How They Lie & Why They Do It

Reflections on Question Time furore

On 12 August 2017, a neo-Nazi deliberately drove his car into a crowd of left-wing protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

America and the rest of the Western world were on a knife edge. The victims were assembled to counter the Unite The Right rally - a demonstration against the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general - and the attack acted as a climax to the nation’s increasing polarisation and paranoia about President Trump’s links with the so-called Alt Right.

At a press conference in the immediate aftermath, President Trump made a series of incendiary comments, including saying that “there were very fine people on both sides”.

Like many people, I was horrified and outraged by the fact that instead of trying to bring calm, Trump chose to further inflame a highly volatile situation. But not nearly as horrified and outraged as when I later discovered that this was all an orchestrated media hoax. In actual fact, at that very press conference President Trump made it clear that his comments were describing peaceful protestors who opposed the removal of the statue, saying “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally”. But the media cut his comments out of context and ran headline after headline claiming he was defending the very people he had just condemned. To this day, millions believe this lie.

Last week, I saw it again when the Labour Party clipped comments by Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, out of context to claim he had criticised Manchester, when he was, in fact, criticising the Conservative Party Conference which had been held in Manchester. This time, the media didn’t have to lie - our politicians did it for them.

These dirty tricks are, sadly, part of the ugly game of politics. More troublingly, they are now increasingly spreading to the arena of public debate more broadly. During my appearance on Question Time last week, the usually decent Labour Minister Douglas Alexander, tried to pull a similar move on me. Unable to respond to my criticism of his Government’s failure on immigration and the attempt to demonise millions of normal British people who dared to notice it, he instead tried to suggest that I am a bigot. “You said Rishi Sunak isn’t English because he’s a brown Hindu,” was his retort.

This is a skillful lie on several levels, the purpose of which was to deflect attention away from his and his party’s failings. Here’s how it works.

First, he deliberately concealed from the viewer that my comments were made in a discussion of the difference between British and English identity so that it looks like I was saying Rishi Sunak doesn’t belong in Britain. That’s not what I was saying.

Second, he failed to mention that in the very same conversation, I explained that my son, born to two immigrant parents like Sunak, is also, in my view, not English. No matter how evil Douglas Alexander thinks I am, even he could hardly accuse me of being racist against my own children.

Third, he failed to mention that Fraser Nelson, the journalist with whom we were having the debate, wrote an article afterwards defending my view, with which he disagrees, as a “perfectly fair point”.

Fourth, he acted as if I myself had brought up Rishi Sunak and then claimed he is not English. I do not go around deciding who is English and who isn’t. It was an example raised by Fraser to which I was simply responding.

Finally and most importantly, he didn’t mention that prior to being elected, Rishi Sunak, described himself as British Indian, saying “British Indian is what I tick on the census, we have a category for it. I am thoroughly British, this is my home and my country, but my religious and cultural heritage is Indian, my wife is Indian.”

This is how you go from two people having a reasonable discussion about their views of what it means to be English and British, to pretending that one of them is evil. Even if you disagree with what I said or thought I didn’t articulate my point well, this is dishonest framing.

Why do they do this? Because it’s easier than addressing the arguments. On Question Time last week I made two basic points. One is that Net Zero is industrial suicide which has destroyed our economy and produced zero growth since 2008. The second is that both Labour and Conservative Governments have imported more people into Britain over their respective terms in power than had come between 1066 and 1950.

Can they deny this? No. Can they dispute the facts? No. So all they have are smears and insults.

Over the last few days, there’s been an attempt by a few non-entities on social media to have me banned from further Question Time appearances. These people still think it’s 2016 when these tactics worked.

Let me explain something to you:

You’ve had the monopoly on the microphone for a long time and it’s made you lazy and it’s made you arrogant.

More than 2 million people now watch and listen to TRIGGERnometry. 100,000 read my Substack at www.konstantinkisin.com. Our show is part of a massive ecosystem of alternative media which is the reason the legacy media is dying.

You can keep trying to cancel people from the conversation to maintain your echo chamber but even if you succeed, all that will achieve is driving more of them into our arms.

If you really hate my views and what I stand for, there’s only one thing you can do: make better arguments. Good luck. You’re going to need it.

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