Our corrupt press

Anatomy Of The Hoax

In his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch noticed how the Left had reverted from even a “residual conception of truth” in the Tawana Brawley case in which the black teenager falsely accused six white New York City police officers of raping her.

“When the ‘rape’ of Tawana Brawley, proclaimed by Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox as a typical case of white oppression, was exposed as a hoax, the anthropologist Stanley Diamond argued in the Nation that “it doesn’t matter whether the crime occurred or not,” wrote Lasch.

What happened to Brawley “actually happens to too many black women,” wrote Diamond. Lasch cited William Kuntsler who also wrote that it didn’t matter whether the attack on Brawley actually happened. “[It] doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of young black women are treated the way she said she was treated.”

A decade after Lasch wrote that we saw the MSM fall for the Duke rape hoax. In defense of his guild Newsweek's Evan Thomas could only say "We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

Robert Conquest:

Not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are dedeuced from a political theory and not vice versa.

The Great Terror