Polygraph

Donald Trump spread the article "Ways of Silencing" written by Jason Stanley.

Posted by Robinson's Podcast, Checked

Polygraph verdictCan’t tell
Sources
3 context
Said
1 time·
Confidence
30%
Robinson's PodcastSep 23, 2026
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53 claimsThe check →

The claim departs from the passage: the post says Trump spread the thing the piece was about (the birtherism conspiracy theory, which the speaker says the 2011 article addressed), not the article itself.

What was said

… Why was it, or how was it, that you ended up making this transition? Yeah, the the, I guess my very first piece for The New York Times in 2011 was on the birtherism conspiracy theory. It was called "Ways of Silencing," and oddly, that was spread by Donald Trump. So, in a sense, my career as a public intellectual has exactly overlapped with Donald Trump's public political involvement, and I was writing about it as a Philosophy of Language topic because it seemed to me, you know, I was thinking about how it undermined …
Robinson's Podcast · · from the transcriptPost →

What we found

Context. The 2011 NYT piece by Jason Stanley, "The Ways of Silencing," exists and discusses outlandish claims about public figures, including speculation that Obama was born in Kenya, but it does not mention Donald Trump in the retrieved text.[1]

Context. Other sources [3] and [4] list or discuss the article without linking it to Donald Trump spreading it.[2][3]

Context. The claimant's passage says the birtherism conspiracy theory, not the article, was spread by Trump; the claimant's own words cannot corroborate the claim and the sources do not address the article being spread by Trump.

Sources

3 sources: 3 not rated

  1. 1The Ways of Silencing - The New York Times Web Archivearchive.nytimes.com · not rated · cited for: context
  2. 2jasonstanley.org › mediaMedia – Jason Stanleyjasonstanley.org · not rated · cited for: context
  3. 3Engendering Silence: Political Rhetoric and The New Jim Crowserendipstudio.org · not rated · cited for: context

Where this claim was made

Said in 1 published post

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