Posted on March
31, 2022
Senseless Consensus
Truth is not up for a vote
by
Daniel
Clark
The front page of the March 18 New York Post called
out the 51 government intelligence officials who had signed onto a statement
attributing the discovery of Hunter Biden's laptop to "a smoke bomb of
disinformation pushed by Russia." This
letter, issued two weeks before the 2020 election, gave the liberal media
exactly the excuse they were looking for to bury the story, thereby shielding
Joe Biden from very credible accusations of influence peddling, a conspiracy of
silence that undoubtedly helped him become president.
In
a remarkable concession that should have nullified the whole document in the
mind of any good journalist, the signatories added, "We want to emphasize that
we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President
Trump's personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do
not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us
deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this
case." So they had suspicions, but no
facts. That has become standard operating
procedure, for as we all know by now, you don't need facts when you've got
consensus.
Take "climate change," for instance. Al Gore told us in An Inconvenient Truth
that increases in atmospheric CO2 levels cause the earth's temperature to rise,
whereas the ice cores he referenced say the exact opposite, that it is
increases in the temperature of the earth that precede rising atmospheric CO2
levels. Those who point this out, among
the many other inconsistencies in the "climate change" hypothesis, stand accused
of violating "the scientific consensus."
Specifically, we're presented with the completely unsupportable
statistic that 97 percent of "climate scientists" believe in manmade global
warming. From this, we are to presume
that the remaining three percent are wrong, based not on the facts, but only on
there being so few of them. Besides,
you're simply not supposed to question Al Gore.
He's thuper thmart,
you know.
The former veep tells us
that the debate is over, because the consensus has spoken. Even now that decades' worth of doomsday
predictions have proven false, one must not question the experts who made
them. News reports on the subject show
no journalistic skepticism about whether the earth is threatened by mundane
human activity, but instead only ask what to do about it, including whether we
need to eat insects in order to reverse the trend. One might as well discuss what size umbrella
is needed to shield oneself from dragon droppings.
"What we know now about Iraq" is that Saddam Hussein
had no weapons of mass destruction.
Really? In addition to finding
hundreds of chemical munitions, we recovered an extensive paper trail detailing
his chemical weapons program. We found
large quantities of the chemicals that are combined to produce sarin. We found binary warheads specifically
designed to blend those chemicals into sarin while in flight. We found missiles capable of delivering those
warheads. The Duelfer
Report includes a section revealing Saddam's clandestine network of mobile
chemical laboratories. UNMOVIC gave a
presentation to the UN Security Council demonstrating that he kept dual-use
equipment at missile sites, and that these sites were quickly dismantled at the
onset of the invasion. One of Saddam's
secret recordings features his son-in-law, who headed his WMD programs,
bragging that, "We did not reveal all that we have. Not the type of weapons, not the volume of
the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about,
not the volume of use. None of this was
correct. They don't know any of this."
All
of that amounts to nothing, because there is a consensus that is determined
never to acknowledge it. Early on, UN
weapons inspector Hans Blix unilaterally changed his mission, from holding
Saddam accountable for material breaches of the terms of the 1991 cease fire,
to searching for something called a "smoking gun," an undefined entity whose
existence or nonexistence was purely up to his own subjective
determination. Liberal talking heads
immediately translated "no smoking gun" into "no weapons of mass destruction,"
a conclusion that is easily, factually refuted.
No serious person could possibly believe that there were no chemical
weapons in Iraq, and yet it has become "what we know."
A cynic might observe from these three examples that
perception is reality, insofar as once a narrative that is based on a lie
becomes accepted, the effect is no different than if it were true. Notice that the initial New York Post
report is only taken to be true now that The New York Times has
affirmed it. That's because most other
media are derivative of the Times, making it the leader of the
consensus.
Those who control most of the media don't always win,
however. If thy did, they would never
have seen the need to rebrand "global warming" as "climate change." They wouldn't have to hire weaselly linguists
to come up with a new euphemism for abortion every few years. Nobody would fondly remember Ronald Reagan
today, because their relentless campaign of slander would have succeeded in
defining him. Saying something louder
and more often than the opposition is not a foolproof plan for victory.
The most effective weapon against them is the moral
authority that comes from being on the side of truth. That means the people on our side need to be
willing to tell the truth, even when it is not immediately advantageous. It is important to recognize, for example,
that there never was any plan to make Mexico pay for a border wall. There was no secret rule or cherished
tradition that relieved Senate Republicans of their constitutional duty to vote
on Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination.
The Arizona election audit conducted by Cyber Ninjas was not a sincere
effort to root out voter fraud. It
should come as no surprise that those who supported the alternative, truth-free
narratives about these issues were not treated as credible when it came to Hunter
Biden's laptop.
Let the liberals be the ones to make the case that
consensus nullifies reality. Let them
claim that all things are subjective, by huffily declaring "my truth" at every
opportunity. Let them argue that two
plus two can equal five, that the United States was founded in 1619, and that a
man is a woman just as long as he says he is.
If we are going to join them in assuming the power to create our own
truths, then what conclusion are onlookers to draw, but that the majority truth
must be the one to prevail?
In fact, objective truth exists even when it is very unpopular. Not long ago, it was the consensus on each
side of the aisle that massive amounts of frivolous deficit spending had no
detrimental effect. Several trillions of
dollars later, our federal spending has become a major contributor to runaway
inflation. The consensus across the
political spectrum that had denied this is now powerless to make it untrue. It turns out that the truth cannot be voted
down after all, nor can it be petitioned out of existence by a group of 51 experts.
The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press