American Falsehoods

American Falsehoods

I have been researching, to the best of my ability, and knowing what I have learned about the veracity of various research sources, several narratives that seem to have taken on the mantle of truth, simply because they have been repeated enough times by the preponderance of our 90%+ anti-Trump mainstream media, and also edited into several ubiquitous reference sources. 

Over the past several weeks, I have blogged lengthy, detailed analyses of what is happening in our society, and put these out there on social media in the event anyone wants to reference facts, rather than be guided by the emotionalism of the popular media.

The First of these glaring untruths is That “Black Lives Matter” and “Antifa” are respectable civil rights organizations fighting for the rights of oppressed Black Americans, and against violent white supremacists.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

A deep dive into the origins and goals of these groups shows that BLM is a neo-Marxist offshoot of the violent Black Liberation Army, Black Panthers and Weather Underground groups of the 1960’s and 70’s.  Antifa in the U.S. is an outgrowth of the communist based German ‘antifaschistisch’ of the 1930’s.  I posted bios of the founders of BLM, and details about the groups core beliefs, financing and rationale several days ago.

Both groups promulgate violent overthrow of conventional capitalistic governments, but this root goal has been pasted over in the popular narrative, by the groups themselves, and by the supportive mainstream media.  To the consternation of reality, these groups are represented as peaceful, First Amendment, civil rights groups, and they are accepted as such by the preponderance of the American public.

Another recent event that has been represented as completely anti-Trump and almost fascistic, is the removal from Lafayette Square in DC on June 1, of the mob that set fire to St John’s Episcopal Church the previous evening.

The narrative of the preponderance of the 90%+ anti-Trump mainstream media is that “Brutal military police and troops used tear gas, flash grenades and rubber bullets to attack a ‘peaceful’ protest in Lafayette Square, so that Trump could hold a photo op.”  This story not only appeared in the normal anti-Trump media outlets it also was edited into ostensibly unbiased Wikipedia in this distorted form. (It can be changed in Wikipedia, but the current entry is so voluminous, that it reads like a fictional novel of events at Lafayette Square).

The official account by the National Park Service, under whose auspices the removal action took place, had a completely different account.  They reported the violent nature of the mob, who had stockpiled baseball bats and other weapons in the park, refused to disperse after several warnings and threw bricks and bottled liquids at the police.  The Park Service also officially reported that smoke and pepper balls were used, but not tear gas, flash grenades or rubber bullets, as reported by the media.  The NPS official report was neglected in the narratives fed by much of the media to a gullible public and posted on Wikipedia.

While the police were obviously overzealous at times, and created an incident with a couple of Australian news-people, the whole event was turned into a massive anti-Trump affair by the biased media.

In the meantime, in an appalling show of pandering, hypocrisy and ignorance, house democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, donned African Kente cloth stoles and knelt at Emancipation Hall at the U.S. capitol.  The only problem is, that this particular type of Kente cloth is associated with Ghanaian slave traders in Africa.  How’s that for stupidity and insufficient research?  Almost as bad as BLM rioters defacing a statue of Stevie Ray Vaughn, in Austin

There are numerous events that are mis-reported, distorted and falsified to make Trump look bad.  Admittedly, he does enough on his own, with his tweets and extemporaneous comments.

Perhaps the greatest leftist-inspired false narrative is that Trump is a RACIST!  The one crystalizing event that comes to mind is the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017.  In his initial statement on the rally, Trump "condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides". While Trump condemned both neo-Nazis and white nationalists, his first statement and subsequent defenses of it, in which he also referred to "very fine people on both sides", were seen by critics as implying moral equivalence between the white supremacist marchers and those who protested against them. His ever-present detractors broadcast that his remarks were sympathetic to white supremacists. 

Of course, Trump’s full remarks were swept away in the leftist, hate-Trump narrative.  The “fine people” that trump referred to were people who were trying to save the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, which was part of American history, from being defaced and torn down.  He did not refer to the white supremacists as “fine people”.  The whole event was made a symbol of Trump’s “RACISM!”, by his leftist enemies, particularly after violence broke out and a young woman was killed, and others were injured, by a deranged driver.

There are many such events that are reported out of context or distorted by the biased, anti-Trump or anti-American elements in our society.  Unfortunately, these distortions and falsehoods find themselves into not only our mainstream media, but also into what should be unbiased and balanced reference sources, such as Google or Wikipedia. 

There are alternate reference sources, but these are not entirely satisfactory.  When researching controversial material that has been massaged by the left and pretty much accepted as truth by much of the world, one almost feels as part of some contrarian “fringe”, and must take really conscious pains to avoid the “kooks” and conspiracy theorists that push other alternate versions of the truth.

What’s really disturbing about the three examples discussed here, is how these three distortions have been accepted as truth by the American public.

BLM and Antifa are not respectable civil rights organizations, they are neo-Marxist groups whose goals are to destroy our society by violence.

The authorities did not use brutal force against a “peaceful” First Amendment protest in Lafayette Park.  The used measured force against violent protesters that had set fire to a church.

President Trump is not a RACIST!  He has done more to help Black Americans economically, legally and from an employment standpoint, than any previous president, including Obama.

One falsehood perpetrated on all of us Americans by the corrosive identity politics of the left, is that our country is systemically racist and must atone for the sins of our forefathers 2-300 years ago.  Nonsense.  We are all equal under the law.  A Republican president freed the slaves, upwards of 400,000 white Union soldiers died in the Civil War to uphold this emancipation, and republican presidents and legislators have been working ever since, to pass and uphold civil rights laws to ensure racial equality.  Unfortunately, there is still some bigotry (both ways), in the country, but this is dissipating with time.

Another falsehood is that the police are racist and brutal, and shoot unarmed Black Americans out of proportion to the rest of society.  This is also nonsense, and there are statistics to prove so, but emotion, rather than reason, has overtaken much of the country, based again on the irrational rhetoric of leftist identity politics, as manipulated very expertly recently by BLM and Antifa.

It is really difficult to obtain truthful accounts of what is happening in modern America, when once impeccable sources of the news, like the New York Times, Washington Post, and other once reliable publications, are so obviously biased toward the left, that they could be considered satirical, if the situation weren’t so sad.  The same goes for broadcast TV and much of cable TV.

What saves our bacon, if we won’t accept the left-wing “paint-over” jobs, are publications like the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Fox TV outlets, talk radio, and some others.  Now these are right oriented, and some are hard right, so some common sense caution is called for.

I lean toward the right, so perhaps I can’t be 100% fair about this, but if I watch CNN, I get about 80-90% left-slanted news, and 10-20% straight news.  For Fox News, these are reversed.  Now I’m not talking about Tucker Carlson or Hannity or Laura Ingraham.  Clearly, these are conservative commentators.  But even they give good doses of straight news.  The “Morning Joes”, Rachel Maddows, Don Lemons, Chris Cuomos, Chuck Todds of the left-wing media never seem to report straight news.                                                                            

Ray Gruszecki

June 24, 2020