1

Con Games and Propaganda in the ‘Information Age’

For the average individual, life today is lived in a gulf between statistical reality and the never-never land of conjecture.

Just how wide is this gulf of discrepancies? Theodore Roosevelt Malloch answers that question in an article for American Greatness, citing a recent YouGov poll that asked Americans to estimate the numbers in various subgroups of American society. Here are just three of these comparisons:

What percentage of the country is black? The average answer was 41 percent. The actual number is 12 percent. Of course, if you watch television commercials, you would think it’s closer to 90 percent. 

           

What percentage of Americans are transgender? The answer given was 22 percent. The actual number is not even one percent.           

What percentage of your fellow citizens are gay? The answer given was 30 percent. The actual number is just three percent.

Malloch hints at the reason for the gulf between statistical reality and our present never-never land mindset in his answer to the question on the size of the black population: television commercials, or more generally, our entire corporate media and our government. For whatever reasons—genuine ideological fervor, political correctness, or just the desire to ride along on the coattails of a fad—the Hollywood gang, the television news collective, many in our government, and other celebrities and public figures foist off false narratives on the American people every single day of the year.

The front-and-center push of transgenderism provides a perfect example of the media and government acting as trendsetters. If we follow the headlines, we too might reckon that 22 percent of our fellow citizens were undergoing radical surgeries and drug treatments in order to shape themselves into the opposite gender. Our military services, for example, have made a big deal of the issue, welcoming the transgendered into the ranks and promising to pay for the medical procedures of those wishing to change their birth sex.

Other statistics are manipulated, ignored, or abused. Statistical analysis from the Center for Disease Control, for example, shows that in 2020 19,384 Americans were murdered by means of firearms. Giffords, an organization established to fight gun violence, reports CDC statistics showing more than 45,000 men, women, and children died from “gun violence” in this same year. The difference? The statistics from Giffords include suicide by firearm, which the article fails to make clear.

Some commentators and politicos just ditch numbers altogether and drive along on generalities. When’s the last time, for instance, you heard anyone from the president to a member of Congress offer solid proof that climate change is here and is real? Yet many of these same folks are spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on the “green revolution,” demanding that Americans switch to electric cars, ignoring all the while the massive pollution caused by countries like China.

Even worse is the race hatred promoted for political gain. President Joe Biden is an example of this, tweeting on Sept. 22, “White supremacy and all forms of hate-filled violence have no place in America. Failure to call it out is complicity.” Likewise, the military has spent recent years rooting out white supremacists from its ranks, while those in charge of the FBI deem white supremacy a major threat to our nation.

All right, then. Give us some stats. Show us evidence of mass meetings of white supremacists, of mobs of white people rioting in our city streets, torching stores and beating passersby, of whites demanding separate dorms and “safe places” on our college campuses.

It doesn’t take long to realize that white supremacy is a code word, a smear tactic, aimed at supporters of Donald Trump and Republicans. But even that won’t work. Are we to regard the African-Americans who voted for Donald Trump in the last election as white supremacists?

If so, explain please.

The tumult of the last few years has brought a barrage of “misinformation.” Here’s just one small sample. Recently, Georgia Democrat and abortion supporter Stacey Abrams declared that a fetus of six weeks has no heartbeat, that the sound is manufactured so that men can control women’s bodies. “Fact checker” Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post affirmed her position, announcing that the heartbeat is created by the ultrasound.

Obstetricians and other doctors quickly jumped on this deceptive language, pointing out that yes, at six weeks there is a fetal heartbeat.

Here’s the point: It’s high time that all Americans, whatever their politics, regard the federal government and the corporate media as primary sources of misinformation and outright indoctrination in our country.

Consequently, we need to dig out the facts as best we can, try to find out the truth, and then speak those facts and truth with courage.

Image Credit: Pixabay