Joel Pollak - See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Cant Handle

Copyright 2016 by Joel B. Pollak

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Table Of Contents

CONTENTS

THE LIE: The Left speaks truth to power.

Examples:

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I dont mean the argument over who came up with the word. I dont know whether its a new thing, but its certainly a current thing, in that it doesnt seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But thats not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. Its certainty.

Stephen Colbert, interview with the Onion, January 25, 2006

An essential truth of human nature is that frames trump facts. When presented with facts that are inconsistent with the frame through which people view the world, the frame will generally win, and inconsistent facts will be discarded or discounted.

Thats why our top priority has to be the relentless, proud, self-confident repetition of our frame, our values, and our vision for the future. We have to activate the progressive value frame that exists in the minds of swing voters. We have to set the frame for political debate in America. Its our job to shape the voters unconscious understanding of what constitutes political common sense.

Left-wing organizer and Chicago political veteran Robert Creamer, 2007

THE TRUTH: The Left suppresses the truth to frame the debate for its own political purposes.

Once, the American Left told itself that it spoke truth to power. Today it cannot even speak the truth to itself.

On November 14, 2015, a day after Paris, France, suffered brutal terror attacks that claimed 129 lives, the three remaining Democratic Party candidates for president stood on a debate stage in Iowa and refused, one after the other, to say that radical Islam was responsible.

The perpetrators of the attacks had been identified, leaving no doubt that the so-called Islamic State, a radical terror group that had arisen in swaths of territory amidst the ruins of Iraq and Syria, had carried out the attacks as part of an effort to project its power worldwide.

And yet these candidates, who wished to lead America against that threat, refused to call it by its name, to state the truth about what had motivated young men to blow themselves up at soccer stadiums, gun down innocent civilians at restaurants, and murder scores more at a rock n roll concert.

Looking back at the year in late December 2015, the economist Thomas Sowell wrote, Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is the growing acceptance of lying as no big deal by smug sophisticates, so long as these are lies that advance their political causes. He noted, for example, that when Democratic presidential contender and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been caught by a congressional committee misleading the nation about the cause of the Benghazi terror attacks of September 11, 2012, even as she told the truth to her own family, she won praise instead of condemnation: Many in the media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clintons lies by admiring how well she handled herself.

We are witnessing a state of denial in left-wing American politics that is almost terminal. Increasingly, the American Left rejects the truthnot just about the threat of radical Islam, but also about nearly every issue facing our society.

How did it come to this? Especially when the Left prided itself, until recently, on being the reality-based community?

The comedian Stephen Colbert mocked conservatives by introducing the term truthiness in the opening monologue of the first episode of The Colbert Report, his spoof on Fox News and conservatism in general, in 2005.

Colbert said:

Cause youre looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls em like I sees em. I will speak to you in plain, simple English.

And that brings us to tonights word: truthiness.

Now Im sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Websters, are gonna say, Hey, thats not a word. Well, anybody who knows me know [sic] that Im no fan of dictionaries or reference books. Theyre elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isnt true, or what did or didnt happen. Whos Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, thats my right. I dont trust books. Theyre all fact, no heart....

We are divided between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart. (Laughter)

The term caught on quickly among left-wing critics of President George W. Bush, who had just led the country to war in Iraq to stop Saddam Husseins regime from producing weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Colbert explained the term at length the following year in an interview with the satirical newspaper the Onion, noting that truthiness was an appeal to authority and emotion, rather than to reason. Truthiness is What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true. Its not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. Theres not only an emotional quality, but theres a selfish quality.

Truth was a rallying cry on the Left, where critics of the Bush administration convinced themselves that their opponents cared less for the concept. And truthiness soon joined the term reality-based community in the left-wing lexicon. That term was taken from a quotation from an unnamed Bush adviser who spoke to Ron Suskind for a 2004 New York Times article: The aide said that guys like me were in what we call the reality-based community, which he defined as people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. Thats not the way the world really works anymore, he continued. Were an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while youre studying that realityjudiciously, as you willwell act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and thats how things will sort out. Were historys actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.