Over in the US we have the amusing/troubling spectacle of liberals desperately searching the ‘Epstein files’ for something to smear Donald Trump with. Given the absence, so far, of anything especially damning, (Trump spent time in the 1990s with someone who was subsequently found guilty of a sex crime), they are resorting to a favourite liberal tactic – ‘guilt by association’. This is when person X (the liberal target) is guilty because person Y (an acknowledged ‘wrong-doer’) has said they support person X. Person X may have never had anything to do with person Y, may not even of heard of them, but in the diminished minds of liberals, this is enough. A good example of this occurred last week. The Guardian reported that Epstein had written a letter to someone called Larry Nassar ‘referencing Trump’. A couple of days later they admitted that it was a fake. [2] (They just skipped over the fact that the day before they had reported it as news, blaming AP for the error. I can’t locate the page from the Guardian where they made the false claim; Google has already suppressed it – but, this snippet from the search engine seems to confirm it – I am not sure about the date, since this was all reported in the last couple of weeks):
At any event; this was a (failed) attempt at guilt by association. (Also see [1] – the Guardian initially reported the letter as news and then hurriedly tried to cover up that they had published ‘fake news’).
Meanwhile; also on the liberal Guardian they do not even attempt to counter the very popular political figure Nigel Farage and his Reform Party, (currently leading in the polls), with arguments. Indeed I cannot recall even a single case of an attempt to do so. It is all smears. The biggest smear they have found is the allegations of childhood racism. Here, one of Farage’s former teachers, disgraces herself and her profession, by doing a sort of listen-and-tell operation – providing the gutter press with insider information/claims about someone who was, at the time, a child in her care.
We still wait for the Guardian to engage in political debate. Can they counter the arguments? Immigration is at excessive levels, the NHS needs to be reformed, some pragmatic nationalisation is desirable, too much emphasis is given to identity politics in public policy making, social security benefits have got out of control and should be cut back. All of these are, apparently, popular policies – and plausible. If the liberal Guardian does have rational counter-arguments we don’t know about it, because all they can do is smear. This tells us something about modern liberalism; it is no longer a rational ideology.
Notes
