What was unusual about the guys outside Twitter’s headquarters is that the media owned up to the hoax. Other hoaxes they keep insisting are true for years.
As PJM’s Rick Moran noted Saturday, two hoaxers fooled the media into reporting that they were fired Twitter employees, victims of Elon Musk’s heartless purge of opponents of the freedom of speech. When the hoax was exposed, we all had a hearty laugh at the expense of the media outlets, including CNBC and Bloomberg, that fell for it and reported what the “fired employees” said as if they were real. Even top media outlets themselves joined in the laughter; the New York Post headlined a story “Pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees trick media outlets: ‘Rahul Ligma.’” For The Win chortled: “Tech reporters fell for a fake Twitter employee purge story.” But really, this is nothing new, so why is everyone laughing? The media has been hoaxing us for years. Decades, in fact.
Back in September 1958, yes, 1958, Betty Friedan, who later became a feminist heroine, published an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Coming Ice Age.” In April 1975, it was still coming: Newsweek published an article entitled “The Cooling World,” which lamented the general inaction in the face of this alleged crisis in terms that will sound familiar to those who are familiar with our current global warming climate alarmism: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.