April Fools Day Hoax Roundup

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Does it seem to you that there have been a lot of big-time hoaxes lately? In late February the most widely-publicized alleged “hate crime” in years — the Jussie Smollett caper — was revealed as a hoax; and then just a few weeks after that the Mueller Report was completed, and it turned out that the single most intensely covered news event of my entire lifetime — the “Trump/Russia collusion” story — was also a hoax.

These were not minor or insignificant hoaxes. Both were a huge focus of mainstream press and media coverage and commentary, in the first case for several weeks, and in the second for over two years. Both fed the dominant media narrative of opposition to President Trump and hatred of him and his supporters. Both hoaxes were accepted uncritically and without a hint of skepticism by essentially all of the progressive press and media, who repeated and amplified them at great extent right up until they suddenly unraveled.

But with the extreme focus on these two hoaxes, perhaps you are losing track of the fact that these are just two of some dozens of similar hoaxes perpetrated by the same press and media players in recent years. Today, in honor of April Fools Day, the Manhattan Contrarian performs the public service of reminding you of the extent to which you are subject to a constant barrage of hoaxes originating from the mainstream press, media (including social media), and often also the government; hoaxes that are then endlessly repeated and amplified, all in the service of increased political power for the left.

Hate Crime Hoaxes

If you search the recesses of your memory, you will likely be able to come up with at least a few prior hate crime hoaxes that got big media play before the truth came out. One of the biggest was the University of Virginia fraternity gang rape hoax of 2014, originally perpetrated upon the world by Rolling Stone magazine. Going back several more years, there was the Duke lacrosse team gang rape hoax of 2006. If you follow this issue, you may also remember some others, . . .

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The Russia Hoax: Should We All Now Just Move On?

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A week ago today, the issuance of the Mueller Report finally popped the long-inflating bubble of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax. After thousands of excited and breathless press reports and cable news segments over two-plus years (“new bombshell,” “the walls are closing in,” “impeachment,” etc.), it turned out that there was nothing there. So is there any point in wasting any more time on this? Why don’t we all just move on?

You won’t be surprised that many voices in the media are already advocating for that. At the New York Times, they had barely made it to Tuesday when the lead front page article, headlined “Trump, Citing ‘Evil Deeds,’ Turns Wrath on His Critics,” started pushing for Trump to “drop the subject,” citing the precedents of Reagan and Clinton:

[Trump’s] approach [of seeking retribution against his critics], if it lasts, contrasts with those of other presidents who survived major scandals. After the Iran-contra affair, President Ronald Reagan happily dropped the subject and focused on arms control talks with the Soviet Union and other issues. After being acquitted at his Senate impeachment trial, President Bill Clinton was just as eager to move on to Social Security and other initiatives.

Less expected, perhaps, was the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the same day from long-time G.W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, with the headline “Move On From Robert Mueller, Mr. President.” That article’s gist was captured in its sub-headline, “Obsessing over the investigation’s origins isn’t the way to win over swing voters.” Rove urges Trump to switch his attention to focusing on a positive message, including the strong economy.

I’m not here to advise the President on how to conduct his messaging or his campaign. But I do think that it is of great importance not to let the perpetrators of the Russia hoax — both media and deep state actors — off the hook. It’s not just that the respective Reagan and Clinton controversies are not remotely relevant. (Both Reagan in Iran-Contra and Clinton in the Lewinski matter had been caught in actual wrongdoing. You might think the wrongdoing was trivial in either instance or both, but wrongdoing it was. Of course those two were only too happy to move on.) More important is that getting out the positive message of more freedom and less government and less government dependency — whether by the President or anyone else — is critically dependent on maximally discrediting and sidelining these hoaxers. . . .

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The Mueller Report: A Few Reasonable Inferences

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It’s only a few days since the Mueller Report has been issued, and we still know very little about it — basically only what has been set forth in the four-page summary letter sent to Congress by AG William Barr on Sunday. The key lines in the Barr letter are on pages 2 and 4, both quoting from the Mueller Report itself:

Page 2: “‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.’”

Page 4: “‘[T]he evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.’”

That may not seem like a lot. But as little as it is, there are some obvious inferences to be drawn — inferences which are extremely damning to the FBI, the Justice Department, the media, and most important, to the prior administration of Barack Obama and to Obama himself. . . .

