comb through the article trying to find the answer. It wasn't easy!

In March 2020, Mr. Hole’s mother approached officers at a Police Department roll call and told them she believed that her son was having suicidal thoughts and might even try to commit “suicide by cop,” the chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police, Randal Taylor, said on Sunday....

When the police arrived at the house, Mr. Hole’s mother “asked him to come down,” the chief said. “When he does, they’d already felt they had enough information to do the needed detention.” Mr. Hole, who was 18 at the time, was taken to a hospital on a “mental health temporary hold,” according to Paul Keenan, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Indianapolis office.

Having been told about a shotgun that Mr. Hole had recently purchased, an officer at the house went upstairs to take it, the chief said, and saw on the young man’s computer “some stuff about some white supremacy ideations and those kind of things.”

Federal investigators would interview Mr. Hole about those discoveries the next month, though they would conclude that he did not harbor an ideology of “racially motivated violent extremism.”...

I'm trying to cut the text down as much as possible as I try to focus on why the gun law didn't work in this case, but I'm leaving in the white supremacy material because it's such a big topic, and it feels as thought the reader is getting detoured into the subject of controlling not guns but hateful thoughts. But I'm more than halfway into the article, and I still don't know why the existing gun law did not work.

The seizure of weapons under red flag laws is often temporary. In Indiana, once a weapon is taken by the police, prosecutors have 14 days to justify the seizure to a judge. If such a determination is not made, the firearms are immediately returned.

But the shotgun seized from Hole was never returned, so this does not yet address the lapse that led to Hole's having a gun.

But if the judge decides the person in question is so unstable that he or she should not be permitted to have guns, the police hold onto the seized weapons, and the person is barred from possessing any guns for at least six months. The permanent seizure of Mr. Hole’s shotgun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen....

So where was the lapse?

Ryan Mears, the Marion County prosecutor, said in an interview at a vigil on Saturday that he did not know what had happened in this case. But he suggested, posing a hypothetical, that the authorities might have taken the gun in response to pleas from concerned family members, and considered the crisis resolved. “What could have occurred,” Mr. Mears said, “is the point was: ‘Let’s get the gun out of there, make sure the gun is not returned,’ if that was the agreement that was made. And I’m not saying that it is the case. But there’s no reason to go in front of the judge at that point in time, because the point is we want to take the weapon away.”

What "point in time" is he talking about? Why isn't Mears informed about this particular case? Something obviously went wrong. The people had their important gun control law. Hole's mother did what she could, and so did the police. Why is Mears talking about "mak[ing] sure the gun is not returned" when the question here is why was this dangerous young man allowed to buy a gun when, under the red flag law, he should have been barred from purchasing a gun?

[W]ithout a red flag restriction, Mr. Hole would go on to buy two powerful firearms within the next six or seven months. For those who have studied the evolution of red flag laws, Mr. Hole may turn out to be a tragic example of their shortcomings.

The NYT never tells us that the Indiana statute has a provision not only for seizing guns but for barring the future purchase of guns! It speaks of the "evolution of red flag laws" and "their shortcomings" as if the problem is in the text of the law. But the problem was in using the provisions of the law! Here's how the article ends: 

In practice, experts say containing more chronic threats like Mr. Hole might be beyond the laws’ reaches, in their current forms. “Maybe it prevented something for a year, or six months,” [said Aaron J. Kivisto, a psychology professor at the University of Indianapolis]. “And then it wasn’t enough.”

But what wasn't enough? The text of the law or the actions of those with the responsibility to enforce it? Instead of mushing up this article with the "maybe" musings of the psychology professor, the NYT should shine a harsh light on the prosecutors. Why did these killings happen? The young man was apparently quite obviously mentally ill and dangerous, and his poor mother did what she could. So did the police, it seems. The legislation was on the books. 

My proposed clear headline is wrong, I believe. I think that there was some failure, the fault of the prosecution or the court, that caused there not to be a bar on Hole's purchasing of a gun. I don't think the seller was at fault. Correct  me if I'm wrong. 

