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We all have friends from high school that did well. I have taken pride in having been close with so many people from back then and one of them announced his retirement from the Washington Post yesterday.

How many of you ever read the Washington Post? Their “Fact Checker” was the one who gave out Pinocchio awards to liars, an endeavor which took on Olympic-sized efforts once you-know-who descended his golden escalator back in 2015. For the past 15 years that Fact Checker was my friend, Glenn Kessler.

Glenn started out as a White House correspondent for Newsday before David Ignatius hired him to be the Post’s national business editor.  In that role Glenn managed a dozen reporters.

Glenn wound up covering the State Department in the early 2000’s, traveling the world with Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.  He even wrote one of the seminal books on Rice, “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy.”

Next, Glenn developed and became the editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker. Yep, my friend Glenn Kessler is the one who developed the Pinocchio ratings for the Washington Post. They started having to work round-the-clock with Trump.

Glenn’s team counted 492 untruths in Trump’s first 100 days back in 2017. In response to reader requests, he decided to keep it going for Trump's entire presidency. In 2020, Glenn and his co-authors published a bestselling book I think we can all relate to titled “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.” This book covered all of Trump’s lies during the first three years of his presidency from January 20, 2017 through January 20, 2020. In that three years (and this was before the tsunami of lies about Covid and the 2020 election), Glenn documented 16,241 lies with his most deceitful day up to then being November 5, 2018 when he lied 139 times.

By January 20, 2021, the end of Trump's four-year term, Kessler and his colleagues had counted 30,573 untruths, or an average of 21 a day.

30,573. Lies.

Because of their Trump database, Kessler and his Fact Checker Team were nominated in 2020 by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute for inclusion in a list of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade.

Glenn was nominated for so many awards that I won’t name them all but it includes multiple Pulitzer Prizes for which he was awarded the Pulitzer twice . He also won my award for Great Human Being Who Dedicated His Life to Helping Us All.

We at Seismic Resistance are continuing my friend’s legacy. Like Glenn our literal mission statement is “To expose lies and dismantle false patriotism through bold action and unwavering truth.” If you haven’t already done so, please sign up as an official member and support our/your mission on our website, seismicresistance.com.

And we’ll see you at our first social next Thursday. Sign up on our website today!