A viral tale was born when the New York Post published an article (here) on May 12, 2023, claiming that “nearly two dozen struggling homeless veterans have been booted from upstate hotels to make room for migrants.”
The Post’s source was Sharon Toney-Finch, CEO of the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, which is involved with homeless veterans (see their website here).
The story isn’t true, and Toney-Finch now faces criticism from veterans’ advocates and a GOP state representative who tried to help her, and scrutiny by New York’s state attorney general.
On May 19 she told Politico “she was misguided in her initial understanding that veterans under her group’s care were moved from the hotel,” but added, “For us not to confirm where they were kicked out of or removed from, that was YIT’s fault.” (See story here.) This doesn’t sound like she’s backing down from her claim that veterans were displaced by migrants.
But when reporters made inquiries, they found that no veterans were evicted anywhere to make room for migrants. When the state representative arranged to meet with her to discuss her evidence, she was a no-show. And one of the purported veterans told a reporter he was “recruited” to back up her story (see story here).
It sure appears that Toney-Finch is lying. A motive is yet to be determined, but most likely involves fundraising. I’d guess the attorney general is interested in whether donations to her nonprofit were diverted, and the homeless veterans story was invented to cover up a diversion of funds.
The story is politically charged, of course, and quickly went viral. Among rightwing sites, Breitbart has updated their story (here) to acknowledge it’s possibly a hoax; I’ve not found similar reader alerts at Fox News, Newsmax, or One America News, all of which ran the original story, but my search could’ve missed them. The nonpartisan Military Times ran a “hoax alert” story (here), as have mainstream news outlets.
But the damage is done. The problem is that false stories acquire a life of their own on the internet. Once it’s out there, you can’t eradicate it, and it becomes part of the constellation of lies that fuels political division in our country.
That makes it much more difficult to have rational conversations about issues like immigration policy.
Update (5/20/23): A group of homeless men say Toney-Finch offered them $200 each to say they were veterans pushed out of housing by migrants, and then never paid them, see story here.