Must I answer that question I asked above: "Why can't [the NYT] say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws?" The answer seems obvious: The NYT prefers to heat up the demand for more gun laws. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Ozymandias writes:

Chief Taylor is first reported to be baffled by the absence of a judicial detention order: 

The permanent seizure of Mr. Hole’s shotgun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen. “For whatever reason,” Chief Taylor said, “that never made it to the court.” 

But later in the piece, there’s this: 

Still, this would not explain how the authorities legally held on to the shotgun after the 14 days. But the chief said Mr. Hole called at one point and said that “he didn’t want the weapons back.” 

“It’s not uncommon,” the chief said. “People realize, you know, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have it.’  

[Emphasis added.] 

It seems no judicial order was sought because Hole agreed to the seizure after the gun was taken, and perhaps before the 14-day deadline for a red-flag order had expired. There was no order on record, Hole was apparently free to buy more guns. 

Such flaccid, meandering writing. Looks like the Times needed another article on the shooting, so they published one before they had figured out a clear story. Quote in the fifth paragraph even lacks closing parentheses.

Yes, that is incredibly garbled. I could be more compassionate toward the NYT. My assumption was they used a template: We need more gun legislation. Your idea is: They rushed to publish a story that they didn't even understand. Either way, it's defective journalism.

AND: Amadeus 48 writes:

This problem (possession of guns by deranged persons) is perhaps one of these things in life to which there is no solution. But the bright and ambitious people who populate our various governments never want to have THAT discussion. In a country where there are already hundreds of millions of guns, we are never really going to be able to corral even a significant fraction of them. Plus, citizens do have the right to defend themselves. We may have to live with this problem, as we have done. And, as this article hints, we don’t enforce the gun laws we have.

When we were in the thrall of the last mayoral election in Chicago, the leading candidates all came serially to a forum of which I am a member. As we all know, the south and west sides of the city have become a shooting range. I asked each candidate what they proposed to do about the surging violence. Each of them said, “Pass tighter gun laws.” When I pointed out that the prosecutors and courts weren’t enforcing the gun laws we have, which are quite strict, they blamed Indiana and Wisconsin in a non-sequitur. Each of them did this, without knowing what the others said. My conclusion was that they didn’t know what to do, so they default to “pass more gun laws” and attempt to change the subject.

ALSO: Another reader emails: "Ryan Mears is a Democrat. There will be no examination of the failures of his office. Reading the article triggered my 'name that party' sense."

"Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves 'Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?'"

"Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It’s possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.... Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.... [M]ost people who take to the streets about cases like Daunte Wright are not thinking about the fact that black people are killed by cops 2.5 times more than their representation in the population would predict. They are protesting because all they see in the news is the black people killed, and have no way of imagining that whites are regularly killed in the same way and in much greater numbers.... Every time the media broadcasts the murder by cop of a black person, ask yourself if it’s really true that a cop wouldn’t have done it to a white person – and then go to, for example, the Washington Post database and see cops doing just that. And upon that, we will settle upon an honest national conversation about the cops as murdering people in race-neutral fashion. Or at least we should." 

Writes John McWhorter in "The Victorians Had to Accept Darwin/We Need to Accept that Cops Kill White People as Easily as They Kill Black People/Otherwise, our conversation on race is deeply and perniciously fake" (Substack). 

***

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I'm only seeing NBC News covering the "White Lives Matter" rallies that didn't happen.

Headline: "'White Lives Matter' rallies flop as hardly anyone shows up/The poor turnout underscores how the country's unpopular and disorganized extremist movements have been driven underground." 

Is it news when something doesn't happen? You need to establish the foundation that it was supposed to happen and something prevented it. Maybe most news organizations decided that to say these rallies didn't happen is to say that there are very few people dedicated to this cause, and that's not something they want us to believe.

