“Debunked” this and “false” that – and “deniers”
No doubt all you news junkies have noticed that the MSM has taken to putting modifiers such as “debunked” and “false” in front of any statement they don’t like. It’s so commonplace it’s become a sort of bitter joke on the right, like “Republicans pounce!” when the Democrats mess up and the right criticizes them.
Yesterday we were having a discussion about what to call the “false and debunked” method of characterizing such things. I suggested “the begging-the-question voice” – meaning this:
Begging the question is when you use the point you’re trying to prove as an argument to prove that very same point. Rather than proving the conclusion is true, it assumes it.
But that doesn’t seem quite right to me – not that it matters, because the people who do it couldn’t care less what I call it. It’s also a sort of proof by repetition, the idea that if the left and the press repeat something often enough a great many people will absorb it as truth. Another example, of course, is the assertion that Trump is a corrupt puppet of Russia, although the left’s attempt to introduce evidence to back that up really was faked, and later debunked. The repetition of the original falsehood worked, though, and it’s my impression that there are few Democrats who have given up the idea that it was true and remains true.
Commenter Ray Van Dune suggested “the derogatory voice” to describe these descriptive methods, and added, “For myself, I see it as a convenient signal that I am being coached or bullied into believing something that someone wants to make sure I know is not open to question!” Commenter MollyG thought perhaps the “gaslighting mood” would do.
And today commenter Sarah Rolph writes:
The practice of inserting opinion into a news story is known as “editorializing.”
It used to be considered a huge mistake, so it’s strange for us oldsters to see it becoming so common.
It certainly is a form of editorializing, but it differs in that it masquerades as a hard cold fact. “Debunked” doesn’t mean “I don’t believe it” – and in fact it’s an open question as to whether those making the “election fraud in 2020 has been totally debunked” claim believe what they are saying or just don’t care or actively would support election fraud by Democrats if it had occurred because it was all in the worthy cause of getting rid of Trump. The “debunked” claim about election fraud claims to be relying on absolute empirical knowledge when of course the way the election was designed there is no way to know for sure, and the court cases that dealt with it simply decreed that lack of standing and then later laches barred any real inquiry into the question, or that it simply was unanswerable.
So it’s not editorializing in a supposedly factual piece, it’s more than that and worse than that. And it works, whatever you call it.
In the very same vein but slightly different, the new phrase to describe those who would question the sanctity of the most non-fraudulent election that ever was, that of 2020, is “election denier.” Suddenly, nearly two years later, it’s everywhere.
I guess they’re like Holocaust deniers, only worse.
Here’s a good example. It’s an article purporting to discuss the results of primaries, but there’s a great deal of identification of “election deniers” – which is kind of funny, considering it’s a report on how these people did in an actual election, the GOP primaries for 2022.
If you scroll down at that link, there’s even a chart titled: “How election deniers are doing tonight.” The subtitle is: “Senate, House, gubernatorial, attorney general and secretary of state candidates who have either denied or questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and their results in Republican primaries in Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont and Wisconsin, as of 11:06 p.m. Eastern.”
It continued with the Wyoming and Alaska primaries, too. At another site (can’t remember where) I saw not only the phrase “election deniers” for the right but also “pro-democracy” for the left. The free, fair, perfect 2020 election has become a Truth that cannot be challenged without heretical apostasy, and in contrast its defenders are holding up the pillars of democracy itself. But of course, if fraud was indeed committed by the Democrats in 2020, then this nomenclature becomes especially Orwellian.
The reason that, from the very start, fraud allegations were invariably labeled by the MSM as “debunked” or “false” is that the canon had to be established firmly. Then it was only necessary to repeat and repeat and repeat till it became reified in many people’s minds. The “deniers” label is icing on the cake, and it will be used right up until Election Day 2022 and probably beyond.
More and more I see comments that Republicans are for “ defunding the police” and that Democrats never supported “ defunding the police”. The former comment is using Republican calls to defund or break up the FBI as evidence. Yesterday, I saw a comment on the subject where a person asked if there was even 50 people in BLM? So, part of the “ we never called for defunding the police” argument, I suppose.
Then there is the moving goal post on what the vaccines were claimed to do. There is now the idea being put forward that nobody claimed that the vaccines would prevent infection.
A few minutes ago, I saw someone claim that Governor Whitmer never shut down Michigan during COVID.
