More evidence that part of being a leftist for some people is being misinformed/uninformed
This must be discussed more. I know people who believe that the assassination attempt was faked and that Trump was not shot. When I ask how did Corey Comperatore [spelled wrong; I’ve corrected it] die, not a single one of them knew who he was.
These are people who consider themselves very savvy news consumers.
This type of ignorance is commonplace. It’s partly because the MSM barely covers certain facts (or doesn’t cover them at all) and it’s therefore easy to miss them if your sources are the MSM and the echo chamber of social media. And it’s partly because an enormous number of people read only the headlines. They also often live in bubbles where just about everyone they know agrees with them.
As another commenter in that same thread tweets:
There is a lot of overlap among “savvy news consumers” who are certain, including names, of the narrative that Kyle Rittenhouse shot Black protestors, that Brian Sicknick died due to head injuries inflicted by a fire extinguisher, etc.
Absolutely. And remember that most of these falsehoods were printed and widely circulated in the MSM (for example, the Sicknick “news”), or they were implied and never explicitly corrected (that the people Rittenhouse killed were black).
Then again, regarding the attempted assassination of Trump, this is also true of some Trump-haters (from a tweet in the comments to that original posting):
They claim that he [Comperatore] was sacrificed for the sake of the ruse, “proving” just how evil Trump is.
Cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable, and most people will try to find a way to stick to their beliefs, even if it means they need to engage in mental gymnastics. As Winston Churchill once said (the following or something very much like it):
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Mark Twain beat you to it:
“If you don’t read the newspaper you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you’re misinformed.”
This type of ignorance is commonplace. It’s partly because the MSM barely covers certain facts (or doesn’t cover them at all) and it’s therefore easy to miss them if your sources are the MSM and the echo chamber of social media. And it’s partly because an enormous number of people read only the headlines. They also often live in bubbles where just about everyone they know agrees with them.
Not confined to the Left, of course. I’ll fess up, I had been reading pretty much only headlines about Jeffrey Epstein and so I was pretty sure there ought to have been “clients”, until neo prodded me to go and actually read what he was charged with and what Maxwell was convicted of and what the actual laws were.
Lately on our side of the house we’ve had the “Scottish axe girl”. Most of what people have been saying about her online has been contradicted by the few facts that have come out.
For example, there was no Muslim rape gang, she was brandishing her weapons at a woman and a man from Bulgaria, who seem to be Roma (gypsies) and don’t seem likely to be Muslims (as the man has a cross tattooed on his neck).
Last I checked in, only two of the people who were actually there have said anything for themselves, the man from Bulgaria and the fourteen-year-old girl who called the police. Both say they weren’t doing anything until they got hassled by the others for no reason at all. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence yet of sexual assault or an attempt at sexual assault, though the man’s chavtastic social media indicates he is not a model citizen, or at least does not want to be taken for one. It’s not impossible for a woman and man together to perpetrate sex crimes, if anyone here remembers the Moors Murderers or Fred and Rose West, but it is extremely rare. (But hey maybe now they’ve had this attention someone will search their basements and find the bodies.)
Lots of people on X slotted it right into the Rotherham narrative and spread it around to each other with their interpretations presented as fact, but so far it doesn’t look anything like Rotherham. It looks like an episode of Cops, where clearly something happened but everyone says they weren’t the instigator, and the cops who respond have to make a decision in the moment based on what little they know in that moment–including all their previous interactions with the people involved, which we know little about yet.
It will be a long time before anyone can know what actually happened and what the cops should have done, if they should have done anything differently. I’ve seen third-hand accounts that one girl was hospitalized, if factual that should come out, and also that there is additional CCTV footage which we might see.
Bloggers who should know better, like Glenn Reynolds, passed off a photo of German cops from an entirely different episode as photo of the Scottish girl’s arrest. Other bloggers just waved new information away with the “fake but accurate” defense, saying that it’s still basically the same situation even if some details are wrong and because of stuff like Rotherham they are perfectly right to assume they had the story basically correct: it was still immigrants, right, and they were probably up to something, right, and we know cops in the UK hassle crime victims and treat perpetrators with kid gloves, are we going to split hairs here?
So I don’t think this on the Right is all that different from Leftists thinking that Kyle Rittenhouse killed black people or that cops were killed by “insurrectionists” on J6. In this case very little time has gone by for new facts to emerge, so it’s more understandable than the two Leftist examples I gave, and there’s still room yet for it to be little-girl-defends-her-sister-from-sinister-foreign-rapist.
But if not, how many people on the Right are going to keep up with new facts as they come out–or dismiss new facts as part of a coverup or conspiracy? We’ll see. Judging from Epstein lots of people on the Right will stay in their bubbles and not update on new facts that come out, either because they won’t pay attention or because they’ll decide in advance not to trust anything that doesn’t confirm the narrative they already accepted.
I’m not saying Left good Right bad, and I’m not saying the Left and the Right are no different, I’m just saying we’re all human and all prone to our biases. We won’t fix our cognitive biases by pointing to the beams in the Left’s eye and ignoring the motes in our own. We all need to check sources, read critically, move past the headlines, and don’t just accept somebody’s take because we generally agree with them on other things.
What I will say, N.C., is that credible right-wing sources will generally correct their errors publicly and prominently once they know they were wrong.
Niketas:
It’s certainly not only the left. But I find it happens more often on left than right.
You may have noticed I didn’t write about the Scottish girl. The story seemed incomplete to me and perhaps wrong, and so I decided not to highlight it.
Some go further. I saw Megan Kelly correcting Bill Maher about Sicknick, and he wouldn’t change; he still believed he was killed. (And also refused to change his mind about the “fine people” BS.)