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The Five Dumbest Things In The New York Times Coverage Of The Issuance Of The Mueller Report

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The Mueller Report has been issued. At this moment, no one has actually yet seen it, other than a few top guys at the Justice Department — Barr, Rosenstein, maybe a handful of others. Nobody knows what’s in it, except for one thing: according to a “top Justice Department official” (probably Barr or Rosenstein), there are going to be no more indictments, whether relating to Russian “collusion” or anything else. Oh, wait a minute. Before today, there also had been zero indictments for anything having to do with “collusion” with the Russians by Trump or his campaign. So that one little thing that we know means that, after almost two years of investigation by Mueller and his team, and after another year plus of investigation by the FBI before that, the vast and awesome armies of our Justice apparatus have found exactly nothing in the way of criminal “collusion” between Trump or his campaign and the Russians.

Now of course, the New York Times cannot just pretend that this issuance of this Report is not happening. They have to cover it, and in a big way. (Same with the Washington Post. But, since I don’t get the Washington Post, I’ll have to let you read about their shame at other sites, for example at PowerLine.). Trying to live up to their readers’ expectations, the Times fills up oodles of space with “coverage” — about two-thirds of page A1 (three news articles), all of pages A14, A15, A16 and A17, the only unsigned editorial of the day on page A24, and an op-ed on page A25 by one Caroline Fredrickson (President of the American Constitution Society).

But what are we going to say? I mean, we are supposedly the most credible among credible mainstream media sources and we have now spent well over two years hyping this Russian “collusion” thing in dozens of pieces in an obvious attempt to damage if not bring down the President. And now it comes to nothing? Everything we’ve said about this for two plus years has been wrong? What are we going to say???? . . .

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On The "Cost" Of The Green New Deal

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A few weeks ago on February 7 and 8, I had a couple of posts (here and here) commenting on the so-called Green New Deal, which had just been dropped on Congress by the team of Socialist it-girl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and long-time Massachusetts Congressman and now Senator Edward Markey. In those posts, I did not attempt to put any “cost” figures on these proposals, but rather offered this general reaction:

In short, in the aggregate, this would be the total takeover of all economic activity in the United States.

According to the FAQ released along with the GND resolution, at least the following Democratic candidates for President support the GND: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee.

In the interim, a few intrepid souls have gone where I had not, and have put some fairly specific cost estimates on the socialists’ proposals. Most notably, there is something called the American Action Forum, headed by Douglas Holtz-Eakin. On February 25, AAF came out with a Research Report titled “The Green New Deal: Scope, Scale, and Implications,” with Holtz-Eakin as the lead author. Holtz-Eakin is not nobody in this game, having headed the CBO for about three years (2003-05) during the George W. Bush administration. If there’s anybody who ought to be able to put credible cost figures on proposals for new government programs, it would be a former head of CBO. The fact that CBO is a non-partisan operation would also seem to give an added level of credibility to the conclusions of its former leaders.

After introducing their Report with a series of qualifiers (e.g., many of the changes “are impossible to quantify at this point”), the AAF guys nonetheless forge ahead with the exercise to at least put some broad ranges on the potential costs. In the aggregate the sums of the lows and highs of their ranges come to about $51 trillion to $93 trillion over the course of the 10 year span of the GND. The $93 trillion figure is the one most frequently attributed to the Report in subsequent press accounts.

$93 trillion compares to total U.S. GDP currently running at about $20 trillion per year. In other words, if you think that Holtz-Eakin and AAF are right, or even close to right, then they are saying that the GND will “cost” close to half of the entire U.S. GDP over the next decade or so. . . .

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More Flagrant Alteration Of The Past: Patrick Moore As Founder Of Greenpeace

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By far the most-read posts on this site are the ones in my now twenty-two part series The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time. The specific subject of that series is the alteration by government bureaucrats of historical temperature data in the ongoing campaign to convince the public that there is dangerous global warming going on. At this point, the showing that earlier-year temperatures have been materially altered downward is completely definitive, made by simple comparison of currently-published official data to previously-published official data that can still be found online. Yet the bureaucrats at NOAA and NASA continue to disseminate the altered data, and even to make further ongoing “adjustments” to make the past appear to have been even cooler. And every time a NOAA or a NASA puts out a new breathless press release about the current year or month being the “hottest ever,” you can count on a dozen or more mainstream media sources to parrot the announcement without ever mentioning that the result derives entirely from fraudulently altered data.

The past has been changed. It’s official! Comparisons to the alteration of history by Stalin are completely appropriate.

In the last week, we have seen an even more ridiculous effort to change history in the enforcement of climate change orthodoxy. You may already have seen several references to it, but let me take you through the timeline of the story.

A week ago today (March 12) a guy named Patrick Moore appeared on the Fox morning news program “Fox and Friends.” I didn’t see the show, but apparently during his segment Moore was identified as a “co-founder” of the Greenpeace environmental group. Moore also took the occasion to call the so-called climate crisis “fake science.”

It seems that President Trump was watching the show. . . .

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