“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made,” Genesis 3 records. “He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, "You shall not eat of any tree in the garden”?’“

And with that, Satan became the first "fact-checker.” The father of lies called into question the truthfulness of God’s command to Adam and Eve. He gaslighted our first parents into believing something false by playing a semantics game about the literal and immediate consequences of disobedience.

God responded by cursing the serpent and promising to crush him.

Without taking the analogy too far, I have zero sympathy for the Leftmedia “fact-checkers” who follow in Satan’s, er, footsteps and now bitterly complain that Meta’s decision to cast them out will crush them. In fact, I confess I’ve been chuckling with schadenfreude.

I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s seismic announcement yesterday. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will ditch its dozens of third-party “fact-check” partners in favor of a community notes function like Elon Musk successfully implemented on X. Zuckerberg promised other changes, too, such as revamping algorithms to quit suppressing political (read: conservative) content and moving his moderation teams from California to Texas. Those are measurable promises, and we’ll know if he breaks them.

After the great news, hilarity ensued thanks to “fact-checker” reactions yesterday.

First, “Meta’s fact-checking partners claim they were ‘blindsided’ by the company’s decision,” Wired reports, “and some say they are now scrambling to figure out if they can survive the hole this leaves in their funding.” Some “fact-checkers” are big and diverse enough to withstand the loss of revenue, but Wired adds, “One editor at a US-based fact-checking organization that works with Meta, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told WIRED that Meta’s decision ‘is going to eventually drain us out.’”

Indeed, according to a 2023 report from the Poynter Institute, the journalism nonprofit that owns PolitiFact, funding from Meta is one of the “predominant revenue streams” for the “fact-checkers.” The International Fact-Checking Network is holding an emergency meeting today to decide what to do.

Gee — insert sarcastic snicker — it sure would be a shame if any of these Orwellian thugs went out of business.

And they were “blindsided”? Well, now they know how we feel every time one of our factual or opinion posts is hit with an unexpected penalty strike on Facebook, and our page and content are subsequently suppressed even further.

Second, get a load of this New York Times headline: “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.”

“We did not, and could not, remove content,” argued FactCheck.org managing editor Lori Robertson. “Any decisions to do that were Meta’s.”

“Facts are not censorship,” huffed Poynter president Neil Brown. “Fact-checkers never censored anything. And Meta always held the cards. It’s time to quit invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact-checking.”

Those assertions are utterly obtuse. No, “fact-checkers” don’t choose what Facebook does with their “fact-checks.” According to Meta, “Fact-checkers do not remove content, accounts or Pages from Facebook.” Yes, Meta set up the strike system and suppressed content while cowardly hiding behind supposedly independent third-party organizations for justification. It’s grossly hypocritical for Zuckerberg and Meta to act like the real problem was the “fact-checkers” all along.

However, these organizations knew exactly what would happen when they submitted their work to Facebook, so they can hardly claim ignorance or innocence regarding the censorship that took place.

Veteran journalist Mark Hemingway left the now-defunct Weekly Standard after it became part of Facebook’s army of “fact-checkers.” He recounted a story about a young journalist at the Standard who expressed discomfort in knowing that Facebook would “kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic” to any article he flagged. In response to PolitiFact rejecting any responsibility for the results, Hemingway asserted that they “knew full well they were providing the bullets for Facebook’s gun, and they were happy to do it because they liked who Facebook was aiming at.”

That goes to the obvious bias of these ostensibly objective journalists. Despite insisting they are “nonpartisan” and unbiased, the entire “fact-checking” genre was created as a way to protect the Leftmedia’s monopoly on public opinion in the face of rising conservative media. The first “fact-checkers” appeared more than 20 years ago, and the vast majority of their targets have always been conservative outlets and public figures. They created a Praetorian Guard for the Democrat Party by taking a position of supposed authority from which to exercise unearned power as the arbiters of truth. They gained power by partnering with social media.

That, in turn, leads back to the problem of money. “News organizations such as PolitiFact, USA Today, and, yes, The Weekly Standard, participating in this program were taking a large sum from one of the country’s largest and most influential corporations,” Hemingway noted. “This was a massive conflict of interest, considering these same publications were also tasked with covering Facebook neutrally when it came up in the news. Which was a lot.”

Not only that, but many news organizations (including our own) depend at some level on web traffic coming from Facebook, meaning, as Hemingway put it, “they had you over a barrel in multiple ways.”

In short, the “fact-checkers” lie. They lie about what conservatives say, and they lie about their role in Meta’s censorship regime.

As for Meta, the changes are, to say the least, welcome. This could and should begin a massive shift in the media landscape. Many are debating whether Zuckerberg’s announcement represents a genuine change of heart or is just an obsequious attempt to save his business. I can’t read his mind, of course, but I believe Zuckerberg actually prefers a more open platform. He was browbeaten into accepting the censorship regime after Donald Trump won in 2016, and he resented where it (predictably) led. I could be wrong, but even if it’s merely a business decision, the benefits should be tangible.

Still, Zuckerberg’s mea culpa isn’t worth much. We can’t recover the last five years of suppressed traffic or make back the money we lost because perhaps millions of people never saw our content. The demise of the “fact-checkers” would be a welcome event, but the damage they caused us and numerous other conservative organizations in recent years may be incalculable and certainly irrecoverable — at least unless Zuckerberg’s regret becomes restitution.

As for the “fact-checkers,” as far as I’m concerned, they can rot with their father, Satan.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.