Facebook and Fake News: The New Inquisition

by Michael Hoffmanwwww.RevisionistHistory.org"Facebook says it is testing technology so that a story shared on its site that is flagged by users, among unknown other indicators, will be checked out by the Associated Press, ABC News, PolitiFact or others. If these high priests declare a story fake, it will be denoted as 'Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers' and perhaps demoted in a news feed. Behind this is the conceit that political debates could be settled if ‘ideologues' (Republicans) would only accept what the liberal consensus defines as 'facts.” (Wall Street Journal).The New York Times reported during the campaign that Hillary’s Vice Presidential running mate, Tim Kaine, was a devout Catholic, ignoring the glaring fact that he supports abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy in complete contempt of his Church’s dogmatic teaching. Fake News. The Washington Post reported about two weeks before Nov. 8 that Trump’s chances of being elected were near zero. Fake News.There are dozens of additional examples. The “Russian hacking hijacked the election" conspiracy theory has snowballed into enormous proportions based on hearsay from Obama on down; not one substantive fact has been produced in support of this fake news which has been decreed as unassailable fact.Meanwhile, Wikileaks' Julian Assange told Fox News that his organization did not obtain Podesta’s e-mails from Russia. Assange’s statement was mostly suppressed by the liberal media. Fake news is maintained as much by omission as commission. The suddenly respectable CIA (now termed by the cozy descriptive, “the intelligence community”), which has sought "regime change" in Russia and Syria and achieved it in Ukraine with the overthrow of the elected government, is not neutral. It has a partisan interest in bringing Putin down and delegitimating Trump’s presidency. Hillary was the CIA's choice for Commander-in-chief and a costly and reckless new cold war with the Russians was the objective.Let’s grasp the epistemology of the “liberal” media’s Brahmin class: it is the same as that of the Inquisition. The latter body ruled that “error has no rights.” Our country was founded on the principle that error does indeed have rights. Why? Because of the question that inevitably follows upon the supposition: who decides what is error? Once the alleged “deciders” establish their opinions and prejudices as fact, tyranny over the mind begins to arise.  Mainstream media like Facebook are imposing a new inquisition in the name of liberal values. The hypocrisy stinks.COPYRIGHT ©MICHAEL HOFFMANDistributed by U-the-Reader