Posted on 05/17/2021 5:44:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
The left is great at putting the right on the defensive, lumping us all in with a handful of extremists and making us defend them. As I’ve written previously, the left has figured out how to label conservative principles as conspiracy theories, racism or other distasteful characterizations, making us run from our own views.
Part of the reason they get away with the conspiracy theory label is because we get caught spreading stories that may cross that line, and so the left then lumps in perfectly legitimate suspicions with them. This took place far too often regarding the presidential election.
Studies have shown that the right is more susceptible than the left at falling for fake news. This is because the left is up to so much corruption that gets swept under the rug by the left-leaning legal system and MSM that many of the stories seem plausible. The relatively new conservative satire site Babylon Bee is now almost as popular as The Onion, which has been around for years and likely has a far bigger budget, because there is so much craziness believable about the left.
The problem is there is so much information out there now, how do you determine whether something is accurate or not? Legitimate major conservative websites don’t have the time to vet everything. There is no major conservative fact checking site (I have been attempting to start one in order to combat this). So unless you have time to watch an endless stream of 45-minute long videos, what can be done? I am buried with requests from conservatives to watch videos made by people I have never heard of, and cannot keep up with it all. It got worse during the 2020 presidential election, when everyone and their brother made a video about election fraud. COVID-19 compounded things, with all the videos about masks and vaccines.
The fake news videos that tend to get the most steam are ones done by apparent “experts.” You want to believe retired military intelligence and nurses, why would they lie? Well it’s much more complex than that. Here’s what’s going on. A lot of people take a piece of information and run with it before thoroughly vetting it. Because we’re too overloaded with information, we lack time and become sloppy. We hear something that sounds good, from someone good, and we are wired to want to believe it. We may not spend the full hour watching the entire video before sharing it. Or something halfway through it jumps out as a red flag, but we ignore it because the rest of the video seems so good.
Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock who got involved with President Trump’s legal team challenging the election, revealed in an exposé after the fact on January 27 that Michael Flynn drafted a plan for Trump to bring in the National Guard and U.S. Marshals. None of this ever materialized, of course. But it got leaked at the time to activists who ran with it. They probably only heard hyped-up versions of the plan which had become distorted being passed person to person, which made it seem likely to happen (if anyone has ever really studied Trump however, they would know such drastic action is not his style). What retired military intelligence officer doesn’t believe Flynn? Flynn comes across as a very honest man. While he probably proposed the plan, it was never under serious consideration.
Another recent example is Mike Lindell’s “Absolute Proof” documentary about election fraud. While much of it seemed plausible, there was one lengthy segment discussing foreign hacking of voting machines that was noticeably lacking in evidence. The movie displayed logs of the alleged hacking, and cited just one person, Mary Fanning, who has little information available about her on the internet. There is no explanation as to how Fanning obtained the logs nor any of the technical details about how it worked. For something that serious, that incredulous, you can’t just expect people to believe some little known woman claiming it’s true. If she didn’t reveal more details because she was afraid for her safety, then why did she reveal her name and as much as she has?
Maybe clear, irrefutable evidence will come out that there was foreign hacking, so the investigations need to continue. But one person saying so with some logs that could have been made up isn’t enough to get anywhere, so it allows the left to pile on and claim the right is making up conspiracy theories.
One more way these types of unproven stories pop up is in a vague, general style. The activist will use a lot of attention getting words, like patriots, terrorism, God bless, prayer, collusion, Russians, hacking, mysterious deaths, the elites, etc. There isn’t any real coherent message, and the dots never connect. It’s just a jumbled mess of hysteria (I know someone semi-famous who does this constantly). While it might sound good at a campaign rally, it serves little purpose other than to waste time and divert people from figuring out what’s really going on.
I believe the vast majority of these people are patriots who think they are doing the right thing. But the left will use their sloppiness to discredit the rest of us. Those of us who are really laboring to get to the bottom of issues like election fraud get lumped in with their efforts, and we end up wasting a lot of time defending them instead of doing the tedious work required to hold up to the Democrats’ intense scrutiny.
They also waste our time watching and then researching all of their ideas. I don’t have time to vet every video out there. The videos usually end up the same; usually a grain of truth stretched to an unrealistic conclusion, with lots of vague, attention-getting words. Stop blindly promoting them; if you don’t have time to vet them, don’t share them.
Right on and many here on FR are doing this often lately!
This was a fake study - almost ALL left news is fake news.
However, some of the absolute cr@p that shows up on conservative news sites shows that there are gullible on both sides.
All left news is propaganda nothing more!
Establishment news posts 95% truth and 5% leftist agenda (or “lies”), making it all unreliable.
