Happy Monday faithful FR readers! We hope you all had a nice weekend. Thank you to Stephen for today’s post.
Several recent left-wing hoaxes have made the news in just a couple weeks, though the last few years have been filled with many more, far too many to recount here. The political hoax is not a new phenomena, such practices have been documented throughout recorded history.
However, with the rise of the modern convenience of social media the perpetrators and origins of such hoaxes has changed dramatically. Once, it was the propaganda of the government which drove false stories in the general media, though such hoaxes often occurred on a more local level.
The power of social media has driven the local, uncoordinated and poorly planned hoaxes to a level of influence and publicity only before available to the well planned and coordinated hoaxes of state and media powers.
From the Roman creation of the pretext that barbarians were again going to invade to loot and pillage Roman cities so they could engage in wars of conquest and expansion, to the fraudulent reports of excessive torture by the Catholics of the Inquisition appearing in the Protestant nations and made popular by that Protestant invention of the Printing Press, there is a long history of making up fictitious stories about one’s political opponents.
It is a great motivator for the uninformed, the intellectually gullible, and the emotionally distraught of a nation or nations. Cynical manipulation of the masses is a time tested ploy of those who seek to grasp for more power as the champions of the fraudulently oppressed.
We have all people who support President Trump maligned by a fanciful tale of MAGA hat wearing rednecks roaming the streets of Chicago at two in the morning in sub-zero weather carrying around spare nooses and bottles of bleach. (However, they are courteous enough to leave their purported victim’s Subway sandwich unharmed and intact.)
Just two weeks prior we had highly edited video purporting to show a young man, again in a MAGA hat getting into the face of native American Vietnam War veteran to smirk, obstruct, and ridicule the kindly old man.
Of course, evidence quickly came to light definitively proving both of these rather obviously preposterous stories were blatantly false, misleading, and outright fraudulent.
The media leapt for joy to publicize and market these fraudulent tales of right-wing atrocities, just as they have done many, many times in the past, from unsustainable stories of Tea Party protesters hurling racist invectives which magically were not caught on all the contemporaneous video footage to staged Confederate flag waving protesters at conservative or alt-right events who appear only long enough to get some video footage before the quickly slink away.
Meanwhile, back in the halls of Virginia government, not one but two top leftist officials are admitted to have worn blackface makeup in the 80s and another accused of sexual assault, but that is barely even in the news. Looking up an article regarding the latter accusation, I had to read all the way to the end of the article just to make sure it was accusation of sexual assault and not sexual harassment.
This is nothing new, allegations against leftists are routinely ignored, dismissed, and overlooked, while even a minor allegation against someone on the right side of the political aisle will be elevated to the level of far worse allegations against someone on the left just so the media can pretend parity and dismiss or diminish the allegations.
Allegations against Hollywood elitists like Harvey Weinstein and others after their initial breaking news fade quickly into the background. Many of the people accused are not talked about enough for most people, myself included, to even be aware that they have been specifically accused, some with quite recognizable and well-known names. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/weinstein-here-s-growing-list-men-accused-sexual-misconduct-n816546
Allegations against Bill Cosby, on the other hand, make front page headline news for an extended period of time and went the full length to trial. The main difference seeming to be nothing more than Cosby’s politics compared to the political leanings of these others. When was the last time you really heard about Bill Clinton’s close associate Jeffrey Epstein and his sweetheart deal he cut with prosecutors.
However, I’m more concerned with the fake allegations and hoaxes which are being promoted than the real scandals which are being ignored, though they obviously follow the same one-sided political bias.
While it looks like the Chicago police are incensed enough that they might actually, for once, hold Mr. Jussie Smollet accountable for his filing a false police report, all too often the perpetrators of such hoaxes are let off with a slap on the wrist and told not to do it again.
Rep. Cummings fraudulently accusing those Tea Party people of racial slurs faced no consequences for his fraud. Nathan Phillips has yet to face any consequences for his fraudulent stories and stolen valor. Indeed, Shaun King got a nice cushy job for apparently fraudulently claiming to be of black heritage. Let’s not forget the accuser Christine Ford’s or Anita Hill’s fraudulent stories of sexual assault or harassment against a Supreme Court nominee, who both make hefty financial returns on their fraud.
People not only see the fraud, they watch the consequences which befall the perpetrators of such fraud. With our current leftist media, fraud peddlers are promoted, empathized with, given fame, and in some FBI cases fortune in the form of book deals.
Now, Alyssa Milano laments that some generic person might have fooled them by perpetrating a fraudulent story and incredulously asked if someone would really do that. Of course the fraudulent story is promoted under Jussie Smollet’s name, tv interviews, and sold-out concerts, but a vague reference that the story might have been false and Ms. Milano can’t even recall his name.
I was once told in a brief by one of the state’s asst. attorney generals that they did not want to prosecute people who committed such fraud because it would discourage other people from committing similar fraud. Of course, she referred to them as complaints rather than fraud, and pretended that their complaints might be valid, but it amounted to the same thing.
It is one of the fundamental rules of economics that if you subsidize something, reward a behavior, publicly encourage it, then you will get more of that type of behavior. Thus, it becomes rather obvious why people all across the nation are willing to commit such fraud in light of the media encouragement and the state’s refusal to hold them accountable.
The more interesting question is why so many celebrities, “journalists”, and activists are so willing to buy into these fraudulent stories when the stories are so obviously false.
The 2am Chicago rednecks with bleach and a noose was clearly unbelievable, but they believed it. The edited video of the young man with a drum being held in his face never clearly indicated who was in the wrong, yet thousands of people simply assumed some guilt of something because they did not like the politics of his hat.
People leapt to believe Rep. Cummings heard racial epithets because they did not like the politics of the Tea Party. A college student takes pictures of some old paper basket wires, claims they are nooses when anyone looking at them could see that they weren’t, yet the papers run with the story. Alyssa Milano claims to see Nazi saluting Elves on the Shelf; college student’s make backwards fecal swastika; a woman in New York claims a Trump supporter insulted her and tried to physically remove her hajib; and many other stories run away in the media.
But why do people believe what is so obviously false? It’s become so common that it has its own internet Jeopardy memes of “things which never happened”. People now appear to want to believe the most outlandish and irrational things as if they were absolute truth.
But, they don’t. Not really.
These people don’t believe those lies, they only pretend to believe them as a tool to slander their political opponents. There is no honesty in them. They realize these are hoaxes, but they have learned from Dan Rather that it can be “false, but accurate”.
They already believe the worst about their political opposition, so these hoaxes have no more meaning to them than a cheer at a pep rally.
“To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.”― John Locke
They have no love of truth, so what other virtue could grow within them?
