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Robert Spencer: Fake University Harvard Uses Fake Professor’s List to Smear Real News Sites

Mar 15, 2017 9:13 am By Robert Spencer

FrontPage, Jihad Watch, Truth Revolt all make the list. My latest in FrontPage:

Harvard University has picked up on a Merrimack College professor’s list of “fake news” sites, including the Daily Caller, the Drudge Report, Breitbart News, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Free Beacon, Independent Journal Review (IJR), and even Bill Kristol’s relentlessly Never-Trump The Weekly Standard. FrontPage Mag, Jihad Watch, and Truth Revolt also make the list. It sure is great to have our intellectual betters at Harvard explain to us what are “illegitimate” sources of news, but there’s just one catch: the “fake news” list doesn’t contain even a single site that is the slightest bit Left of center.

That’s right: BuzzFeed, with its fake dossier on Donald Trump, didn’t make the list. Nor did the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN, despite all their no-there-there hysteria about Russia “hacking” the 2016 presidential election. Nor does the Huffington Post or Salon or Slate or Glenn Greenwald’s fact-free Intercept. Harvard’s list is clearly intended not to warn people away from hoax news sources and stories, but to demonize, stigmatize and marginalize the perspective of the half of the American electorate that American electorate that voted for Donald Trump.

It’s a clever presentation: there are actual fake news sites on the Harvard list, sites that publish wholly false or unsubstantiated stories simply as clickbait in order to generate revenue. But to add to them some of the most prominent conservative sites on the web makes the agenda clear: Harvard, and the Leftist intelligentsia in general, is trying to stigmatize and marginalize every point of view except its own. Merrimack College’s Melissa Zimdars and those who take her list seriously at Harvard and elsewhere apparently think that if they call every perspective they dislike “fake news,” they will be able to destroy the influence of such perspectives, and attain the hegemony of their own point of view.

If I called Harvard a “fake university” and Zimdars a “fake professor,” few would take me seriously, but when they call my work “fake news,” they have money, influence, power and prestige, if not facts, to back up their claims. Harvard’s “fake news” list, like charges of “hate speech,” is a tool in the hands of the powerful, used to silence dissent from their line. The only problem with this is that their line contains so many obvious falsehoods and fallacies (Islam is a religion of peace, poverty causes terrorism, etc.) that it will continue to falter at the bar of reality, and people will continue to look to these so-called “fake news” sites for the truth.

The list contains subcategories; Zimdars labels my Jihad Watch as “Unknown.” This classification she explains thusly: “Unknown (tag unidentified): Sources that have not yet been analyzed (many of these were suggested by readers/users or are found on other lists and resources). Help us expand our resource by providing us information!” So a site that purports to identify “fake news” relies on unsubstantiated rumor, hearsay and innuendo to make its classifications. Doesn’t that make Zimdars’ Harvard-endorsed list a quintessential example of…fake news?

Harvard’s list is another example of how the Left today, and particularly the academic Left, is authoritarian, intolerant of dissent, and increasingly intent on demonizing and destroying its opponents, rather than engaging them in rational debate. Liberal journalist Kirsten Powers, author of The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, recalls that when she was growing up, “I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting that conservative views were illegitimate and unworthy of debate.” Now, that is all Leftists ever say. David Horowitz has, of course, argued that the Left is inherently authoritarian, and that any Leftist regime will move to crush dissent; now Harvard is proving him right once again.

This is generally because as Leftists envision establishing a truly just society on earth, those who oppose them are inevitably stigmatized as morally evil, and consequently are accorded as little tolerance as the medieval Roman Catholic Church gave to those it considered heretics. No less a luminary than St. Thomas Aquinas argued that because the Catholic state had to be concerned with the moral and spiritual wellbeing of its people, as well as their material condition, heretics were enemies of the state, and thus were deservedly executed. If today’s Left had a patron saint, it would be Aquinas, for that alone.

The contemporary Left so closely identifies its agenda with all that is good that it considers those who oppose its imperatives to be beyond the pale of reasonable discourse and decent human beings. The foes of the Left must therefore be shouted down, discredited, and destroyed altogether. Harvard is busy doing just that.

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Filed Under: academia, Featured, free speech, journalistic bias, Robert Spencer Tagged With: Harvard University, Melissa Zimdars


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Comments

  1. berserker says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 9:53 am

    Cleaning out the universities appears to be almost as important as defeating the cancer of Islam. I truly despise these so-called intellectuals.

