Kill Notes #04: The Forged Map, the Chef, and the Thing Steinem Said Herself in 1967

Three claims that traveled this week. In every case the original document exists, is public, and says something other than what the post says. Nobody sharing it went to look.

All three items this week come apart the same way, and it is worth saying how before starting.

Each claim points at a source, whether a seventeenth-century map, a former White House chef, or a newspaper report from the Johnson administration, and in each case the source is real, is available, and sits in a public archive that anyone with a browser can open. The claim survives because nobody opens it. That is the mechanism this week, and it is a more hopeful one than last week’s, because it means the correction is a link rather than an argument.

Item one. The map that proves the lake was always Lake America.

The claim, circulating on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Threads since the end of August, is that an old French map of the Great Lakes labels the water at the bottom of the chain “Lac America,” and that the president therefore restored an original name rather than inventing one. The most-shared version on X drew about 73,700 views and 3,700 likes, with a caption saying Trump was just correcting what it was called a very long time ago.