Thursday, December 15, 2016

Fighting Back Against Fake News

Every liar from Hillary Clinton to Brian Williams is up in arms at what the liars at the New York Times are calling the "Fake News Onslaught." The make-believe outrage, largely aimed at censoring conservative opposition to the media's left-wing agenda, hit fever pitch last week after an armed man walked into the popular D.C. Pizza joint and music venue Comet Ping Pong and fired a rifle, claiming he had come to investigate the online rumors known as Pizzagate.
Pizzagate is the notion that Hillary Clinton and her minions are running a satanic child sex ring in the restaurant's basement. I've taken the time to look into the theory and it's ridiculous, wholly unfounded, its "proofs" absurd.
But when I mentioned that the theory was bunk on my podcast the other day, a few listeners became angry with me. One was so incensed she says she cancelled her subscription to The Daily Wire, the website that hosts my cast. This certainly testifies to how attached people become to these false ideas, and how dangerous they can be.
So as a public service — and braving the anger of my readership — I'd like to expose a few other absurd fake news stories.

1. Police Target Blacks
After a white police officer shot and killed a large black thug who was attacking him in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, witnesses falsely claimed that the thug had surrendered before being shot, putting up his hands and saying, "Don't shoot." This fed into the mainstream media thesis that police were unfairly targeting black youths for violence. Both the "hands up, don't shoot" scenario and the overall notion of widespread police bigotry have been thoroughly debunked and yet fake news sites such as CNN and the New York Times continue to keep up their onslaught of lies. Unlike the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, these lies have contributed to multiple deaths and repeated riots. Should fake news sites like CNN and the Times be shut down before more people die?
2. The Obama Economy is Strong
Once again, we find the pernicious fake news site the New York Times at the center of this absurd story. Desperate to obscure the near-total failure of the Obama presidency, the Times has been using fake news sites like nytimes.com to spread the absurd notion that "Donald J. Trump can expect to inherit an economy that has added private sector jobs for 80 months, put another 178,000 people on payrolls last month and pushed the unemployment rate down to 4.6 percent today from 4.9 percent the previous month. Wage growth, though slower, is still running ahead of inflation, and consumers are expressing the highest levels of confidence in nearly a decade." In fact, while energy-rich states like Texas and Kentucky have thrived, the National Association of Counties reports that 93% of the nation's counties have not recovered from the 2008 crash. Median incomes are down. And the drop in the unemployment number disguises the fact that labor participation is at its lowest rate since the horrible Carter years. When you add people who would like to work or work more, the real unemployment rate is very close to ten percent. Oh, and by the way, those rising levels of confidence may have something to do with the fact Obama is leaving office.

3. The Climate is in Crisis
This nonsensical story, promulgated by various fake left-wing news sites like NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others, was designed to arouse the sort of panic that causes people to foolishly give more power to the government. In fact, reports of disastrous climate change have been dialed back even by those most committed to spreading the panic. Just as important, the proposed "solutions" to the climate catastrophe have been shown to be ineffective and overpriced.
These and other fake news stories have endangered lives, cost money and threatened, our liberties. It is time to take action against the fake news sites that spread these lies. Out of respect to the First Amendment, I believe our best approach is simply to ignore them entirely.

Oh wait. We already do.

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