In the most absurd factcheck since Twitter vs. Babylon Bee, Colorado journalist Jason Salzman claims to have factchecked Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman’s experiences two years ago living a week on the streets as a homeless person.
Salzman didn’t check facts so much as he recreated a completely different experience under completely different circumstances.
Coffman slept on a cold winter sidewalk as the temperatures dipped into the teens using tarp as a blanket, and experienced life in the shelters.
Salzman pitched a tent for one pleasant evening in September, and almost whimped out when rain was forecast.
Homeless advocates delivered soup to Coffman’s camp to keep the homeless warm and fed. Coffman quipped the food was so plentiful; it would be tough to control one’s weight.
Salzman loaded his backpack with a tent, pad and sleeping bag, and took $40 to get him through one night. But no one brought Salzman soup on that warm night, and he made a note of it. He also forgot his earplugs.
Coffman set out the day after Christmas with no food, no money, and no protection except for a coat and hat. He carried an ID in case he got injured.
A military veteran himself, Coffman lived as a homeless vet, and listened to the problems of the homeless as one of their own.
Salzman interviewed the homeless as a journalist, snapping photos of their tent homes. One person said Salzman looked like a cop.
Unremarkably, Salzman’s interviews were completely different than the conversations Coffman experienced in the dead of winter living among them on freezing sidewalks.
It’s the lamest “gotcha” story ever conceived by a biased journalist.
Instead of sympathy towards “unhoused people,” Salzman says he witnessed “hate that’s fomented by Coffman’s simplistic and mocking (“not good for weight control”) rhetoric.
People screamed profanities at my camp. “Fuck you,” one man yelled as he sped by. “Fuck all of you” spewed from another vehicle. One honked for a full minute as they waited at the light. It went on into night, I can assure you, because I failed to bring earplugs. At 1:09 a.m., I woke up to a continuous honk. At about 5 a.m., “You’re gross, nasty, dirty fucks.”
I was scared of the unhoused people around me as I set up my tent in the evening, but when I dismantled it the following day, I was thinking to myself that I should have been more worried about the insane drivers speeding by the camp.
How dare drivers speed along highways when people are trying to sleep beside the roadways!
And now it’s somehow Coffman’s fault that some folks are fed up with the out-of-control homeless situation, and that Salzman himself was afraid of homeless people?
Salzman concluded Coffman’s experiences did not exactly match his own in completely different circumstances with completely different people in a completely different location two years later.
According to our fact check, Salzman should give up his day job as a journalist.