People with a cause in need of a narrative

Robert Tracinski points out that 2014 was the year of really convenient narratives.

It may not actually be true that Michael Brown had his hands up and was saying “don’t shoot” when a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot him—the bulk of the eyewitness testimony and physical evidence indicates otherwise—but “hands up, don’t shoot” is still a great slogan because it’s such a good “metaphor” and captures a “larger truth.”

Gruber didn’t get in trouble for stretching the truth, he got in trouble for being just a little too truthful about the dishonest way ObamaCare was drafted and shoved through Congress.

Then there was

the University of Virginia, where everybody forgot about Charlottesville’s real-life rapist and serial killer and spent weeks in a frenzy over a rape accusation that was not only false but had its corroborating details plagiarized from “Dawson’s Creek.”

There was also

an unbelievable tale about a high-school whiz kid who made $72 million trading stocks during his lunch hour. That’s “unbelievable” is in literally “not believable,” and the kid later confessed to a prank that got out of hand, all the way into the pages of a prominent mainstream magazine.

While a jihadist held hostages at a downtown Sydney coffee house, leftist activist Rachael Jacobs saw a “presumably Muslim woman” on the subway take off her headscarf, which Jacobs further presumed was out of fear of being targeted by “Islamophobes” as news of the siege broke. Jacobs then recounts approaching the woman, urging her to put her headscarf back on, and offering to walk with her to her destination to make her feel more comfortable. The story inspired the Twitter hashtag #illridewithyou (as in “I’ll ride with you”), which was dreadfully popular among those who thought the real victims of the siege were Muslims who might get dirty looks on the subway.

Except that the original story wasn’t true. It was “editorialized,” and it’s unclear from Jacobs’s current version of the story whether she even spoke to the woman at all, for fear of seeming “tokenistic and patronizing.”

Climatologists were caught omitting 80 years of data in order to support a bogus claim that global warming is causing deadly acidification of the oceans.

Read more here.