Believing lies and helping spread them; or, What it means to be liberal

Liberals love being lied to. They enjoy being manipulated and played like puppets by the mainstream media, race-baiters and the leadership in the Democrat party. Liberals will not look beyond the surface so long as the talking points are coming from sources they admire and, if they happen to come across conflicting information, it is in their prerogative to dismiss such things in order to pledge blind allegiance to their masters and continue to regurgitate the original narrative force-fed to them from on high.

That’s a powerful accusation to level on a segment of the population. But where is the proof? How can I make such a claim? Where is my justification?

I could run through a litany of events that have occurred within the last six years of Democrat reign (having had a super majority in the Senate for the first two years of the inaugural term of President Obama, a simple majority in the Senate the following four and a majority in the House from 2006 until the 2010 midterms), but that may cause such a partisan turning up of the nose that anyone who proudly wears the label, or lives in suspicion they do, of liberal, may not bother to continue reading.

To illustrate my point, I will turn to an item that occurred just a few months ago during the run-up to the 2014 midterms. A group called the New Georgia Project worked with the NAACP to register “voters of color” and other minorities in and around the city of Atlanta. This included Democrat strongholds of Fulton, Dekalb and Clayton counties. They helped collect 80,000 new voter registrations in a state that many hoped would turn blue, thanks to Michelle Nunn (running on her Daddy’s name and reputation) and Jason Carter (running on his granddaddy’s name and, well…his name) running to take a seat in the US Senate and the Georgia Governorship, respectively.

A couple weeks before the elections, the group brought a lawsuit on the Secretary of State’s office and the state of Georgia, decrying that more than half of the registrations were not being processed or were being held up by election officials with a political agenda. “We are concerned, given the speed of the election, that if we don’t resolve this quickly and through legal means, that these will be 40,000-plus disenfranchised voters in the state of Georgia,” said State Rep. Stacey Abrams (D-Atlanta), who heads the New Georgia Project.

Without waiting for the investigation to conclude (or stopping to look for facts), the willing accomplices of misinformation and propaganda splashed their headlines all over social media and print news, stating that Georgia was refusing to process between 40,000 and 50,000 new voter applications. The Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, ThinkProgress.org, NPR, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times were some of the biggest hitters and their headlines were shared across the whole of social media.

Look! They cried. See how Republicans are cheating the voters? They refuse to process over 40,000 brand new voters because that’s the only way they know how to win. This is a clear case of voter disenfranchisement.

It didn’t matter if there was any validity to the claims. Most low-information voters don’t bother to look past the headline or the 10 second sound bite. All that mattered was the sources for liberal ideology had used the appropriate key words and phrases. Conclusions were reached and there was never a moment’s pause to question further. And the mindless Leninites went about their merry way, parroting the message over and over like the useful idiots the purveyors of propaganda rely on them to do. “Georgia won’t process over 40,000 new voter applications! Voter disenfranchisement in areas made up predominantly of people of color.”

And so the lie was already halfway around the world before the truth had time to get out of bed.

Why do I say it was a lie? In less than 10 minutes, I was able to pull up the findings of an internal investigation that had begun the moment the lawsuit had been filed and the allegations made. Of the “over 40,000 registrations” that the New Georgia Project and the NAACP said were not being processed, a little more than 39,000 were already on the voter roles; 513 were found to be dead; over 1,600 had felony arrest records, which made them ineligible to vote; almost 2,200 had an invalid or out-of-state zip code; and, over 2,100 had no valid birth year listed. And, the cherry on top of this investigation? 9,900 applications were in a pending status because the applications were incomplete and each of those 9,900 had been notified by letter to finish their forms through their county election office.

To summarize:

• 39,276 are active voters
• 513 are deceased
• 1,637 have felony record, so they can’t vote
• 2,195 had an invalid or out-of-state zip code
• 2,124 had no valid year of birth
• 9,900 pending due to incomplete form

Total = 55,645

Within days, a judge, who looked at the same information I’ve just presented to you, threw out the case without batting an eye. All of the other new voter applications were processed through each county’s elections office. There was no disenfranchisement. There was no attempt to prevent newly registered voters from getting to the polls. There was no story.

But, it didn’t matter. The lie had ginned up the emotions of the faithful and the headlines were written and shared and tweeted and liked all around the country. Was there ever a retraction from any of the entities that were quick to post their false and misleading stories? Did anyone make a point of fixing their egregious mistake on social media? Was there any attempt to right the wrong?

No.

The vast majority of liberals who had read the headlines had already made up their minds and regardless of the facts, were set to run with it, content to let their strings be pulled like good marionettes. The wording of those headlines met the liberal narrative: Republicans cheat, Republicans don’t like anyone “of color,” Republicans only want rich, white people in charge. And even after all of the facts were placed in front of them, it didn’t matter. They were content to dismiss anything that ran contrary to the narrative.

It is a willful act of choosing to ignore the truth (or the parts they don’t like) and knowingly repeat the lie for as long as it takes. It is an exercise in wanton ignorance. It is what defines the low-information voter and is what Ministers of Propaganda in every oppressive regime throughout history rely upon to suppress freedom and subjugate the masses.

And, because it is a conscious, willful act, one must conclude that liberals love being lied to. They love to be manipulated by half-truths and outright fabrications. They like to be misled. They yearn to be used, spreading those very same lies themselves. It is an active display of groupthink, where the capacity for self-thought and cognitive discernment by the individual is lost, supplanting the desire to question and discover facts for themselves. It’s how the ruling class can get away with flouting the Constitution. It’s how facts can be ignored, hidden, Photoshopped or edited and it is accepted without hesitation. It’s how mobs form. It’s how looting takes place. It’s how the destruction of lives and property becomes justifiable.

It’s how a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth even gets out of bed.

This is how something like the Fast and Furious scandal can go under the radar for years. Or the IRS targeting scandal can hide behind the help of the mainstream media. Or how President Obama can ignore the Constitution with his many executive orders and it’s sold to Americans as commonplace. Or how tapping phones and hacking the computers of reporters who are reporting on the activities within the Administration is allowed to take place. Or how a dozen other scandals have been allowed to occur in rampant fashion.

And it’s how something like Ferguson can happen.