Embattled Secret Service chief Kimberly Cheatle has announced she will resign from her post less than two weeks after the agency’s calamitous failure at Donald Trump’s July 13 campaign rally led to him being wounded by an assassin’s bullet.
Cheatle, a 28-year veteran of the agency, faced mounting pressure to step down in recent days but insisted all along she would remain on the job. She announced her resignation in a letter to agency staffers on Tuesday morning.
“I have, and will always put the needs of this agency first. In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director,” Cheatle wrote in the letter, which was obtain by The Post.
She said she didn’t want the growing calls for her resignation to be “a distraction from the great work each and every one of you do towards our vital mission.”
Following the rally shooting — which left the former president nicked in the ear, two supporters badly wounded and a volunteer fire fighter dead — Cheatle made a series of missteps that did little to reassure lawmakers or the American public that she was fit to remain in the role.
Among her baffling remarks was an admission to ABC News that the reason Secret Service agents weren’t posted on the roof from which Thomas Matthew Crooks fired on the rally crowd was because it was too “sloped,” creating an unacceptable “safety factor” for the agents.
The agency’s failure to adequately secure the roof gave the 20-year-old an unobstructed line of sight to the GOP standard bearer, leading to the first assassination attempt against a sitting or former US president since 1981.
At a House Oversight Committee meeting yesterday, Cheatle admitted the agency’s rally response was a “failure” but still gave her agents an “A” grade for the job they did that day.
Her testimony to the Oversight Committee was a wall-to-wall catastrophe, and it’s not at all surprising she has decided to quit.
The Democratic party baton has not officially passed from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, but already, the vice president is facing Republican attacks befitting a presidential front-runner.
Only moments after Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection on Sunday, upending the 2024 race, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his allies unleashed an offensive against Harris, seeking to tie her to Biden’s record on immigration and criticizing her views as too liberal.
“Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline,” said a narrator in an ad released Sunday by a Trump-supporting super PAC. “Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead.” . . .
Republicans on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, said Biden can’t carry out his duties and called on him to resign from office immediately, a step that, ironically, would make Harris president.
They also sought to turn the tables on the Democrats by arguing that by pushing Biden to step aside, Democratic lawmakers rejected the will of the voters who cast their ballots to make Biden the nominee earlier this year.
“Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a statement Sunday.
“The party’s prospects are no better now with Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-owns the disastrous policy failures of the Biden Administration,” he added.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), meanwhile, pointed to Harris’ statements in the past defending Biden from questions surrounding his age as a reason not to trust her candidacy.
“For four years, those closest to Joe Biden, including Kamala Harris, knew he was not fit to be president and lied to the American people in an effort to hold onto their power,” Scott said in a statement. “It was painfully clear that Biden wasn’t competent for office going way back to 2021.”
The man is stacking up W’s like nobody’s business. First, he wins the early debate that Team Biden demanded, then sits back and watches for two weeks while Democrats tear their party apart in an ultimately doomed effort to kick Sleepy Joe off the ticket. Then on Saturday he survives an assassination attempt, and by Monday, the situation is so dire for Democrats that MSNBC decides it’s not safe to let “Morning Joe” on the airwaves. Next, a poll comes out showing Trump leading every single swing state (and this was a poll taken before the assassination attempt), and right on the heels of that, the judge in the Mar-a-Lago documents case throws it out on constitutional grounds. So then he picks J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential running mate, and the Republican National Convention starts off like an early victory celebration.
Have I left out any of Trump’s recent wins? Probably, but they’ve been piling up so fast I couldn’t keep track. And yeah, yeah, “don’t get cocky,” but the past couple of weeks have been such a non-stop streak of #winning that I’m starting to think maybe Democrats won’t even try to cheat their way to victory in November, because this thing is slipping outside the margin of fake mail-in ballots. I mean, Trump +7 in Arizona? All the fraud in Maricopa County can’t close that gap.
We’re still 16 weeks away from Election Day, and a lot could happen between now and then, but right now Trump’s got the momentum, and I refuse to let myself be bummed out by a few hand-wringing worry-warts.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” I say, every time there’s a shooting, bombing, some other incident where people on social media start rushing to place blame, before any definite information is available. In my first update Saturday, at 6:55 p.m. ET, I said: “We still know nothing about what actually happened, and I urge everyone to avoid promoting unsubstantiated speculation.” Twenty minutes later, I added:
Don’t jump to conclusions. To call it “an apparent assassination attempt” is fine, but appearances can be deceiving. Until we have more definite information, we don’t know what happened, and should avoid pretending as if we do know. Patience!