1984, indeed.
There’s also the group of heretics known as “climate deniers.”
“well, everybody knows . . . “
They have been saying that for years; but, yea, I’ve noticed the “debunked” this and “false” that a lot more lately.
The word that irks me, which the MSM uses all the time to describe claims of election fraud, is “baseless.” That word denies that there were any unusual occurrences during the election. It also overlooks all the statistical evidence of such irregularities. That the courts would not get involved in spite of sworn depositions from eyewitnesses, is quite inexplicable to me, but provided the left with a meme – no evidence of fraud. See, the courts found no evidence. It was a completely fair and free election. 🙁
So many of these adjectives and phrases that the left use are focus group tested. And you know they are being sent out from the Democrat political handlers to be used by the pols and MSM. Repeated and repeated, they soon become the TRUTH and anyone who isn’t on board is a DENIER. It’s a strategy that has worked very well. And they’ve been using it since the Clinton days. The GOP would do well to learn to use this technique. Fight fire with fire.
It’s very prevalent and not just among the gullible and uninformed but among highly intelligent people as well. Jordan Peterson claimed in a recent video on youtube that there were many court cases where the evidence in support of a fraudulent 2020 election was debunked. My jaw dropped in amazement that he wasn’t aware that none of the evidence was ever allowed to be presented in a US Federal court.
For many years the Left claimed there was no evidence of election cheating.
Then instapundit and others started listing occurrences.
1) there were some, plenty in fact
2) authorities weren’t even actively looking
Perhaps Eric Holder’s action after this incident led to the issue going to a whole new level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_intimidation_case
I think Liz Cheney repeated the term “deniers” about 10 times in her carefully scripted interview with Savanah Guthrie on the Today Show. I could tell that the talking points memo had gone out. Election Denier joins Climate Change Denier and Covid Denier as a way to discredit anyone with an opposing view. And it works because it causes the brains of people who don’t see the pattern to lump dissenters in with Holocaust Deniers.
Another modifier I’ve noticed the left using when talking about the events on January 6th is the word “deadly”, as in “the deadly insurrection”. This in spite of the fact the only deaths at the capital that day were at the hands of the Capital Police- an unarmed woman shot to death by a capital police officer, and another one filmed being beaten by another capital police officer.
@ Gothamite > “And it works because it causes the brains of people who don’t see the pattern to lump dissenters in with Holocaust Deniers.”
The most ironic part is that the Democrat Left is hand-in-glove with the Iranian mullahs (which is which?), who genuinely ARE Holocaust deniers, when they aren’t celebrating it, depending on the propaganda needs of the moment.
From the people who ought to know:
https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-kits/press-guide-to-holocaust-denial-in-iran
What’s ignored in all of this is that Democrats played an “election denier” role with regard to the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections, as well as the 2018 Kemp-Abrams race in Georgia.
“Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960” by Irwin Gellman includes an analysis of the Illinois and Texas returns that suggests that the results weren’t entirely legitimate that year. Maybe around 2080, somebody will do that for the 2020 election.
I’m old enough to remember when a small ad buy by a foreign government was enough to sway millions of American voters that never saw the ads and steal an election from Hillary Clinton.
They pretend otherwise
https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/18/top-cheney-lieutenant-on-j6-committee-seeks-to-sabotage-gop-chances-in-missouri-with-independent-senate-run/
The free, fair, perfect 2020 election has become a Truth that cannot be challenged without heretical apostasy, and in contrast its defenders are holding up the pillars of democracy itself.
“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is constant in all aspects of the narrative. It is considered established liberal fact that:
— cops roam the streets looking to gun down blacks, Trayvon and Michael Brown were victims, hands up don’t shoot.
— global warming is established incontrovertible science. Renewables are known to work and the world will have more and better access to energy at a cheaper cost if only we would commit to them.
— women don’t lie about rape or sexual assault (or anything else), they are discriminated against relentlessly by the patriarchy, the gender pay gap is fact and without Title IX no woman would ever have had a chance to participate in athletics. Men are toxic.
— blacks are too stupid to get a voter ID which proves Republicans are racist; blacks are discriminated against so much and so often that it is impossible for a black to succeed without liberal help.
— Republicans are racist, fascist, sexist, white supremacist, Nazis who want to spoil the environment, starve kids and kill seniors.
