Exo 23:1 NKJV
"You shall not circulate a false report. Do not put your hand with the
wicked to be an unrighteous witness.
Liberalism
Is a Hoax [/] Column: Public relations in the service of
the left [/] Matthew Continetti [/] December 5, 2014 5:00 am [/] Washington
Free Beacon http://j.mp/0LibsAreHoaxers
or http://freebeacon.com/columns/liberalism-is-a-hoax/
Talk about a dramatic entrance. When the St.
Louis Rams took the field last Sunday, several teammates raised their hands,
palms out. It was an act of solidarity with Michael Brown, the unarmed black
teenager killed last August in a struggle with a white police officer. Moments
before his demise, it is said, Brown raised his hands and pleaded: “Don’t
shoot.”
Since then “hands up, don’t shoot” has become
the rallying cry of protesters and rioters furious that the officer, Darren
Wilson, was not indicted by a grand jury. There is just one problem: It is not
clear that Brown put his hands up. Nor is it certain that he said, “Don’t
shoot.” On the contrary, the evidence released by the grand jury suggests that
the fatal incident began when Brown assaulted Wilson.
Indeed, the foundations of the Brown story have
been eroding from the moment a St. Louis television station broadcast security
video from the convenience store where Michael Brown, prior to his fatal
encounter, stole merchandise and assaulted a clerk. It was for example claimed
that Brown was shot in the back. The evidence before the grand jury showed that
he was not.
Is the movement to “de-militarize” the police
that was sparked by Brown’s death therefore based on lies? “Those questions may
never be answered,” says The New York Times, which campaigned for the
indictment of Officer Wilson and sympathized with the violence and looting that
has plagued Ferguson, Missouri, after the grand jury announced its decision.
Well, maybe those questions won’t be answered.
What I do know is that the Times would be much more definitive and much more
emphatic if the empirical data conformed even in the slightest to its preferred
narrative, to its politicized storyline of pacific young black men gunned down
needlessly by racist cops. What I do know is that the sensational and electric
assertions made by liberals to further their agenda, especially on issues of
race and sex, have a habit of being untrue. And it is the recurrence of such
factually suspect accounts that raises troubling questions about the relation
of liberal myth to human reality. (The case of Eric Garner, in which there is
video of the deadly engagement, is different and should not be conflated with
the fable of Ferguson.)
Liberal myths propagated to generate outrage
and activism, to organize and coordinate and mobilize disparate grievances and
conflicting agendas, so often have the same relation to truth, accuracy, and
legitimacy as a Bud Light commercial. Marketing is not limited to business.
Inside the office buildings of Washington, D.C., are thousands upon thousands
of professionals whose livelihoods depend on the fact that there is no better
way than a well-run public relations campaign to get you to do what they want.
What recent weeks have done is provide several lessons in the suspect nature of
such campaigns.
The 2006 Duke Lacrosse case is the paradigmatic
example of a liberal rush to judgment when the perceived victim is a minority
(in that case, a black woman) and the alleged perpetrator a straight white
male. But it is not the sole example.
In 2007, an instructor at Columbia’s Teachers
College specializing in racial “micro-aggressions” and under investigation for
plagiarism discovered a noose hanging from her office door; when she was fired
the following year for academic malfeasance it was widely suspected that she
had put the noose there herself. The racist graffiti and Klan sightings that
rocked the Oberlin campus in 2013 and served as the basis of an antiracism
campaign were later revealed to be a left-wing “joke.” And of course the leader
of the Michael Brown protest movement, tax cheat Al Sharpton, was involved in
the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987.
Recently critics have noted serious flaws in
the reporting and writing of a Rolling Stone article that purports to describe
a violent gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity house. The article
was the basis for the university’s decision to suspend Greek life on campus for
the duration of 2014. What if the piece turns out to be largely or wholly
false?
Would it even matter? Some liberals are upfront
that the factuality of these cases is secondary to their political import.
“Actually, in both the case of the UVA rape and in the case of the killing of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,” says a writer for the New Republic
digital media company, “the major takeaway of recent weeks should be that our
systems do not work” (emphasis in the original).
What the New Republic means by “our systems” is
our systems of power: the institutions through which a free society allocates
resources and decision making, chooses priorities, delegates responsibilities
and authority. It is the goal of contemporary liberalism to command these
institutions—in particular institutions resistant to the left such as police
and fire departments, fraternal societies and private clubs, the military and
extractive industry—and to alter them according to fashionable theories of
equality and justice. The details are unimportant so long as the “takeaway” is
communicated, the desired policy achieved.
