Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (6)
Last week Andrew Bolt had prominent Labor man Bruce Hawker on his show. I suppose this is an attempt at balance. There I go, trying to make my life lefty-free in order to remain sane, only to be hijacked by Bolt bringing Hawker into my sitting room. As an aside, Alan Jones does the same thing in regularly having Tanya Plibersek invade my space. I use the mute button till she’s gone, so I can’t absolutely swear that what she says is insufferable.
Anyway, this piece is not about Hawker per se but about two myths he spouted about Donald Trump and also, to draw a lesson, about Bolt’s pallid response. The two myths are well-trodden paths for leftists everywhere. They are repeated ad nauseum; they are now fully-fledged factoids and from here, no doubt, will appear in history books for children as historical facts. They will sit alongside the totally debunked accusation that Trump made fun of a disabled reporter and no doubt the brand-new calumny in The Atlantic that he described WWI fallen US soldiers as losers.
The two myths to which Hawker gave fresh currency are as follows. Trump showed himself to be a racist by not condemning white supremacists in Charlottesville. And Trump advised ingesting disinfectant to cure COVID-19. First to Charlottesville.
A rally was organised in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 to oppose pulling down the statue of Robert E Lee. Reportedly, it was organised and led by unsavoury ‘white-nationalist’ types. It ended badly, in violence, as a result of clashes with those who supported removing the statue. That’s my anodyne take on it. I don’t want to get into the weeds of what did or didn’t occur.
At issue is what Trump did and didn’t say. It is legitimate to debate whether he always struck the right nuance in how he responded. That kind of picky debate is par for the course in political life. But it is a lie, pure and simple, to say that he didn’t condemned those taking part in the rally who were neo-Nazi’s and white nationalists.
It is worthwhile going to Factcheck.org and a piece by Robert Farley on 11 February this year. He set out all of Trump’s statements and comments which followed the rally. Here is an extract of one:
You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides … and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.
Here is another:
Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans
Of course, the outrage industry went into overdrive at Trump’s assertion that there were fine people on both sides. But simply take the statement in isolation. It implies that a number of those participating were not so fine. Some, in fact, as Trump put it, were “bad.”
Make a note. Each time leftist buffoons claim Trump is a racist they hark back to Charlottesville. That is all they have. And that is a big fat nothing.
Second, the “disinfectant” myth. I personally saw that particular pandemic press briefing. Trump was clearly expressing a wish, somewhat tongue in cheek, in a side conversation with doctors who were there as part of the briefing and who in part discussed the need to disinfect surfaces, that it would be good if something could be found to ingest which would have the same effect as disinfectant on surfaces. It could not have been misinterpreted except by those with ill will towards him; of whom, sadly, there is no shortage in Washington DC and beyond.
Andrew Bolt has been known, quite rightly, to criticise presenters who allow panellists or guests to get away, unchallenged, with making unfounded prejudicial remarks. He often brings in Gerard Henderson to amplify the ABC’s culpability in that regard. In this case, he allowed Hawker to make such remarks about Trump. True, he did try to challenge him a little over the Charlottesville matter but allowed himself to be talked over by the garrulous Hawker.
My point is not to be critical of Bolt, one of the few good guys in the Australian media, along with a number of other Sky News hosts. My point is to press the need, in this post-modern age, when lies are dressed up as truth, for conservative commentators to pre-emptively arm themselves with the facts and be ready to respond resolutely, if they choose to subject their viewers or listeners to leftist malign make-believe. It’s not that hard. Leftists tend to repeat and repeat the same old fabrications with the intent of giving them faux verisimilitude.
Completely agree. I saw both reports of Trump’s statements and was astonished that the US media is both so juvenile (and a not very smart juvenile at that) and mendacious to fabricate the slurs that they did. There is no way, listening to Trump on Charlottesville that one extract ‘racism’ from his remarks.
Similarly with the disinfectant: we’ve got cheap chemicals that destroy viruses on benchtops, why can’t we have cheap chemicals that will to the same in bodies. All the medico present needed to say: ‘ah that we could, but the body is far more complex than a lifeless surface, and we need to be careful about interactions.’
But maybe she ( from memory ) was thinking that even a half-wit could tell that Trump was musing about the possibility of a simple cheap agent that did the same job for humans as disinfectants did for benchtops. She over estimated the reporters present.
Indeed, one needs to be armed with facts. You need specific facts and not generalizations.
A few weeks ago I was invited to lunch by an old friend. She’s a medical practitioner, and others invited included an engineer, his school-teacher wife, and a nurse. The school teacher suggested that if Donald Trump was re-elected President it would be the end of the USA. When I suggested the complete opposite, there was a stunned silence in this polite society. So I asked where they got their news from, and mostly they relied heavily on the ABC who they seem to have trusted since childhood, when it was good.
But as well as referring to the leftward slide of the ABC, I was able to describe a blatant fabrication when Foreign Correspondent ran a program alleging the Australian government covered up the wartime hangings of Japanese collaborators at Higaturu, in PNG. The hangman, William Alexander (Bill) Gordon, served with my father in the army. I knew Bill well, and the history was well known in PNG. Furthermore, the ABC had even contacted the historian Hank Nelson who had written three books in which these events were treated. One of his books, “Taim Bilong Masta” was even published by the ABC itself. But Nelson’s contribution was ignored presumably because it contradicted the desired conspiracy narrative.
To the school teacher, I was able to cite educational statistics in the USA where “progressive” Democratic-run cities have woeful black/white achievement gaps compared to conservative cities. And then cite how a small UK school opposed by the educational unions, Michaela, tossed out all the educational “wisdom” of recent decades, and its poor and disadvantaged students scored 4 times better than the national average.
So while numerous studies show that most people won’t change their minds when confronted with facts that contradict their long-held worldviews, at least when no one can refute your facts, the conversation tends to change to a different topic.
Lefties in particular are very good at pre-arming themselves.
.
As soon as they see one of their memes losing traction, they flick the switch to something else. You can usually figure it out by reading the Guardian and related tweets – the correct line is beamed out like a huge bat-signal over Gotham.
.
Righties will never be as good because they have neither the time nor the inclination to spend their hours, days and lives playing partisan politics.
.
OK, we expect Bolt to be well-informed on all this stuff, especially since constantly changing allegations is a prime leftits tactic.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe that. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State”. – Josef Goebbels
Interesting that the evil Murdoch news outlets regularly feature left of centre guests, when the purportedly unbiased ABC only features right of centre guests as canon fodder on Q&A. The lefties are given a much fairer reception on Sky and in The Australian than conservative masochists on Q&A.
Even more absurd is Trumps’ supposed description of WW1 survivors as ‘losers’. I don’t even need to see what he actually said to know that is total horse manure.
If we thought the Left were deranged with Tony Abbott, that was nothing compared to this frothing-at-mouth hatred of Trump.