Nothing is gained by excessive haste. Probably my attitude reflects the fact that I spent more than two decades in print journalism. Unlike TV, print journalists don’t have to “go live” and then keep talking to fill the airtime during a breaking news event, so we have can afford to take time to make sure we only publish facts that are fully confirmed.
So, we now know that this was an attempted assassination, and we know that the shooter was 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks but — this is very important — so far we don’t know his motive. Yes, obviously, the gunman wished to kill Trump, but as to why he wanted to kill Trump, I have to insist that we still don’t know. It would seem to be the simplest common-sense deduction to say that the would-be assassin’s motive was political, but does the name John Hinckley ring a bell?
In 1981, he tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan: “Hinckley was reportedly seeking fame to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had a fixation after watching her in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver.”
That’s not a political motive. That’s just plain crazy. And it is too early to rule out the possibility that Thomas Matthew Crooks was just plain crazy.
Classmate of the 20 year old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, says “he was bullied almost every day”. pic.twitter.com/4m3tLwJtzT
— Sabrina Smolders ?? (@SabrinaSmolders) July 14, 2024
Think back to the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. Liberals tried to blame Republicans and the Tea Party — especially Sarah Palin — for Jared Loughner’s murderous shooting spree in Tucson. But the truth of his motive was something much different:
The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. By the time he latched onto the conspiracy-theory film, Loughner was already a very troubled young man. . . .
Go read the entirety of my 2011 American Spectator column, in case you’ve forgotten about that. As common-sense as it must have seemed to liberals — a Democratic congresswoman targeted for assassination, and therefore, the gunman must be a right-winger — the truth was, Jared Loughner was just plain crazy and, insofar as there was a political motive for his shooting spree, it was much more clearly left-wing.
Given my experience in debunking false narratives in such situations, readers will understand my reluctance to assume that what motivated Thomas Matthew Crooks to target Trump was the over-the-top rhetoric of Trump’s political opponents. That may yet prove to be the case — it’s certainly what Occam’s Razor would suggest — but so far we can’t say so for certain. Nevertheless, I found myself nodding in agreement with Austin Ruse’s column today at Chronicles:
Good Lord Almighty, that man is a legend. He gets shot, gets up almost immediately, with blood running down his face, throws his fist in the air and shouts “fight, fight, fight.” Donald Trump is a legend.
As the Secret Service covered him with their bodies, even putting their hands protectively over his head, as they helped him to the car, the crowd could be seen turning to the media in the back and giving them the finger. They knew. They knew who did this. The left did this. The Democrats did this. The gutter press did this. The #NeverTrumpers did this.
What did they think would happen after months and even years yelling at the top of their lungs that Trump is Hitler, that Trump will be a dictator, that Trump is an “existential threat to our democracy?” Violence was inevitable.
Just a week ago, Biden said Trump needed to be put in the “bullseye.” In 2022, he said Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the “soul of our country.”
Last November, The Washington Post ran a column that said “every conceivable measure” must be taken to stop the “end of our democracy.” It said, “When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything at him—pots, pans, candlesticks …” It said the next Trump administration will be filled “with Hitler’s gauleiters.” What did they think would happen?
Go to the NeverTrump Bulwark website founded by Bill Kristol and see they are nearly constant in their shrill cries that Trump and not just Trump but you and me are out to end “Our Democracy™.” What did they think would happen? . . .
Read the whole thing. As I say, I’m hesitant to place blame without clear evidence, but emotionally? Yeah, I’m as angry about this as anyone else, and giving the finger to the media is OK with me.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, has been pictured for the first time.
Cooks, 20, was on the roof of a manufacturing plant over 130 yards away from Trump’s rally at Butler Farm Show grounds on Saturday when he took fire at the former president — grazing Trump’s ear and killing one rally attendee.
Immediately after he began shooting, Secret Service snipers took the 20-year-old out. He was found with an AR-style semi-automatic assault rifle and was wearing a shirt for a popular gun YouTube channel, Demolition Ranch.
One former classmate, who confirmed photos of Crooks, told The Post, “He didn’t seem like really weird or anything. I would have pegged him as a Republican.”
The classmate added: “He was more of a loner. He probably had a friend group, but not many friends.
Asked why he wasn’t in the 2022 yearbook, the classmate said “Maybe he didn’t come back after Covid.”
Crooks grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, Pa., a village about 40 miles south of Trump’s rally in Butler.