— the 2020 election was honest
— Covid measures were all scientifically and medically sound. Any questioning of any statements, policies or mandates by authorities regarding covid should be forbidden. There wasn’t enough censorship.
— the only way to support children is to support universal head start.
— socialism is fantastic and will surely succeed the next time it is tried
— national health care in Europe works better and cheaper than US healthcare
— higher minimum wage creates jobs, massive government spending creates economic growth without inflation, and generous unemployment benefits do not cause people to wait longer before looking for work
— Antifa does not exist. Also, it is made up of wonderful people who only want to stop fascists.
— Hillary and Bill and Hunter and Joe have never been convicted of any crimes and thus are completely innocent of any wrongdoing ever.
I always like to point out that rigging an election isn’t just fraudulent votes but the use of propaganda, censorship, threats and use of political violence, and changing of electoral law often illegally to get people to vote “the right way.” All of that absolutely happened in 2020 and I know this because the people that did it to help defeat Trump openly admit they did it.
I agree that the GOP should take back the language from the Dems:
*Call them Democrats, left-wingers or the left, not “liberals.”
*Republican, not “Red” states. “Reds” are communists, socialists, the left.
*Don’t “google”, something, do a web search. Don’t feed the fascist, election-meddling Google crocodile.
I would suggest using “retcon” as the operative word to describe what the left is doing. They are reframing the past to serve the current need.
Retcons are particularly used in comic books to “adjust” previously established canon to help the current writer tell the story. But of course it goes back at least to the Egyptians who would remove and deface any sign of the previous pharaos to remove them from history.
Saying X is debunked is thus an attempt to impose a new established truth where none in fact exists.
This started a while ago when millennial journalism majors whined about having to do “both-sidesim” in their stories. Meanwhile their boomer professors and administrators rolled over and showed their bellies to them. “Oooh! Your generation is so huge! Just like our generation! You’re going to change the world! We won’t impose any standards in your learning.”
Nice Article. Now I need to go back to bed to get rid of my headache. Look I’ll make it easy for you.
The left lies when it is trying to sell its policies.
The left lies when it is trying to destroy the Right’s policies.
In other words the Left (and their media/academic butt dogs) LIE.
Jordan Rivers: I don’t mind the “red” applied to Republicans. I actually think it’s funny that 1) the US does it completely backwards–take THAT world!!—and 2) the origin of the confusing red/blue comes down to Nancy Reagan, sitting in the White House, watching the one of the three main US networks that used red for Republicans the year Reagan got reelected, and deciding she really liked red.
Lots of good examples in the comments. I do like the term “retconning” to describe how they adjust the narrative. But we need better answers to their nonsense. So let’s see some suggestions for how to reply when the lefties use their ‘debunked’ nonsense. Hopefully we can think of some creative responses, dripping with mockery.
Welp, it worked for Hitler.
Ann re: red,
The networks used to alternate red/blue every presidential election.
All the “debunked” and “denier” labeling we now see on issue after issue, is enabled by a basic fallacy that is accepted by millions of our neighbors.
“A consensus of authority around a narrative, equals conclusive proof of the truth of that narrative.”
That fallacy combines the worst attributes of elitist hubris and mob rule.
But one reason that is accepted, is because we have been led to sell our own insights and common sense short … as inherently inferior to our society’s Pedestaled Elite. People have been led away from even asking simple questions to determine if what they say makes sense … and have been led away from valuing the individual liberty that would render that consensus irrelevant to our own lives.
Such questioning is instead seen as high risk, compared to going with the flow of the consensus … but that consensus is no guarantee of the truth.
For anyone else who was unsure of the neologism used by Soren:
“Retcon is a shortened form of retroactive continuity, and refers to a literary device in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.”
As for myself, having grown up with a lot of the Golden Age DC comics (my uncle never threw his away), and most of the then-avant-garde upstart Marvel canon, I detest the cowardly practice of retconning all of the origin stories, past histories, biographies, and even physical characteristics of the originals.
If you don’t like our super-heroes, get your own.
A great persuasion response to the debunked / elections are clean as the driven snow crowd would be to note that happily (/sarc), in a world where every single thing governments do is corrupt, elections in all 51+ jurisdictions (states + DC – there are more, but play along for at little while) are clean as the driven snow. Use it early and often. Cheers –