Like the seasons, another phase of politically-focused dinosaur media elitism not only has brought us Rachel Maddow and MSNBC cutting away from Donald Trump’s speech after his record-setting victory in the Iowa Caucuses, and Harvard “gender studies expert” Naomi Oreskes lamenting wider speech parameters on “X,” it is serving-up the simultaneous spectacle of these blowhards implying that their promotion of censorship is for our own good.
But there might be no more asinine and obnoxious, no more elitist, and down-the-nose offering of this fetid anti-intellectual gruel than that which the junk-food “news” units at The Washington Post served via columnist Philip Bump.
Carrying the head-full-of-shrapnel title, “Doing your own research is a good way to end up being wrong,” the brilliant minds of Mr. Bump and the WaPo editorial staff evidently didn’t grasp the self-defeating nature of the headline and Bump’s brand of ouroboros argumentation.
But it perfectly epitomizes the Aristotelean fallacy they keep promoting. It's “Appeal to authority...and we are the authority; we are the arbiters of truth.”
Writes Bump:
“While confidence in American institutions has been in decline for some time, it’s not hard to imagine how the economic incentives of the internet contribute. There is an outsize appetite for derogatory, counterintuitive or anti-institutional assessments of the world around us.”
Could this be due to experience? Could readers and viewers be seeking alternatives to the old media elites because these elites – like the WaPo – repeatedly have shown themselves to be untrustworthy? Is it, perhaps, because the WaPo and others pushed the malicious canard that Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandman was the aggressor – and possibly racist one, at that – in a 2019 encounter that actually saw Sandman merely stand where he was and suffer through a man approaching him, beating a drum and singing in his face? Is it possible that some of us who were well aware of Anthony Fauci’s lack of candor, of his slippery misuse of his office and unconstitutional activity also were aware that the WaPo waited a year before reporting on what we knew was the truth about US viral research?
The list goes on and on. Take your pick. The Hunter laptop story. The canard of “Russian Disinformation” that the pop media parroted after hearing it from devious mendicants like John Brennan…the Steele Dossier…
Forget Aristotle’s admonition. You and I must be utter dunderheads not to rely on the experts - experts like the pro-censorship globalists at the World Economic Forum, and like our arrogant pal, Bump.
If we look up info ourselves, well, that’s just pernicious and too risky to condone.
“The result is that there is both a supply and a demand for nonsense or appealingly framed errors. Americans who have little trust in the system can easily find something to reinforce their skepticism. They often do.”
Just ask the subscription department at the Washington Post.
Related: WaPo Writer Acknowledges Fauci Gain-of-Function Viral Research Involvement – A YEAR Too Late
At its heart, Bump’s expostulations are the self-defeating narcissism of the collectivist mind, the mind that uses political force and coercion, and belts out lamentations that people are just too stupid to do their own research – that, instead, they must rely on “experts” to do it for them.
But that begs the obvious question which Mr. Bump blindly avoids. It’s the classic Platonic problem of “who watches the watchers?”
If people are too dumb to do their own research, then how can the supposed “researchers” do it, either?
In fact, how can we Troglodytes even know which of those vaunted “experts” and “researchers” is trustworthy? As Bump implies, we shouldn’t do our own research, so we also cannot research which researchers are trustworthy and – well, you figure it out.
Better yet, don’t.
That’s his point. Don’t figure out anything. Do as you are told to do by Bump and by people he likes.
Get it?
The man’s childishness is almost unbelievable.
Related: Nick Sandman on Media 'War Machine': 'I Would Not Be Canceled. I Fought Back...'
Yet, it is so in-line with the collectivist approach to "the science" on COVID, jabs, Climate fearmongering, the economy, and virtually everything else they massage and manipulate that, during these desperate days when people like the editor of the Wall Street Journal lament that they no longer have a lock on people’s trust, it's not surprising that he and the WaPo would tell us it’s just too dangerous not to trust them and their dusty, propagandistic ilk.
They know what's best for us to know.
So, don't do you own research... even though that puts into question how "THEY" can know anything, in their glorious world of authoritarianism.
Just trust them, as they raise their proverbial media fists to deliver more propagandistic blows against fundamental truth, your integrity, and human dignity.