According to state voter status records, he was a registered Republican.
He also made a single $15 donation to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on Jan. 20, 2021 — President Biden’s Inauguration Day, the Intercept reported.
At the time of the donation, Crooks was 17 years old. He registered to vote upon turning 18 in September of that same year as a member of the GOP, records show.
Crooks was a member of the 2022 graduating class at Bethel Park High School, the school district confirmed Sunday morning.
Video shows him walking across a stage to accept his diploma.
He also received a $500 National Math and Science Initative Star Award during his graduating year, TribLive reported.
Why Crooks fired on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is unclear.
Early Sunday the FBI officially confirmed the Post’s reporting, calling Crooks the “subject involved” in the attack on Trump.
A loner math geek — of course. It all makes sense now. It’s never the gregarious English majors who commit these atrocities.
SALENA ZITO: “Myself, my daughter and my son-in-law were just 3 feet from the President.” https://t.co/5QZMsEtMB1
I'm thinking, they withheld the name till they locked, cleaned, and pulled down all of his social media. It doesn't take 8 hours to run fingerprints and get his ID.
We may never see anything about him beyond what the FBI chooses to release.
These are my suspicions as well — once the FBI gets involved, the suspect’s social media accounts disappear, so that if he did say anything on Facebook, Reddit, etc., that would give us a sense of his motive, nobody but the FBI can know about it. That’s why I can guarantee you that the shooter is not an anti-Semite or a white supremacist or any kind of “right-wing extremist,” because if that were the case, we would have learned about it many hours ago. One of my acquaintances believes this assassination attempt was a CIA op and, while I am dubious of his theory, I can’t prove it’s wrong, because the FBI has successfully suppressed every independent source of knowledge about the suspect’s motive.
This news broke within the past hour and, at this point, nobody can say for certain what happened during Donald Trump’s speech at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The sound of gunshots was reportedly heard, Trump appeared to grab at his neck, then went to the ground, and then was escorted offstage by Secret Service agents.
UPDATE 6:55 p.m. ET: It appears that Trump may have been hit, but perhaps just grazed, as he was able to pump his fist and urge the crowd to “fight” before Secret Service got him offstage. First the shots:
Former President Trump was shot in the side of the head on stage at a rally in an apparent assassination attempt.
What sounded like gunshots rang out just about five minutes into his speech shortly after 6 p.m., sending Trump to the ground as Secret Service agents jumped in to cover him. Sources said the investigation is ongoing and they are looking into if the shots were from a BB gun.
After the initial shot rang out, apparently grazing Trump, the rest of the shots that could be heard were gunfire from law enforcement, sources said.
A streak of blood could be seen on the right side of his face.
Soldiers in military gear were seen rushing into the rally.
Nine shots could be heard in video of the incident, including three before Trump ducked.
So that’s what we’ve got so far, and it will take a while to sort through the facts and figure out what actually happened. Don’t jump to conclusions. To call it “an apparent assassination attempt” is fine, but appearances can be deceiving. Until we have more definite information, we don’t know what happened, and should avoid pretending as if we do know. Patience!
Butler County District Attorney Richard A. Goldinger confirmed to multiple news sources that former President Donald Trump was grazed by gunfire at a rally in Butler, Pa., Saturday.
Goldinger added that the shooter was dead, as well as one person in the audience.
No information was available about the audience member who was shot or the shooter at this time. . . .
Trump’s campaign said in a statement after he was rushed off stage that he was fine and being checked out.
“President Trump thanks law enforcement and first responders for their quick action during this heinous act,” spokesman Steven Cheung said. “He is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility. More details will follow.”
The Secret Service echoed in its own statement that “the former President is safe.”
Until the shooter is identified, we know nothing about the motive. Yes, it was an apparent assassination attempt, but we must wait for more confirmed information to actually know why this happened.
UPDATE 9:05 p.m. ET: The shooter was observed crawling on a rooftop outside the rally with a rifle and, after he opened fire — and barely missed killing Trump — was taken out by the Secret Service. Failure to secure that rooftop before the rally is certain to be widely criticized. We probably won’t know the identity of the shooter tonight, so until we do, I’ll just let this post stand, and do another post if and when we learn anything significant.
JUST IN: A guy outside the rally saw the shooter crawling on a roof and attempted to warn police and the Secret Service.
"We noticed a guy bear crawling on the roof with a rifle."
