theQuestion: Is fake news a fake controversy?*
Controversy over so-called “fake news” is more than a fabrication by the Left to deflect blame from its disastrous, poisonous and vicious policies, which helped cost Hillary Clinton the U.S. presidential election. It is a conniving attempt to regain its totalitarian grip over political discourse and keep on life-support its cherished narrative that self-sacrifice and equality of outcomes trump individualism and equal opportunity.
What is fake news? Reporting that challenges the Left’s political perspective and which the Left deems to be untrue. Shorthand, news originating outside of the approved left-wing media—Globe and Mail, CBC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, I could go on.
The fake news controversy is a deliberate lie, perpetrated to justify the institutionalization of censorship tools, for the Left to use, to discredit and purge political speech of its adversaries.
Distressingly, Facebook is complicit in the Left’s effort to censor speech. Last week, it deployed new tools, empowering users to flag stories they believe to be untrue, which then would be dispatched to third-party “fact-checkers” for scrutiny. Stories deemed to be fake would be publicly branded as “disputed” and relegated to the fever swamps of the Facebook news feed.
Talk of “truth” from the Left is duplicitous. I learned during my graduate studies in leftist postmodern critical theory at Simon Fraser University that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ and ‘objectivity is a myth’. Unbiased facts are nonexistent since production of fact cannot be separated from the social, political and economic power structures from which they are manufactured and distributed. I reject these teachings today, but they hold powerful sway over much of our culture.
The terrain in which the fake news controversy is being fought was tilled by the postmodern rejection of truth. Every college student today and for the past 30 years has been conditioned in some form to believe that facts — including history and science — are relative. Yet, practically every outrage stemming from racial and sexual politics, to the battle over climate change, is influenced by postmodernism and for each issue “root causes” or perceived truths sit at the core of the struggles. Relativism, it seems, only applies to matters Leftists believe to be untrue.
It’s sickening for the Left to wail over what it calls fake news, when the very theoretical foundation of its belief system is a rejection of truth. What’s worse is that companies like Facebook are buying the lie.