Fighting Shameless Libs

Having lost their moral compass decades ago, today's leftists are immune to criticism based on facts which violate their preferred progressive narrative.  That makes it difficult for conservatives to effectively fight back against progressives because they also have no shame when they're caught lying.

The left's disregard for inconvenient truth goes back several lifetimes.  Walter Duranty, the New York Times' Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1936, was convinced that the murderous Stalin regime could do no wrong.  Having been smart (or fortunate) enough to predict in 1922 that Stalin would come out on top of the power struggle that followed Lenin's death, he enjoyed access to the dictator that helped win him a Pulitzer prize in 1932.

Over nearly a decade and a half of reporting, he staunchly refused to report one of the worst crimes of mass murder in human history as millions starved to death during Stalin's forced collectivization in the early 1930's.  He dismissed the reports as mere rumors, saying "the 'famine' is mostly bunk."  History now knows this to be such a spectacular lie that the "bunk" has its own genocide name: the Holodomor.

The Times wasn't alone in believing that Stalin walked on water.  The fact that government restrictions made it difficult for reporters to visit the famine area didn't prevent Malcom Muggeridge from publishing truthful stories in the Guardian - but he "couldn't get work" for years afterwards because his criticism of the communist regime had violated the unwritten laws of media liberalism, even so long ago.

Although Duranty published reluctant stories about Russian scarcity in the New York Times in 1933, he knew the horrible truth in full: his confidential report to the British embassy estimated that 10 million people had starved, but this wasn't considered to be news fit to print for public consumption.

Many decades later, with all the evidence before them, precious few liberals have retracted their support of Communism, going so far as to dismiss reports form KGB archives that confirmed Sen. McCarthy's charges that the American government and media were indeed rife with Russian sympathizers.

The Past Isn't Even Past

To this day, our leftists are still belittling crimes against humanity committed by leftist regimes with which they identify.

When America learned that Otto Warmbier, the college student who'd been released from prison in North Korea in a coma, had died of his maltreatment, the left poured out hatred on him because of his "white male privilege."  At the Huffington Post, a writer named La Sha wrote:

I'm a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense.

She compared his suffering in the North Korean prison, which shrank his brain tissue by about 30% and put him in a coma from which he never recovered, with her suffering as a nonwhite American woman who is published regularly in a major media outlet. Does she seriously believe that her daily life in America is like being in a Korean prison camp?  And if not, has she no moral conception of the magnitude of her lie?

Ms. Sha wasn't the only writer without the slightest moral sense.  When James Hodgkinson, a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter who belonged to Facebook groups with names such as "Terminate the Republican Party" and "The Road to Hell is paved with Republicans," wounded four people and put Rep. Steve Scalise in critical care while Republicans were practicing for their baseball game with the Democrats... the New York Times editorial board blamed heated rhetoric from Mr. Trump and his supporters!

Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They're right. Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.  [emphasis added]

The Times somehow forgot to mention Gavin Long's shooting three police officers in Baton Rouge, La in 2016 "to create substantial change within Americas police force and judicial system" according to his suicide note.  They made no mention of President Obama and Eric holder encouraging BLM protestors whose followers have murdered police in New York, Dallas, and other cities.  No connection between police deaths and liberal incitement, not at all.

Gov. Palin has filed a libel suit against the Times which, experts say, may very well win.

Having preposterously and libelously asserted that the link between a Bernie supporter personally posting hostile messages about Republicans was not as direct a the link to that same Bernie supporter shooting Republicans as Sarah Palin's targeting Democrats for defeat was linked to Gifford's shooting, the Times also trotted out the usual nonsense of keeping guns away from everyone.  They had to admit that the only reason the carnage wasn't a lot worse was that Rep. Scalise ranked high enough to have taxpayer-funded gun-toting bodyguards, but they ridiculed the idea that normal American citizens had the right to have weapons nearby to protect themselves as our ruling elites do.

Even liberals realized that the Times had gone too far.  After a great deal of criticism, the Times backed off a bit:

Correction: June 16, 2017
An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.

This tells us how to reason with committed liberals - don't bother.

The Times' lies blaming both the shooting of Rep. Giffords and Rep. Scalise on Republicans was so outrageous that so many liberals protested that the Times issued a half-hearted correction.

They didn't point out, for example, that the investigation which verified that there was in fact no connection between Republican rhetoric and Rep. Giffords' shooting had been done by a Times reporter and had been reported in their own paper.

The Times' original editorial is a perfect illustration of liberals shameless obsession with saying whatever they think might damage their political opponents regardless of truth.  The only recourse to a liberal lie is for enough liberals to point it out, and even then, the best you get is half-hearted correction; to this day, the Times has not apologized, nor have they corrected their shameless adulation of Stalin of so long ago.

Forget The Left - Aim For The Center

Our best course, then, is to educate non-liberals on the economic and liberty dangers of left-liberalism.  The Times, which lied about both shootings, and the Huffington Post, which equated the modern black experience in America with a North Korean prison camp, are some of the most widely-read "news" outlets in the country.  There's no way that anyone can argue that they don't speak for typical progressives, and their statements show just how little truth is found in most liberal positions.

When leftists rant about global warming, for example, highlighting their lack of respect for the truth in these matters may make people suspicious of other things they say.  What's more, if liberals truly believe that American blacks are treated like prisoners in the North Korean gulag, there's nothing that can be done to help them.  No matter how high welfare payments get, no matter what affirmative action gives them, they will never be satisfied; they'll always want more.  There's no point in spending more money on them because it won't be appreciated and they'll still claim they're being abused.

Showing people on the fence the direction in which progressives are trying to take us may change some minds - which, in a democracy, is the goal of political discourse.  By constantly hammering the "fake news" of the "lying media," President Trump may be getting some filth on himself, but he's demonstrated that the mainstream media is entirely submerged in deceit, and all America knows it.

In the meantime, Sarah Palin has brought suit against the Times for defamation of character.  As a public figure she must prove that the Times is guilty of both "reckless disregard" of the truth and "actual malice" in order to win - but that shouldn't be hard.  The investigation that showed that her politics had nothing to do with the Gifford shooting was done by a Times reporter, so it looks like "reckless disregard" to us, and nobody who's read a smidgen of Times coverage of Gov. Palin could possibly doubt the presence of "actual malice."

It's about time conservatives started waging lawfare against liberals.