By Cindy Offutt
For the “Progressive Views” column, Boerne Star, September 8, 2024
Published errors are very unfortunate, but disinformation is a pernicious thing that can have devastating effects. As noted in the August 24th Boerne Star, a “Write of Center” author failed to fact-check the validity of his assertion that a retired military general had authored an article from which that Write of Center author “lifted” several points.
Fortunately, non-partisan fact-checkers did their job and found out the article — which was passed around only on social media and not by any reputable news reporting organization — is bogus. A simple Google search would have disclosed Major General Higginbotham’s categorical denial: “Emphatically, I AM NOT THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE!” (capitalization in original Higginbotham email).
Unfortunately, there were other problematic assertions by the Write of Center author that beg the question: If you can’t get the little things right, how can you be trusted to get the big things right?
First, the Write of Center author got the venue of the 2017 “Unite the Right” march wrong. The march occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, not Charlotte, North Carolina. Once again, a simple Google search would have revealed this.
And while Trump attempted to excuse his “very fine people on both sides” remark, it is a fact that the march was both violent and organized by white supremacists, neo-Nazis and KKK dregs.
According to The Atlantic online, the “Unite the Right” march may have ostensibly been about removal of a Confederate statue, but in actual fact, it was about “asserting the legitimacy of white culture and white supremacy” and it was “suffused with anti-black racism and anti-Semitism.” Marchers displayed swastikas and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology, and “Jews will not replace us,” a reference to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
“Very fine people” they weren’t.
Second, as the local author noted, in the years since the release of the Steele Dossier, some of its claims have proved to be unsubstantiated. However, extensive investigation and the Mueller Report found “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” and established that “the … Trump campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Contrary to the insinuation made by the local author, the FBI did not open its counterintelligence investigation because of the dossier. The FBI opened its investigation because of the WikiLeaks leak and because a foreign diplomat disclosed what a Trump campaign advisor had divulged to him.
Although FBI investigators did, for a brief time, take the dossier seriously, the FBI investigation had already begun when the dossier was released. Moreover, the Mueller Report doesn’t rely on the dossier in reaching its conclusions about links between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
In the end, that some of the contentions in the dossier were unsubstantiated had no relevance to the authenticity of a link between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Third, someone should tell the local author (and Donald Trump) that name-calling is a measure of last resort. Such appellations as “Marxist,” “Socialist,” and “San Francisco radical Maoist activist” have almost no persuasive power with average Americans, in no small part because of the right’s injudicious overuse whenever they try to demean anyone who’s not a MAGA/Trump worshipper.
Most left-leaning Americans are radical only if sharing a commitment to the common good is radical. What Republicans too often label as “socialist” is closer to common sense than to anything extreme – things like providing free meals for at-risk school kids so they have enough nutrition to learn. And things like reducing our fossil fuel footprint so the planet – and our backyards – don’t burn. And things like a progressive tax system so folks in the top 1-5% pay their fair share to sustain the general welfare.
Democrats believe “we are all connected as one people,” or as U.S. Senator and Rev. Raphael Warnock recently explained, “(We) need American children on both sides of the track to be OK. Because we are all God’s children.”
It’s essential to understand that right-wing hype that’s been lifted from some social media site is extremely untrustworthy, especially for something as important as voting.
Cindy Offutt is a local Democrat.