"I'm standing there pointing at him for two to three minutes, and the Secret Service is looking at… pic.twitter.com/27h6qf3uUS
What’s the first thing you notice when you look at today’s Real Clear Politics average of presidential election polls? What stands out to your eye? For me, it’s that NPR/PBS/Marist poll which, alone among all polls in the last two weeks, shows Joe Biden in the lead. Any average is only as good as the components of the total dividend, and this one number — which is eight points off of four different polls showing Trump +6 — ought to attract careful scrutiny. Here’s their story:
Contest for President Still “Up for Grabs” Biden +2 Percentage Points Against Trump, Despite Concerns about Biden’s Mental Fitness
With just days to go before the start of the Republican National Convention, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump continue to be closely matched among registered voters in both a head-to-head matchup and a multicandidate field. Biden’s support remains relatively unchanged from last month despite the view of many Americans that he lacks the mental fitness to serve as president. However, Biden outperforms Trump on whether either candidate has the character to be President of the United States, and by more than two to one, Americans are more concerned about a president who lies than they are about someone who is too old to serve. Both candidates remain flawed in the eyes of Americans, and majorities say neither should be on the ballot. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer do not improve the Democrats’ chances against Trump.
Among registered voters nationally including leaners, Biden receives 50% to 48% in the two-way presidential matchup. Two percent are undecided. Biden and Trump were tied (49% to 49%) in last month’s pre-debate NPR/PBS News/Marist survey.
Did you catch that? According to Marist, Biden has actually gained two points since their pre-debate poll. Are they trying to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge or what? It’s not just that their number is out of line with most other polls, but the direction of the trend is backwards. For example, the New York Times/Siena College poll has shown the race going from Trump +1 in April to Trump +4 in June (pre-debate) and now Trump +6 post-debate. Similarly, the Emerson College poll, which had Trump +1 in June (pre-debate) now has Trump +3. Stipulate that a shift in the range of 2 to 4 percentage points may just be margin-of-error statistical “noise,” but that Marist poll still sticks out like a sore thumb.
Here, perhaps, it’s worthwhile to mention that I’ve been reading polls for a long, long time. When I was at the Washington Times, one of my jobs was to update the weekly roundup of polls during election years. This was years before Real Clear Politics had begun its handy aggregation and, indeed, before Google, back in the day when you had to use search engines like Yahoo or Dogpile to find anything on the Internet. So for four consecutive election cycles — 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 — I was the guy grabbing up all these poll numbers from wherever I could find them and compiling them for a weekly graphic, trying to give readers an idea of where things stood. The longer you do that kind of work, the more you notice certain patterns. For example, as September gives way to October, the media will look to the polls and declare that the race is “tightening.”
What they really mean — the underlying truth — is that most polling operations have a built-in slant toward Democrats. During most of the year leading up to the November election, whether it’s a Senate contest or a presidential race, most polls will show Democrat leading by a larger margin than the final election result. The “tightening” of poll numbers in October always involves the Democratic candidate losing ground, as these liberal pollster/propagandists adjust their numbers so that their final poll isn’t preposterously out-of-whack with the official vote totals.
All of which is to say that Democrats have mastered the art of using polls to influence public opinion, rather than to reflect public opinion, which is why you will rarely see polls overestimate the likelihood of Republican victory. (The 2022 midterms were an exception in this regard.) Democrats know that many people see polls as justifying either hope or gloom, and therefore they publish polls that reliably inflate hopes for Democratic victories, trying to create self-fulfilling prophecies.
This brings us back to my suspicious side-eye glance at that Marist poll number. The only way you can judge the value of a pollster in terms of predictive accuracy is to look at their past results. In October 2020, Marist released a poll showing Biden leading by 11 points. The final official popular vote had Biden winning by 4.5 points, which meant that Marist’s poll overstated Biden’s support by 6.5 points. Apply that error rate to the current Marist numbers? Biden’s down by at least 4 points.
Not that I’m blowing sunshine up your skirts, you understand. We have no idea what will occur between now and November, whether Biden will be forced off the ticket, or whether Democrats will be able to manufacture enough fake “votes” to elect their candidate (who may or may not be Biden). Overall, however, I’d rather be playing Trump’s hand than to be playing Biden’s hand right now, and I’m not going to let some dubious polls convince me otherwise. Remain calm. All is well.