The way NBC News dealt with that is to say that the failure to show up in person should be interpreted to mean that the movements have gone "underground." So a big rally would be bad, but a non-rally would be bad too: 

The poor showing underscores how the country’s unpopular and disorganized extremist movements have been driven underground by increased scrutiny from the media, law enforcement agencies and far-left activists who infiltrate their private online spaces and disrupt their attempts to communicate and organize.

How do you know that what looked like rally planning wasn't just the media, law enforcement agencies, and far-left activists  talking amongst themselves? 

Few “White Lives Matter” marchers showed up Sunday, but anti-racist and anti-fascist groups gathered just the same. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a small crowd of antifa and anti-racist protesters gathered at the park where the “White Lives Matter” march was planned. They marched around downtown behind a large white sign that read, “WE ACCEPT YOUR SURRENDER.”...

The “White Lives Matter” rallies were disrupted in several cities after activists infiltrated their online groups and leaked internal chats to journalists. Those chats were reported to have indicated that the events were being planned by the extremist group the Proud Boys and by self-described fascists and Nazis who framed the rallies as peaceful events unaffiliated with known hate groups to recruit more mainstream members....

Reported to have indicated....

Two of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to events in Philadelphia and New York City were shown to be traps created by anti-fascist activists. Another local activist tweeted screenshots of the plan's reveal with a warning Saturday to would-be rallygoers: “Given how riddled these chats are with antifascists ... it might be time to rethink whether you really want to trust a bunch of anonymous internet weirdos to show up with you in your city."

Is that the same as existing activist groups being "driven underground"? The whole thing looks fake.

FROM THE EMAIL: Jerry writes: 

I was shocked that NBC identified some as "Antifa," since they're only an idea. And since others are identified as "Anti-fascist groups" shouldn't there be some Fascists on the other side?

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 55% of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election was the result of illegal voting or rigging."

"Additionally, 60% of Republicans incorrectly agree that the election was stolen from Republican Donald Trump." 

CNN reports, aggressively inserting the view that the people who were polled are wrong. I believe that's a very unusual way to report an opinion poll, with insistence that the opinion is wrong and apart from any factual reporting that makes it perfectly obvious that the opinion is mistaken. 

This displays a desperate fear of the opinion, and I don't think it does much good. The urge to stamp the opinion out will tend to make those who hold it grip more tightly: What are they afraid of? Are they trying to get me to move on, telling me there's nothing to see here?

CNN continues:

What is perfectly clear, however, is that Republicans' lack of faith in our current election infrastructure is a direct result of Trump's historic efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 results.

It's "perfectly clear" why people have this opinion? This is a news article, reporting a poll, and it's making an absolute assertion about why human beings believe what they do. That doesn't inspire confidence. It makes people suspicious, perhaps paranoid. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Cheryl writes: 

“Election infrastructure...” 

Seems like that word is being softened up to mean anything they want it to mean. Wonder why. 

Good catch. I'll boldface the word in the quoted text above. Cheryl's right. There's been a lot of talk lately from Democrats around the word "infrastructure." I was just saying: "It's a propaganda word to the core."

AND: Temujin emails:

The only thing missing from this article was the word 'debunked' as in, these false theories have been clearly debunked. Which, of course, they have not.

The key to this is that the fraud, or at least the appearance of fraud has never been fully examined, investigated, or allowed to be. Even those few court 'appearances' were mostly tossed out of court for 'lack of standing' or due to lack of evidence. Yes, it's hard to obtain evidence when your discovery time is extremely short, and the states have it locked away, or thrown away, or it has simply 'disappeared'.

What we have had, since the surprising closing of the polls late in the evening in 4 key cities, and the more surprising change from a massive Trump lead to a Biden surge taking place while the polls were 'closed' at 1-4 am, is a barrage of media sources, Big Tech, and 'expert' talking heads telling us all how this was clearly a clean election, no fraud, and all questions have been answered, all theories, debunked. I personally will go to my grave not believing that 80 million Americans — more than voted for any previous person in our history- got out and voted for Joe Biden who had spent the previous 18 months locked up in a basement with an occasional outing to mispronounce names or forget where he was.

