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Harvard University has picked up on a Merrimack College professor’s list of “fake news” sites, including the Daily Caller, the Drudge Report, Breitbart News, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Free Beacon, Independent Journal Review (IJR), and even Bill Kristol’s relentlessly Never-Trump The Weekly Standard. FrontPage Mag, Jihad Watch, and Truth Revolt also make the list. It sure is great to have our intellectual betters at Harvard explain to us what are “illegitimate” sources of news, but there’s just one catch: the “fake news” list doesn’t contain even a single site that is the slightest bit Left of center.

That’s right: BuzzFeed, with its fake dossier on Donald Trump, didn’t make the list. Nor did the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN, despite all their no-there-there hysteria about Russia “hacking” the 2016 presidential election. Nor does the Huffington Post or Salon or Slate or Glenn Greenwald’s fact-free Intercept. Harvard’s list is clearly intended not to warn people away from hoax news sources and stories, but to demonize, stigmatize and marginalize the perspective of the half of the American electorate that American electorate that voted for Donald Trump.

It’s a clever presentation: there are actual fake news sites on the Harvard list, sites that publish wholly false or unsubstantiated stories simply as clickbait in order to generate revenue. But to add to them some of the most prominent conservative sites on the web makes the agenda clear: Harvard, and the Leftist intelligentsia in general, is trying to stigmatize and marginalize every point of view except its own. Merrimack College’s Melissa Zimdars and those who take her list seriously at Harvard and elsewhere apparently think that if they call every perspective they dislike “fake news,” they will be able to destroy the influence of such perspectives, and attain the hegemony of their own point of view.

If I called Harvard a “fake university” and Zimdars a “fake professor,” few would take me seriously, but when they call my work “fake news,” they have money, influence, power and prestige, if not facts, to back up their claims. Harvard’s “fake news” list, like charges of “hate speech,” is a tool in the hands of the powerful, used to silence dissent from their line. The only problem with this is that their line contains so many obvious falsehoods and fallacies (Islam is a religion of peace, poverty causes terrorism, etc.) that it will continue to falter at the bar of reality, and people will continue to look to these so-called “fake news” sites for the truth.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266095/fake-university-harvard-uses-fake-professors-list-robert-spencer