An Open Letter to the @RealJamesWoods

Dear Mr. Woods,

I’m a fan on Twitter. You’re one of the smartest people I know and, coincidentally, I agree with just about everything you say — especially when you give voice to deep conservative outrage and anger. That’s how I feel, too!  I do my best to share your knowledge and wisdom with friends and family living in ignorance. It’s sad, really. They think I’m “gullible.” Of course, it’s the other way around. Most of them are pathetically deluded.

One of the major lessons you’ve taught me is that mainstream media — aka, “lamestream media” —  consistently lies, spreading vicious fabrications meant to propagate a false (liberal) narrative. They are the source of all our Fake News. Hearing the Truth requires listening to completely reliable reporters such as yourself and the citizen journalists of QAnon and 4Chan. Whenever I try to explain this simple concept to my “progressive” friends, they slander you as a disseminator of debunked nonsense, not a purveyor of the Way Things Really Are.

Don’t worry: I defend you passionately. These people are sheep; they don’t know any better. You, sir, are an independent critical thinker; you do know better. Which is why I find you credible.

Not long ago, you tweeted (with hilarious commentary) a meme showing how much low-wage working people would suffer under the Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All plan. I shared it with my network, including a Bernie Bro buddy who can’t face reality.

As usual, you were right! It doesn’t add up. (I’m one of those folks who actually can do simple arithmetic.) So I decided to see how Crazy Bernie was trying to justify this oppressive plan.

When I did my research — my own independent research, not merely what was claimed in a meme — I found a whole bunch of “fact-checking” sites that unequivocally dismissed the 52% tax rate on working people as a complete and utter falsehood. In other words, fake news.

You can familiarize yourself with accurate figures in this corrected version of your meme. The 52% rate would only be applied to people earning more than $10 million; everyone else would pay less. Come to think of it, if you or I had used our common sense, we would have immediately been skeptical of any alleged proposal hurting working families coming from a candidate who desperately needs working families to vote for him. But you have credibility. I trusted you implicitly.

Having read your sage commentary for some time now, I know that Snopes.com is itself 110% fake news and that QAnon is %1000 real, so the fact that Snopes declared your meme a lie proved to me that what you wrote is actually true. But then I looked at four other fact-check sites that, to the best of my knowledge, are not owned by George Soros. They, too, claimed your meme was patently false. I know how these slippery libtards work, so this revelation only strengthened my conviction that you were telling the truth and the fact-check sites were part of a massive cover-up. Mr. Woods, you and some of the other strong voices in our movement have taught me that whenever something we (or our President) say turns out to be untrue, the best practice is to attack the debunker, not the actual substance of their claim. So I got to work on research; I badly wanted to prove once and for all that you, sir, can be trusted categorically and the fact-checkers cannot.

I pored over the transcript of the debate at which Bernie allegedly said what you told me he said. I read everything on his Website. I scoured the Internet for speeches, interviews and policy papers. Nowhere could I find what you claimed. In fact — and it gives me no pleasure in reporting this — I couldn’t find anything anywhere that proves your claim. Indeed, I’ve amassed concrete evidence to disprove it.

Now, I don’t want to call you a liar, Mr. Woods, because I know you respect the Truth as much as me. But what do you call spreading fake news?

I call it irresponsible. (You’ve used similar words, and harsher, to describe the practice). Let’s assume you just didn’t know any better this one time. Let’s say this was the first and only time you’ve shared with followers a falsehood masquerading as true. Let’s agree that the lamestream media does this kind of thing 24 hours-a-day and you only do it, well, rarely.

But, Mr. Woods, there’s a big difference between you and our enemies. They’re lowlifes. You have principles. You have scruples. You know when you’ve told a lie, and you know what that does to a person’s credibility. Which is why I’m hoping you’ll tweet an apology and a correction, and maybe an explanation for why spreading fake news is, in certain cases, totally forgivable.

Then I can return to sharing your posts without worrying if they’re true.

with appreciation of your leadership and fine sense of morals,

An Observer in Los Angeles