One of the most powerful and corrupt players in American politics is spreading a sensational lie to manipulate voters four days before the final day of voting in the 2024 presidential election. The lie is that Donald Trump threatened to execute dynastic war hawk Liz Cheney by firing squad, and the culprit is America’s propaganda press.
Anyone who watches the clip of what Trump said will discern that he was obviously suggesting Cheney pick up a rifle and join the thousands of young Americans she’s sent overseas to fight in forever wars. Anyone who interprets it differently is either lying or so stupid he should take a lifelong vow of silence starting today.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Cheney on Thursday night. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee … let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Cheney, beside herself at the thought of having to do what she asks young American men and women to do, ripped the first half of Trump’s comment from its context and claimed Trump had “threaten[ed]” her “with death.”
The corporate media didn’t issue one of their infamous “fact” “checks” or call Cheney out for her disinformation. They quickly joined in on the lie that Trump had “fantasized” about putting Cheney in front of a firing squad.
What happened to Democrats’ concerns about disinformation being a threat to democracy? Aren’t they worried that these lies will reach low-information voters, and that those voters will vote based on a false info operation?
The official definition of “disinformation” that has been used to systematically silence true and constitutionally protected speech is false information “deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.” This Cheney hoax is textbook, well, that.
By the media’s standards, every story spreading the hoax should be nuked from the internet, and every outlet publishing those stories should be banned from Big Tech platforms and Google searches, demonetized, and probably sued into oblivion for good measure.
Disinformation does pose a real threat to American self-governance. But it’s not the “disinformation” that gets “fact-checked” by media gatekeepers, like the (true) Hunter Biden laptop story or the (true) reporting that Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines were ineffective. It’s the deliberate fake news that gets projectile-vomited at the country every day by propagandists who exist only to peddle the favored narratives of establishment swamp residents like Liz Cheney. It’s lies like the Russia-collusion hoax, or the “suckers and losers” hoax, or the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, or the lie that the sitting president of the United States isn’t an Alzheimer’s patient, or the “Trump is a Nazi who hates soldiers” hoax The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg spread last week. These deliberate deceits, spread by news media monopolies and aided by government and intelligence actors, do demonstrable damage to the country.
For that matter, the solution isn’t censorship by Big Tech and its government informers; the solution is for Americans to simply quit trusting the propaganda press. It’s actually possible to fight disinformation without trampling on the First Amendment! All you have to do is reject the narratives that media mouthpieces want you to imbibe uncritically. If you stop believing them, they lose their power.
The corporate media are well aware that their credibility is so eroded they might collapse completely as an institution by the time this election is over. As an anonymous TV executive expressed to New York Magazine earlier this week, “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”
Unlike Liz Cheney, the media-industrial complex is in danger.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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