In the course of a follow up to an earlier post Father Andrew has discovered that the report about a wealthy banker leaving a 1% tip and an insulting message for his lunch waiter was a hoax. It appears that the image of the receipt was doctored and the whole thing was fabricated by person or persons unknown. Given the whole 1% vs the 99% class warfare theme however, it does not seem unreasonable to suspect this was a politically motivated lie. Point in fact I strongly suspect it was a clever piece of left wing propaganda. I had considered taking the original post down, but have decided against for three reasons. First, I intensely dislike removing posts from the blog and in fact have only done so once in the near six years of its existence. Secondly, no one specifically was defamed and finally because as it stands now it is cautionary warning about the tactics employed by the far left.
I have often been a sharp critic of right wing extremism on this blog. But it is well worth remembering that some in the radical left are not above making things up or just plain lying to advance their agenda.
Confessing God
17 hours ago
4 comments:
My only protest to your take on this John is that I very seriously doubt the person behind this hoax was a member of any radical leftist organization or devoted to radical leftist politics. Most radical leftists I have known have been either too poor to afford photoshop software, or have been too rich and eccentric to pull off something so propagandically useful. I'd be willing to bet my house that this came out of a moveon.org milieu, or something of a similar mainstream liberal posture. A radical leftist doing this would never have been able to resist including long quotes from Rosa Luxemborg or Althusser or Trostsky or Gramsci or somesuch and spelling out how this particular act is to be rightly analyzed by whatever vanguardist or anti-vanguardist position is the correct one. I get the impression that the person who was behind the “Future Ex Banker” blog probably gets his/her ideology from the Young Turks, or something like that.
Ochlophobist,
You must have been fortunate indeed to only have experienced 'nice, slightly dotty' radical leftists.
Nice has nothing to do with it.
My bet would also be on a moveon.org type. However, I do have to admit that this hoax led me to a lot of anger. Perhaps I should have given up politics for Lent.
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