The Patriot Post® · The Menace of 'Misinformation'

It’s a powerful weapon, misinformation. Properly executed, it’s a one-two punch that forces an opponent onto the defensive while deceptively redirecting the people’s attention. And the Left is infinitely better at deploying it than the Dudley Do-Rights on the Right.

Why might that be? Author and conservative commentator Dennis Prager puts it succinctly: “Truth is not a left-wing value.”

One the Left’s most recent and obvious manifestations of misinformation has been Joe Biden’s shameful charge that supporters of Donald Trump are “semi-fascists.” This is also known as the Big Lie, and it’s the reverse of the truth. It’s an attempt by Biden’s handlers to convince his gullible base that their political opponents are guilty of the bad behavior that they themselves are guilty of. The truth is that the Republican Party, whether being led by Donald Trump or someone else, has always been the party of liberty, lower taxes, smaller government, economic freedom, and individual accountability.

As for the Democrats and their leftist brethren, what could be more fascist than the government’s corporatist weaponization of Big Tech and Big Media in collusion with the Department of Justice and against their political opponents on the Right?

Here, blogger Glenn Greenwald offers a sobering assessment: “Stop being shocked when mainstream liberals express their desire to see their political adversaries not only censored by a union of state and corporate power but also imprisoned. The crux of American liberalism is authoritarianism.”

Think about how this cabal worked in concert to perpetuate the biggest of the Big Lies: that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It was, for all intents and purposes, a quiet coup.

And think about how, four years later, it rigged the 2020 election by shamelessly working the other end of the misinformation angle: by telling us that all the very real and damning materials found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were actually Russian disinformation. Indeed, they co-opted more than 50 “former senior intelligence officials” to co-sign and publish a letter saying as much. The laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” said high-level Trump-hating liars such as James Clapper and John Brennan and Mike Hayden.

But as columnist Aaron Kliegman points out, the laptop misinformation ruse is merely the most consequential of numerous versions of the same ploy. Indeed, Kliegman lists six other recent examples of the misinformation device being used by the Left against the Right. Among them:

• The origins of COVID-19, whereby those who proposed that the virus had leaked from of virology lab in Wuhan, China, were labeled bigots and conspiracy theorists
• The vaccine as panacea, whereby questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine were shut down as disinformation
• The January 6 narrative, whereby suggestions that Nancy Pelosi knew in advance about the threats of a violent storming of the Capitol were dismissed but later revealed to be true
• The integrity of the 2020 election, whereby claims of fraud and other irregularities were deemed false, misleading, or unsubstantiated

In all of these cases and others — such as the mistreatment of J6 defendants and the insistence that critical race theory wasn’t being taught in our schools — the truth eventually rolled out of bed and put its pants on … but not before the “misinformation” lie had traveled halfway around the globe. And that’s the sad reality of our discourse today: When the truth is harmful to the Democrats’ agenda, they’ll do everything they can to hide it.