@Niketas Choniates: From what I’ve seen, it’s more complicated and uncertain that the version you cite. Though it’s still clear Insty was premature, at least.
I don’t care a whit about the Epstein crap. I don’t know why anyone does at this point.
I’ve tried conversing with my liberal friends–they’re not stupid, they just choose to believe things that the MSM feeds them, even though marginally adept critical thinking would lead them to the empirical evidence that they’re being told lies.
I’ve decided to treat them like the useful idiots they are.
@neo:You may have noticed I didn’t write about the Scottish girl. The story seemed incomplete to me and perhaps wrong, and so I decided not to highlight it.
I had thought this might have been why you hadn’t, and I’m glad to see I was not the only one who thought the story was incomplete and could be wrong.
But I find it happens more often on left than right.
I do too, but I’m looking for it and expecting it more often on the Left. When it’s on the Right I frequently don’t catch on until much later, because I’m not expecting it as much.
I was compelled to look up the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect” recently. I was amused that while it was based, in part, on a conversation with Murray Gell-Mann, it was largely a concept and term posited by Micheal Crichton, It was Crichton who felt the term would be more memorable and have more gravitas if he labeled it with a famous physicist’s name rather than his own.
I was involved in an incident as a kid and later interviewed at age 13, by a reporter from Iowa’s largest newspaper. I recall how surprised I was that they got a few things wrong in the resulting article. The errors were nothing terribly important, but it was nonetheless clear that high accuracy was not a big concern for said reporter.
@TommyJay:it was largely a concept and term posited by Micheal Crichton
The essay in which he presented it has an even more valuable treasure that I don’t see cited as much, the “wet streets cause rain” story. Those are just everywhere, all the time.
The basic format is, studies show that when it rains, the streets are wet, and experts advise that we can get more rain if we water the streets more. Some troglodytes are opposed to watering the streets more and clearly such people hate rain and wish to deprive others of it. Are you watering your streets enough? Take this quiz and find out. For more information on how you can water your water streets more…
Saw this just today with an article I was reading on myopia in children, that children with higher education levels have more myopia, especially children who read more than two books a week. The evidence is clear, don’t let your kids read or learn. They’ll be ignorant and illiterate but they will have perfect vision.
Relevant to your vacant generational theme here, Neo, there was a debate on communism between 20 young GenZs and immigrant and successful entrepreneur David Bet Patrick this past weekend. “DBP’s debate on Jubilee is going viral, but while the entire debate is supposed to be centered around debating the merits of capitalism, that doesn’t actually seem to be the root issue.”
Therefore, young Millennial Brett Cooper breathlessly reacts and explains (in only 20 some minutes) that it was less about facts at all (DBP won), and much more about the permanent personal victimhood felt within this youngest generation.
I’m a VICTIM!….Ergo…Revolution? Or something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rui89NKOB6E&t=1177s
The generational triumph of “feelings” over respect for facts and the pursuit of Truth is a dire verdict against “education” today. Ben Shapiro is ready to reply “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” But if facts aren’t even taught as the respectable standard for discourse, then emotionalism will reign free, and NYC will elect a communist Mayor soon.
(The full debate is up at YT and lasts 105 minutes.)
PostScript: About four years ago, I spent over a month in Seattle’s most famous Hostel, downtown next to the Pike Place Market.
I had spent most of the earlier part of 2021 remote working but living in a Hostel in New Zealand, next to two Auckland Universities. And no one there prepared me for my encounter with Clementine in Seattle — a 20-something woman who was confused and seeking a rudder in life after college.
Clem’s polder sister was a Marxist, working in a Women’s book store not far away.
When I asked what she most wanted to do….she replied, “why can’t I just move onto a piece of land and just live?” It was an impulse from her mother, a SoCal hippy living on a commune — before she met her husband and married.
So…Clem was longing for the commune life her mother had abandoned for marriage, then? Yes.
Her adult-child like impulses reminds me of the young “victims” seen in the debate with DBP.
The only thing missing in Clem was the aggrieved and entitled victimhood — which she lacked. But in the debate, they fully exhibit this.
How will these lost souls of GenZ be raised up? As children lacking ties — much less anchors — to a reality base?
You say Lighties,
I say Refties,
Let’s call the whole thing [more than a bit] OFF…
See, they both doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it…
Right.
Um, uh, hold on a sec…
“Biden White House lawyers, DOJ were befuddled by autopen clemencies, emails show: ‘He doesn’t review the warrants’”—
https://nypost.com/2025/09/04/us-news/biden-white-house-lawyers-doj-were-befuddled-by-autopen-clemencies-emails-show-he-doesnt-review-the-warrants/
H/T Powerline blog.
File under: Woopsies!
+ Bonus:
“Will I be arrested next, after Graham Linehan?”—
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/04/will-i-be-arrested-next-after-graham-linehan/
Continued?
Related?
(IOW, is “Been there, done that” being catapulted to the next level?)
…From the “Yikes” File—cross-filed with “Everybody Loves a Victim; Everybody Needs a Scapegoat”—we present: Cross-Cultural, Global Woke, Inc.
“The Evil Idea That Has Taken Over the Woke Right;
“The coming of ‘critical religion theory’”—
https://www.commentary.org/articles/josh-appel/conspiracist-woke-right-religion/
H/T Powerline blog.
Black Man Stabs White Ukrainian refugee Woman in neck on train in Charlotte, NC – Video (Updated)
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/09/black-man-stabs-white-ukrainian-refugee.html
None are so blind that refuse to see! The proverb and parable guys are having a field day!