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Among leftists’ many methods to comfort themselves in the wake of their disastrous electoral defeat in November is their self-talk that a large percentage of the American electorate is “misinformed” and that the GOP appealed to “low-information” voters. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who regularly outdoes herself in combining elitist condescension and an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, described such persons in a Nov. 29 column as “also sometimes categorized as ‘ignorant’ or ‘disengaged’ voters.” Actor Alec Baldwin in turn attracted headlines for his public comments that “Americans are very uninformed about reality — what’s really going on.” Leftist corporate media meanwhile warn of a “misinformation crisis.”

They’re actually not wrong. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and plenty of “low-information” people peddling and consuming it. But if leftists really want to combat these manifold falsities, they’ll have to look in the mirror. For as much as members of the technocratic ruling class present themselves as the defenders of disinterested, unassailable, data-driven truths, they are purveyors of many of the fattest mistruths currently on the market.

A Few Examples of Leftist Misinformation

Abortion is as good a place as any to begin when recounting the left’s egregious misinformation campaign. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, corporate media and pro-choice groups have incessantly claimed that state abortion restrictions have resulted in the deaths of pregnant women, despite the fact that there is not a single state law currently on the books that prohibits physicians from treating ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, or women suffering life-threatening complications, even when those complications stem from abortion.

The left routinely claims that abortion laws are “killing women,” though the women they cite are dying from miscarriages that have nothing to do with state-level restrictions on access to abortion. Leftists disingenuously claimed that an Ohio abortion law prevented a couple with an in-utero child suffering from a severe bodily abnormality that almost always results in the baby’s death from aborting their child — when in reality their inability to procure an abortion had to do with their health insurance provider.

Another example of the left’s misinformation is its dangerously irresponsible mission vis-à-vis transgenderism, for years promoting transitions as a cure not only for gender dysphoric adults, but also for teenagers and even prepubescent children. The result has been a dramatic increase in the number of children undergoing so called “gender transitions” — via such medical interventions as puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and mastectomies.

Despite what should be obvious — namely, that young people undergoing massive hormonal shifts and experiencing all the mental and emotional instability typical to their age demographic are not well positioned to make decisions about irreversible physiological decisions — corporate media still won’t acknowledge their complicity in this national epidemic. Instead they claim Americans are freaking out over a “few stories of regret.” Legitimate protests over the increase in biological men competing in women’s sports — which is affecting outcomes from high school to professional competitions — have been met with accusations of “transphobia” from the left.

Or consider the left’s blatant disinformation on crime, claiming that the police forces are systemically racist and the American criminal justice system is racist, given the fact that blacks are incarcerated and killed by police at higher rates than other demographics. Yet, as bestselling author Heather MacDonald has documented for decades in countless articles and books, the black incarceration rate in the United States is “overwhelmingly a function of black crime,” rather than a manifestation of bias and racism.

As MacDonald wrote in 2008, “In the overwhelming majority of cases, whatever the race of the convicted, prison remains what it has always been: a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.” In 2015, she observed that “blacks commit homicide at 11 times the rate of whites and robbery at 12 times the rate of whites.”

In 2020 she noted that on average the police kill about 1,000 civilians a year, “the vast majority of those victims armed or otherwise dangerous,” and that blacks comprised about 25 percent of those victims, “less than what the black crime rate would predict” (emphasis mine). In those same 2020 comments, MacDonald even exposed the fact that The Washington Post’s own database on crime — so often cited to “prove” alleged systemic racism in the nation’s criminal justice system — found that police were responsible for a negligible .2 percent of “all black homicide victims” (most perpetrators were black).

The Left’s Control Over the Narrative Is Waning

The above is only the most cursory study of some of the most blatant examples of leftist misinformation — one could just as easily cite their messaging on illegal immigration, education, or climate change. Why is the data-driven truth on these issues not more widely known or circulated? The simple answer is that the left dominates the institutions that control that message, from public schools to the academy to legacy media to the entertainment industry.

When the left bothers to cite an expert on abortion (e.g., Ryan Anderson), transgenderism (Abigail Shrier), or crime (MacDonald), it does so only to pillory that expert in hit pieces. Even when leftists’ own data disproves their narrative, they simply ignore it, or, as is often the case, viciously attack the researchers who discover inconvenient truths about their most sacred cows, as they did with sociologist Mark Regnerus, physician Lisa Littman, and political scientist Charles Murray.

Unfortunately for the left, its grip over the dissemination of information is weakening — Americans are more suspicious of corporate media than ever, and their confidence in higher education is also nosediving. Ordinary citizens know they are being manipulated and gaslighted by self-interested ideologues, whether the issue is transgenderism or the pandemic, and they are finding alternative, data-driven sources of information.

As our most recent election demonstrated, the American people are realizing that there is indeed a misinformation crisis in America — and that the deluded, patronizing leftists are the primary culprits.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.