The Washington Post’s lead “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler issued a hit piece against Sen. Tim Scott on Friday targeting him for his black heritage.

Using the guise of a “fact-check,” Kessler spent nearly 30 paragraphs analyzing census documents and other records to try to counteract Scott’s claims that his grandfather left elementary school to pick cotton and “never learned to read or write.”

While the article sets out to prove Scott wrong, it confirms the narrative that the senator has repeated in his book and from the political podium multiple times. While Scott believed his grandfather, Artis Ware, dropped out of school in third grade, Kessler claimed to have uncovered that Ware may have left school in the fourth grade, a slight inconsistency which even Kessler admitted could occur because the records are old.

Despite the slight difference in his grandfather’s age when he left school, Kessler glossed over the fact that Ware worked “55 hours a week” in cotton fields at a young age in order to attack Scott for amplifying his family history “for political consumption.” //

Margot Cleveland
@ProfMJCleveland
HT @ellie_bufkin
"Some enterprising Black families purchased property as a way to avoid sharecropping and achieve a measure of independence from White-dominated society." Could this read any more like "Scott's uppity black family dared not be beholden sharecroppers?"