There are roughly 74 million people in this country walking around right now with a nagging nervousness in their gut, like a wound that will not go away. Too many of us, and I clearly include me in this, strongly suspect a massive foul play — a coup — took place on November 3. We are suspicious of what took place before, during, and certainly after election day. Demanding we believe the networks is hardly the answer to clearing this up.

And the overall complete and total censorship and dismissal of the topic — by Big Tech, the networks, major news outlets, and talking heads — only exacerbates our suspicions. That CNN- the network most famous for promoting the Russia! Russia! Russia! hoax, purposely misquoting Trump on his Charlottesville comments, showcasing preposterous liars with fabulous stories about Justice Kavanaugh, calling flat-out riots destroying our cities 'peaceful protests', and sporting insurrection tears — has a show called "Reality Check" is all you need to know about the USA in 2020, 2021.

That the Reuters/Ipsos poll only shows 55% of Republicans still questioning things shows how much work the media has already done to make this all disappear. That number should be at 80%. It probably is. We know how inaccurate our polls have been over the last few years. Yet we still crank them out — daily.

Owen writes:  

Remarkable behavior by CNN, as you point out. Reminds me of the line, “The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

And mezzrow says: 

On truth and elections. Here’s a definition of what term 'liberal' means from my favorite reactionary. On these terms, I will always proudly identify as liberal. It’s the only identity politics that has meaning to me.

There exist two interpretations of the popular vote, one democratic, the other liberal. 

According to the democratic interpretation what the majority resolves upon is true; according to the liberal interpretation the majority merely chooses one option. 

A dogmatic and absolutist interpretation, the one; a skeptical and discreet interpretation, the other. – Don Colacho

And Tim writes: 

Somehow, both Hayes and Kennedy avoided going down in history with an asterisk beside their name. I do not think Biden is going to avoid that fate. A big part of both Hayes and Kennedy avoiding that fate was their attempt to reconcile with their foes. But Biden has never been the sharpest pencil in the box.

AND: Bob Boyd writes:

That doesn't inspire confidence. It makes people suspicious, perhaps paranoid. 

I think this kind of thing does inspire confidence in those who choose to believe The Narrative.

CNN knows what it is doing with this stuff. It's not a blunder. It's not poor journalism. It's the new journalism. Their role is not to report facts, it's to report their expert determination of the correct opinion.

There is no factual reporting included because it is not the role of news consumers to determine which opinion is correct and which is mistaken. Facts are for experts to sift through, who will then report their determination of the correct opinion. Wise consumers will adopt that expert opinion. Failure to adopt that opinion is a clear indication of a serious character flaw.

Am I being paranoid?

And Wild Swan writes: 

Believe is kind of a funny word which may make "falsely believing" an impossibility. What would Wittgenstein say? Can I "falsely believe" in the sense that I would be able to say "I falsely believe?"

Wittgenstein said no.. He said: I can believe a falsehood (false belief) but I am not able to carry out an action - "falsely believing" - that means believing and not believing?

Continuing on from him, I say: "Truly believing," as a description of the belief of many Republicans about the 2020 election means "sincerely believing," rather than "correctly believing." Its opposite is not "falsely believing" but "pretending to believe" or hypocrisy.

Go further. Can someone else truly say of me: "She falsely believes?" Is there such a thing as a psychological state which is a false way to believe, as opposed to a false belief. Can you falsely believe CNN or Jen Psaki?

The significance of the question is that a "false belief" implies that there is a truth somewhere whereas "falsely believing" is a nonsense phrase - something a bureaucrat or any other dullard is well able to say about the ciphers they ruin without the phrase ever diverting them into falsely questing for truth.

AND: Dwight writes: 

USA Today has been doing this for months regarding the election... "Trump falsely claims..."

I've been waiting for "Franklin Graham falsely claims there is a God".

*** 

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