Ben Weingarten: The Media's Role in Perpetuating and Inflating Russiagate

Absolutely brutal.

But that's the beauty of political correctness. It has personal manifestations in the individual minds of leftists, and institutional manifestations at the level of social organizations. So individual progressives have--partially by brainwashing, partially out of wishful thinking, partially from fear of cancellation, and, probably, partially as a matter of innate predilection--become more and more willing to ignore counterevidence. And the same is true of "converged" leftist institutions like the media and academia...and, well, now: all the rest of them. Once you've adopted the (politically) correct attitudes, habits and beliefs, even when some counterevidence is so strong that it bashes its way through your institutional epistemic shields, it's unlikely to have the power to create the kind of cognitive dissonance that commonly drives involuntary belief-change. And more evidence is just more evidence...and progressives are already committed to subordinating it to their dogmas. 

   Russiagate flourished on the left far beyond what the evidence warranted. A patently absurd collection of tales grew like doxastic kudzu in the fertile, febrile soil of progressive minds rabid with TDS. It has been obviously absurd nearly the entire time, and now the evidence is undeniable. But the institutional shields are strong, and the strength of the evidence is dampened on the way through. 

   We live in hope that truth will win out in human lifetimes.

   But I dunno, man.

   We're dealing with a faction that not only believes that some women are male, but that thinks that denying this is an act of bigotry equivalent to racism, and which thinks people deserve to have their lives destroyed for that. Make sure you keep in mind: they would make it illegal if they had the power to do so. 

   As I keep saying: this is basically the equivalent of War is peace, or the sky is green or 2+2=5. Once someone has the kinds of epistemic habits and attitudes and policies and beliefs that lead them to accept overt material contradictions as truths--let alone as undeniable axioms that can only be denied by moral criminals--well, slightly complicated and easily-obfuscated matters like those revealed in the Durham report are very unlikely to break through the shields.

   Finally: one of the more depressing parts of all this is the second-order delusion/lying. Not only did the NYT and the WaPo print all that bullshit, but they won the Pulitzer for it. It didn't just happen in the journalistic heat of the moment--in a cool hour, American journalism went back and deemed those stories to be the best journalism of the year...

   Very depressing.