Great, Britain!

The Brits have just provided my previous article, The Truthers and The Fakers, with a tidy little case study: the very next day after I published it Theresa May’s government stepped into its role as one of the world’s premier Fakers and unleashed the next installment of fake news on the Skripal poisoning. We can use this as training material in learning how to spot and discard fakes.

The fake story that May has been pushing is that it is “highly likely” that the Kremlin ordered a hit on the former British spy Sergei Skripal (and his daughter) using a “Russian-made” chemical weapon called “Novichok.” In turn, from what we already knew, it is highly likely that this story is a complete and utter fake. As I explained in the previous article, it is not our job to establish what really happened. We would be unable to do so with any degree of certainty without gaining access to state secrets. But we don’t need to; all we need to do is establish with a reasonable degree of certainty that the British government’s story is a foolishly, incompetently concocted fabrication. Doing so will then allow us to properly classify the British press, which repeats this nonsense as fact, and the British public, which accepts it unquestioningly at face value. Then we can drop the erroneous appellation “great”—because great nations don’t act so stupidly.

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