It is sometimes difficult to understand that,
for the left, racism and sexism and prejudice are not ethical categories but
political ones. We are not merely talking about bad manners when the subject
turns to Michael Brown or UVA or Thomas Piketty. We are talking about power.
“The new elite that seeks to supercede the old
one, or merely share its power and honors, does not admit to such intention
frankly and openly,” writes Vilfredo Pareto. “Instead it assumes the leadership
of all the oppressed, declares that it will pursue not its own good but the
good of the many; and it goes to battle, not for the rights of a restricted
class but for the rights of almost the entire citizenry.”
Such is the conduct of our new elite, the
archons and tribunes of the “coalition of the ascendant,” which proclaims
itself the advocate of minority rights, of the poor, of the sick, as it
entrenches its power and furthers its self-interest.
For an example of that rising and fabulist
elite, look no further than Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who in a 2013
speech confided that the passage of Obamacare was due to a “lack of
transparency” and “the stupidity of the American people or whatever.” Here is a
highly compensated professional, who has received close to $6 million in
consulting fees from state and federal government, admitting to like-minded
audiences that the Obama administration rigged the process at the Congressional
Budget Office, and that the law was written so if states did not establish
health exchanges they would not receive Medicaid subsidies (the government is
now arguing the opposite before the Supreme Court).
The response? More lies: Nancy Pelosi says
she’s never heard of Gruber, and the president and his former secretary of
Health and Human Services minimize his role in creating their signature
legislation. (Gruber visited the White House, including the Oval Office, more
than 20 times.) Gruber hasn’t been delivering speeches over the last few years.
He’s been delivering confessions. And his words only embitter the recollection
of other Obamacare promises that have been exposed as false: that the law would
cut the deficit, that it would lower health care premiums by $2,500, that if
you like your plan you can keep your plan.
What are the apocalyptic predictions of climate
alarmists but Sorelian myths intended to shape legislation, regulation, and the
culture in the radicals’ favor? To merely profess agnosticism on the subject of
global warming is to elicit calls for one’s removal from the Washington Post.
Yet the “pause” in warming has lasted for more than 15 years, leaving puzzled
climate scientists, whose jobs depend on the imminence of crisis, speculating
that the heat is hiding somewhere in the ocean. The “Climategate” emails
revealed an insular and opaque scientific community sensitive to the political
and financial ramifications of contradictory data. The sharknado-like
hurricanes that environmentalists predicted as a consequence of global warming have
yet to appear. Indeed, no hurricane has made landfall on Florida in nine years.
I gave up predicting the weather the first time
I didn’t do my homework in expectation of a snow day and was proven wrong.
Nevertheless I recognize the political appeal of climate change, the rhetorical
power of a threat to correlate forces, to direct their activity. Not to mention
the aromatic whiff of potential economic rewards. Retrofitting an economy for a
post-fossil fuel world is a business opportunity for well-connected
entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk or the coal baron, radical environmentalist,
billionaire, and Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, who is on record that the
government-subsidized green energy bonanza is above all an opportunity “to make
a lot of money.”
So much of contemporary liberalism reeks of a
scheme by which already affluent and influential people increase their margins
and extend their sway. Liberalism, mind you, in both parties: the Republican
elite seems as devoted as their Democratic cousins to the shibboleths of
diversity and immigration even as they bemoan the fate of the middle class and
seek desperately the votes of white working families.
Just-so stories, extravagant assertions, heated
denunciations, empty gestures, moral posturing that increases in intensity the
further removed it is from the truth: If the mainstream narration of our
ethnic, social, and cultural life is susceptible to error, it is because
liberalism is the prevailing disposition of our institutions of higher
education, of our media, of our nonprofit and public sectors, and it is
therefore cocooned from skepticism and incredulity and independent thought.
Sometimes the truth punctures the bubble. And when that happens—and lately it
seems to be happening with increasing frequency—liberalism itself goes on
trial.
Has the jury reached a verdict? Yes, your
honor, it has. We find the defendant guilty. Liberalism is a hoax.
Related
Notes
Darren Wilson on why he shot Michael Brown |
New York Post November 25, 2014 | 2:29am Modal Trigger Officer Darren Wilson
released a statement after a grand jury decided not to indict him for fatally
shooting Michael...
Ferguson Verdict Explodes Media's Lying Racial
Narrative On Monday night, the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri freed Officer
Darren Wilson from the possibility of indictment over his shooting of 18-ye...
Ferguson grand jury papers full of
inconsistencies 5 photos A protester is arrested outside of the St. Louis city
hall Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2014, in St. Louis.... Read more FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) —
Some ...
I2C 141205ba Exo23v1 Lefties are hoaxers | I2C |
1412 | Exo23v1 Lefties are hoaxers