    • Judy says

      Mar 16, 2017 at 5:03 pm

      Agree with you all the way. SICK people= liars, pimps for Islam send her somewhere but Not America

  2. David says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 10:10 am

    I appreciate lists like this because it tells me where to look for real news, just not in the way the fake news “professor” intended with her faux data.

  3. Ted Gilber says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 10:45 am

    Ideologues, demagogues, self – interested anti-nationalists but not intellectuals. What makes them seem to be intellectuals is that the rest of us have become idol worshipers and but anyone with a few letters after their names or a star on the walk of fame somewhere on an imaginary throne. In 2017 there is a division of the populace, us and them.

  4. utis says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 11:05 am

    Well, well, Harvard has signed on to a 21st century Index Librorum …! What’s next? Show trials and public immolations?
    A good scholar looks at all information sources and decides for himself what’s legitimate. Of course, if a big chunk of sources are condemned, redacted or just obliterated, no one can be a credible scholar. Thanks for the destruction of western intelligence, Harvard. At least the Library of Alexandria had to be burned to the ground by the barbarians themselves.

  5. Frank Scarn says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 11:14 am

    . . . but there’s just one catch: the “fake news” list doesn’t contain even a single site that is the slightest bit Left of center.

    *****

    Just following the model of the SPLC where not one leftist or Muslim organization makes its hate lists. Ever !

  6. Diane Harvey says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 11:20 am

    “Merrimack College’s Melissa Zimdars and those who take her list seriously at Harvard and elsewhere”

    Guess Melissa really wants to get to the BIg Leagues by impressing cronies at one of the Ivies in the hopes of getting a job offer.

    Suggest she follow Lieawatha Warren’s path and apply as an American Indian. Looking at her blue eyes and high cheekbones she’s obviously qualified.

    • RonaldB says

      Mar 15, 2017 at 10:51 pm

      Lieawatha

      ROFL

    • SweetOlBob says

      Mar 16, 2017 at 9:16 am

      Diane:
      Me Too ! “Lieawatha” …………….. HOOT !

  7. DJ says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 11:39 am

    Should we readers institute a scoring system for leftist sites and centres of education?
    How about giving them Marx out of 10, with 10 being the full Karl?

    • Steven Wood says

      Mar 16, 2017 at 8:17 am

      I like this. We need a full Karl emoji. Smiling and full of glee.

  8. Keys says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 11:45 am

    Saul Alinsky tactics influenced by the spirit of deceit, evil:
    Accuse the “enemy” of what you are doing.

    Evil 101: Lie and accuse those you hate of lying about what you are lying about.

  9. Voytek Gagalka says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 12:55 pm

    Fake University of Harvard which falsely use their old logo “Veritas” (meaning “the Truth”). The should go to hell.

  10. Wellington says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 1:23 pm

    There no longer is a Spanish Inquisition (finally abolished by Spain in 1834) but there presently exists an Academic Inquisition, replete with a list of “forbidden” sources, a new Index.

    Leftism is a substitute religion and it tends to mirror the worst of religion. (And may I say here that I understand why Ferdinand and Isabella established the Inquisition in 1478 and that it is somewhat defensible that they did when they did for reasons of state but there is no justification, none whatsoever, for today’s Academic Inquisition in free and democratic societies—–said societies sadly becoming less free and democratic principally because of Leftism.) It has its own substitute theology and smacks of totalitarianism because it divides society between “us and them,” with the “them,” which I will here note I am a proud member, being worthy of scorn, ridicule, demonization and, if possible, marginalization to the point of extinction.

    It’s all so wrong and stupid is this Leftism but it dominates the academic world nowadays and there is no end in sight. Indeed, Leftism, a true enemy of freedom (and truth), is still waxing and not waning on college campuses across America. It’s on the march and the devout can be found on virtually every college campus where indoctrination has replaced education (e.g., the white privilege nonsense which, as Angemon noted some time ago here at JW, is just Marxism reconfigured from the pure socio-economic paradigm to a racial component). It is intolerant, deficient in fact finding (how ironic since it accuses its enemies of this) and indicative of a great dearth of both common sense and moral intelligence.

    Actually, being on the “hit list” of Leftists should serve as a badge of honor. I tend to look at it this way. Why the hell not since contempt for Leftists is fully justified. As it was for the Brownshirts, with whom Leftists have a good bit in common.

  11. Angemon says

    Mar 15, 2017 at 7:00 pm

    So a site that purports to identify “fake news” relies on unsubstantiated rumor, hearsay and innuendo to make its classifications. Doesn’t that make Zimdars’ Harvard-endorsed list a quintessential example of…fake news?

    It would, if her standards were applied to her work.

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