Just yesterday I noted my shock that Jon Stewart (!!!) is now apparently a MAGA extremist, and I guess we’ll have to add Nate Silver’s name to the list, now that he’s admitted that the term “misinformation” has been “hijacked as a cover for partisan bias.” Barely two weeks ago, you were a right-wing conspiracy theorist peddling “misinformation” if you suggested that videos showed Joe Biden in a condition of diminished cognitive capacity. “Cheap fakes!” they shrieked, and their army of allegedly objective “fact-checkers” pushed back against any such suggestion. “The right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because of, the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on June 17. Ten days later, Biden’s performance during the debate proved who actually has the “credibility problem,” and it ain’t “right-wing critics.” Suddenly, every Democrat and liberal media hack claimed to have discovered — “shocked! shocked!” like Captain Renault in Casablanca — that the “misinformation” was true.
While we wait for our apology — and I expect it to be a long wait — let’s take a moment to ask: How did we get here? When did concern about “misinformation” become a sort of cottage industry, and why?
Remember? It was 2016 and the Hillary Clinton campaign had some narrative problems. There was that thing about her doing State Department business via a secret personal server, which was destroyed in what was clearly an act of obstruction of justice (for which she was never prosecuted), and then there was a leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee confirming what everybody already knew, namely that the fix was in at the DNC to guarantee Hillary the nomination and screw over Bernie Sanders. The need to distract from these scandals helped fuel the Clinton campaign’s operation to smear Donald Trump as engaged in “collusion” with sinister Russian forces. The DNC emails were not a leak, we were told, but rather the result of a Russian hacking operation. And if you pushed back against that claim, you were accused of being a Putin stooge and your Twitter account might get shut down because somebody called you a “bot” or a “troll.”
Then the unthinkable happened — Hillary lost the election — and one of the consequences was that suddenly the fight against “misinformation” was portrayed as a patriotic effort to SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY by preventing Russian “election interference.” By the way, have you ever heard of a guy named Seth Abramson? He’s a guy who pitches himself as an “investigative journalist” while exploiting the paranoia of gullible left-wingers by telling them that EVERYTHING THEY FEAR IS REAL!
Until Wednesday, I’d never paid any attention to Seth Abramson until (via Memeorandum) I got a look at this headline:
We Now Know What Really Happened in Atlanta Media lied to voters about the cause of President Biden’s subpar debate performance. The lie — described here in full — is unforgivable, and was intended to chill discussion of Trump’s cognitive decline.
Wow. He bought a ticket on the train to Crazytown and rode it all the way. Here is the essence of Abramson’s claim:
At the time major media began harping on President Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, progressive dissatisfaction with the lack of coverage of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline had reached a fever pitch. The only way for major media to resolve the situation in its favor was to turn a one-night situation whose causes and implications it quickly understood to be (respectively) transient and virtually non-existent into a bigger story that would at once plump ratings, virtue-signal even-handedness, and put progressive critics back on their heels.
Do you believe that? Or better yet, can you possibly imagine anyone being dumb enough to believe that? Because I must point out that Seth Abramson is a New York Times bestselling author of such titles as Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America (2018), Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy (2019), Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump (2020), and Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection (2022).
And did I mention he used to appear frequently on CNN?
Wikipedia tells us, “Writers at The New Republic and The Atlantic have described Abramson as a conspiracy theorist,” and further directs us to a review of Abramson’s first book (which was compiled from his numerous Twitter threads about the “Russian collusion” claim) by Scottish journalist Harry McGrath:
What it doesn’t do is prove anything despite Abramson’s insistence in the introduction that “Proof of collusion in the Trump-Russia case is in plain sight”. Amassed theories and suggestive juxtapositions notwithstanding, we end up with something closer to the Scottish “not proven” verdict with its unique mix of moral conviction of guilt and inability to conclusively prove the case.
So the guy who claimed to have proven that the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” hoax was true now claims that the media are covering up the “fact” that Donald Trump’s cognitive ability is impaired. You see how the narratives propagated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign have led to a situation in which any claim that reflects badly on Trump is acceptable, even the most obviously counter-factual claims peddled by someone whom liberal journalists call a conspiracy theorist, even while an entire industry has been created to smear any criticism of Biden as “misinformation.”
Glenn Reynolds calls our attention to a lengthy item by Matt Taibbi about the Clemson University “Media Forensics Hub,” which began in 2017 when two faculty members “worked together to uncover and expose more than 3 million tweets by Russian trolls.” Allegedly, I hasten to add. If your account got banned from Twitter because these two guys decided you were a “Russian troll,” far be it from me to accept such defamation at face-value. Given the current situation, when CNN is now running a 24/7 effort to push Biden off the Democratic ticket because of a cognitive impairment which they previously dismissed as “misinformation,” I would urge everyone to be skeptical about any such claims.
