Excerpt:
I am about to say something that will strike you as blindingly obvious. Here it is:
You can't believe everything the news media tell you.
Now, you know that, and I know it. Still, knowing it is one thing and living it is another. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," said a famous abolitionist. Eternal vigilance is also the price of truth. Which is to say that you can't ever afford to let down your guard when you're reading or watching or listening to the news. You may think you're taking it all in with a proper degree of cynicism, but are you? Or are you capable of being suckered into believing a lie if it's repeated often enough?
There's a reason why such questions are on my mind these days. I live in Norway, and on July 22, a lunatic murdered several dozen people here, most of them young people attending a Labor Party youth camp. He turned out to have written a "manifesto" criticizing the Norwegian left for its role in advancing multiculturalism and the Islamization of Norway. In it he cited with approval scores of writers and thinkers, ranging from classical philosophers of liberty such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson to contemporary critics of Islam such as Robert Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and various people in Norway. Norwegian leftists lost no time in exploiting this situation, accusing their ideological adversaries of being "right-wing extremists" and "Muslim-haters" who had gone too far in their rhetoric and, in doing so, inspired a man to commit mass murder. The purpose of all this was plainly to convince the Norwegian public that these "haters" were enemies of the people who had to be shunned, silenced if possible, lest they inspire further mayhem.