The Patriot Post® · This Just In: Leftists Peddle Misinformation
In what might be the least shocking news of the century, a pair of New York Times journalists have uncovered a major scoop: Left-wingers are sometimes guilty of misinformation, too.
The article begins with three examples of left-wing misinformation: The cockamamie idea that Donald Trump may have staged the assassination attempt against him, the smears against The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 by attacking proposals that aren’t even in it, and the Kamala Harris campaign’s deceptive suggestion that Trump is suffering cognitive decline.
Lest anyone think the Times has suddenly turned against its own side, the fourth paragraph offers the requisite qualification:
For years, the discussion about misinformation online has focused on falsehoods circulating on the American right. But in recent weeks, a flurry of conspiracy theories and false narratives have also been swirling on the left.
A couple of paragraphs later comes this gem: “The researchers emphasized that the falsehoods and exaggerations were not as entrenched or as toxic as those permeating right-wing spaces online.” Roughly half of the story, in fact, is still dedicated to the idea that right-wingers are worse.
That formulation begs the question. It assumes that right-wingers are guilty of misinformation without acknowledging that the judges are left-wingers who often only disagree with conservative opinions. In many cases, it’s not even opinion; it’s basic facts like sex being determined by genetics or most masks working about as well as a chain link fence for mosquitos.
Leftists run the “fact-checking” outfits who’ve become the self-appointed arbiters of truth. Of course they’re going to target conservatives. They exist to protect the Left’s monopoly on mainstream media.
NewsGuard is one of our “favorites” because the folks running it and working for it are professional journalists who talk a good game about defending truth with an objective set of standards. Yet they attack your humble team here at The Patriot Post with an annual grilling about various assertions made on our pages that most often boils down to a disagreement over interpretation. In other words, opinion.
The Times benignly calls NewsGuard “a company that monitors online misinformation,” but it’s a lot more than that. NewsGuard is a gatekeeper — an “objective” source relied upon by others who then decide what content from what websites is allowed to be seen by web users. When NewsGuard’s “fact-checkers” disagree with us, it hurts our reach.
No wonder NewsGuard’s intrepid journalists powerful censors love outfits like The New York Times. Heck, they even used CNN’s reporting to challenge us, which is pretty low if you ask me.
So, let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane to see that the left-wing misinformation the Times suddenly discovered this summer is not a new phenomenon.
Aside from the aforementioned gender confusion and mask enforcement, both of which the Times peddled with all the tact of the mafia, I’ll name three incredibly consequential examples.
For years, the Times beat the drum of “Russia collusion,” even winning and retaining a Pulitzer Prize for its fake news. That hoax was used to undermine President Trump for the duration of his term in office, and it was a great example of the wrap-up smear Mark Alexander discussed yesterday. (In essence, Democrats relied upon the media’s false reporting to create a damaging feedback loop of false accusations.)
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Times was part of the media cartel that blocked and rebutted reporting by its crosstown rival, the New York Post, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and that it revealed the lucrative corruption of the Biden family, including Joe Biden. Suppressing that information arguably changed the election outcome, but the Times didn’t get around to acknowledging the laptop’s veracity until a year and a half later — when it no longer really mattered.
The final example came in the aftermath of January 6, which, similarly, has been used for the last four years to discredit and destroy Trump as a unique “threat to democracy.” The Times was among several Leftmedia outlets that falsely reported that U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. As Alexander noted in February 2021, the Times “quietly corrected its 08 January post making the ‘fire extinguisher’ assertion — but not until after the Demos’ closing impeachment arguments — which relied, in part, on the Times’s false narrative.”
Now you know why I laughed out loud when I saw Tuesday’s Times story about left-wing misinformation.
And yet, it’s no laughing matter. There is arguably no greater threat to American Liberty than that posed by the Leftmedia’s “fact-checking” censorship racket. It’s not enough for the Left to control nearly every major media outlet. Left-wingers seek to suppress and censor the reach of any contrary ideas because the acquisition and retention of power requires that opposition be squelched and silenced. The word for that is tyranny.