Saturday, June 26, 2021

In the News: Real or Satire?

Which of the following news headlines are real and which are satire?  It’s getting harder to tell these days.  Read the headlines, below, and take a guess.  Then learn which ones are the real deal, after the jump.

  1. University: Avoid term “trigger warning” because it uses the word “trigger”
  2. University class explores whether the vast blackness of the cosmos is racist
  3. Female weightlifter suffers testicle injury one week before competition
  4. Scholar banned from APA discussion group after suggesting there are only two sexes
  5. Pennsylvania election audit shows Benjamin Franklin voted for Biden
  6. Chemistry, Biology textbooks over-represent male scientists, educators say
  7. Police: Woman briefly identified as man to avoid long bathroom line
  8. Professor: White privilege is like getting free Wi-Fi
  9. Scholar: Progressive church adopts all the positions popular in modern society
  10. Professor: Harry and Meghan’s baby “half oppressed, half privileged”

Saturday, June 12, 2021

Branding speech as “misinformation” to shut down debate

The Left loves to brand speech with which it disagrees, or that threatens its political agenda, as racist, hate speech, a conspiracy theory, misinformation, or even the dreaded Russian disinformation.  The goal, of course, is to use these words and their negative connotations to suppress the speech instead of having to debate it.

For example, remember when Sen. Tom Cotton (R) said that the virus could have originated at, and been negligently released from, the nearby Wuhan Lab?  The media jumped all over that as a racist conspiracy theory—never mind that a negligent leak is the exact opposite of a conspiracy and that Cotton’s hypothesis had nothing to do with race (i.e., if it is racist to say it escaped from a Chinese lab then it must also be racist to say, as the Left was contending, that it came from a Chinese wet market).  In short, our nation’s prestigious media outlets, like the NYT and WaPo, were just spewing nonsense to advance their political agenda.  As we now know, the evidence has piled up in support of Sen. Cotton’s position.

But don’t take my word for it.  Listen to this NY Times senior writer explain why the Left is so closed-minded and anti-evidence, and read about how the Wash. Post now has to edit its articles to remove its previous claims that Sen. Cotton was spreading a “debunked conspiracy theory.”  Unfortunately, the beat goes on.  The latest example of branding speech as “misinformation” is arguably even more harmful, as the dreaded label is now being used to suppress valuable information about the vaccine.