Folks like John Solomon, Steve Bannon, Daniel Greenfield, Dan Bongino, Molly Hemmingway, Sundance (@ConservativeTreeHouse), among others, are reliably honest and accurate.
Sites like FreeRepublic, JustTheNews, TheFederalist, RevolverNews, NationalPulse, FrontPageMagazine, AmericanThinker, and - lately - FrankSpeech all are reliable sources.
Go forth and discern!
That's a load of horse dung. As is the claim that people can't do their own vetting...it's like Dems who promote anti-minority policies because "they're not smart enough to help themselves."
All it requires is a little vigilance and some smarts. For example:
-If someone posts a video without the executive summary, it's either a blogpimp or someone who didn't watch the whole thing on their own
-if it comes from American Thinker or Gateway Pundit, you can be assured it likely lacks basic editing and fact-checking and is suspect/sensational. Washington Examiner is a distant third in this category.
-there is this cool, space-age technology called a "search engine" e.g., Duck-Duck Go. All you need to do is take 5-10 min to do your own fact checking. You'll be surprised at how much you learn and how little you'll wind up trusting certain new media (and old media, too).
Don't outsource your fact-checking to some blogger in his mom's basement who says he's conservative.
The problem is almost EVERY news article written is impossible to vent. The reason because the Government Lies (every agency), Republicans Lie, Democrats are natural born Liars, fact checkers are bias, and last but not least is that the media deliberately slants the news to fit a narrative they prefer with unnamed sources.
How are we supposed to know the truth?
Ah yes. We really DO get caught up in all kinds of fake stories and we look like idiots.
Like a Presidential campaign being spied on by the FBI, DOJ, and intelligence agencies. What a ridiculous conspiracy theory. Who but an idiot right-winger would believe such pap?
Or how about that story about a former General working for a Republican Presidential campaign who was set up, fired from his job as a result, prosecuted and hounded for years on trumped up charges, ruined financially and personally. People actually believed that he was set up!
Wait-wait-how about that guy who worked for the President, who was charged with lying to the FBI, and when it looked like he might slip through their grasp, they had to find a way to shut him up, so they got someone to give him $10,000 in cash (one penny over the limit for not having to declare when bringing it into the country) and had some FBI agents meet him at the airport on his return home from Greece, arresting him in the airport for probable cause (nearly unheard of) and keeping him in prison, only to have to release him because they couldn’t find the money they gave him as part of the set up (he had left it with a lawyer in Greece)
Oh, how about that President who was impeached over quid pro quo charges? Right wingers believe that was all made up.
Never mind all the voting fraud idiocy. This was the most secure election ever.
No! Idiots on the right believe that this crap actually happened!
I have a suggestion-why don’t we tell this a-hole of a writer to go pound sand over a few things we got wrong, while a tsunami of REAL things that actually DID happen and were shouted about by those right-wing lunatics were totally ignored and discounted and are in the process of irretrievably destroying this country.
This pearl-clutching jackass hasn’t got the sense or the guts to stand up to a Leftist who lies about all those things, and folds because someone on the Left told her we swallowed a story that was wrong.
(Nothing against you, Kaslin...you are just posting the article...)
The truth cannot be found in the media or government. Seek places on the Internet for new sources that can be trusted.
The left mission is to control our lives.
See my post above at #8. Sure, we can and should be more discriminating, but that isn’t the battle we should fight.
Exactly!!
If we could get our side to stop ‘reporting’ on tunnels, JFK Jr is alive, and white hats are about to swoop in and frog-march Biden and his cronies to their doom, I’d be happy.
I agree. You can see it here often.
Most of the comments on this article are on to the writer. Check it out!
The right should be more careful about fake news coming from its own side, yes, but not because of concerns over what the left will label it.
100% agree with the above. My inbox is getting flooded with "must see" videos which is a major pet peeve of mine. Just give me a well written article!
It's not even a matter of time with me, I simply don't have the patience to sit through these 45-minute videos, in which it takes 30 minutes or more to get to the point. Typically, the narrator spends the first 10-15 minutes talking about "where we can find" related content and asking us to subscribe to this or to subscribe to that, yadda yadda.
I spent most of my life reading 2-3 newspapers every day and average 5-10 books read every month. I would much rather get the information in printed form.
The entire Democrat Party is living on fake news. Everything in their world is fake!!!
I can say with certainty that China and Iran helped fuel disinformation to both sides, but mostly to conservatives in an effort to discredit them and to instigate violence.
The simple fact that we still have Q followers demonstrates the problem clearly. A source of disinformation can totally discredit itself and still have loyal supporters and followers.
No kidding...I stopped reading comments of any kind on any article years ago because I found them to be a waste of time, like listening to two four year olds arguing “You’re a poopy-head!” “No! You are!”
(I generally don’t see FR the same way, though we do see that in some forms here too)
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