A recent article at American Thinker titled An illustrated look at the evolution of the ‘inject Lysol’ anti-Trump hoax made a very interesting point about hoaxes in general. The article lays out the chronological timeline and associated media ‘events’ that falsely claimed that President Trump recommended drinking disinfectants to combat COVID 19. Here is the quote from the article:

“On Thursday, April 23, President Donald Trump ruminated during a press conference about the possibility that, just as disinfectants can destroy the Wuhan virus outside the body, there might be a way to destroy the virus inside the body. Within hours, the mainstream media was telling people the Trump was telling Americans to inject or ingest disinfectant to treat Wuhan virus.

After that, the internet was quickly inundated with “Trump said to drink bleach” memes. While there was factual pushback from conservatives, facts made no difference – the hoax was set in place. It will now be a smear against Trump’s name as permanent as the Charlottesville hoax.”

If you remember, the Charlottesville hoax accused the President of being a racist and praising white supremacists when all he did was say there were good people on both sides of debate about removing a Robert E. Lee statue. In fact, the President has condemned the white supremacist movement. No matter, the ‘racist’ label stuck like glue. The American Thinker article uses the current ‘disinfectant’ hoax to chronicle the phases through which hoaxes pass until they become recognized as fact in the hearts and minds of some of us human beings (the gullible ones). I highly recommend reading the article.

The part of the article that caught my attention the loudest was near the end of the article, where a “point of no return”, from which there is no turning back to reality, even when the actual facts of the case have been presented over and over again.

“This information (actual facts) will be unavailing. In connection with the Charlottesville hoax, Scott Adams has explained that, once the hoax is fixed, there is no way to displace it with facts. No matter how often he showed people the transcript in which Trump made it crystal clear that he was not calling white supremacists “fine people,” Trump haters could not recognize that information:

After a few years of trying to deprogram people from this hoax, I have discovered a fascinating similarity in how people’s brains respond to having their worldview annihilated in real time. I call it the “fine people” hoax funnel. When you present the debunking context to a believer in the hoax, they will NEVER say this: “Gee, I hadn’t seen the full quote. Now that I see it in its complete form, it is obvious to me that my long-held belief is 100% wrong and the media has been duping me.”

That doesn’t happen.

What happens, instead, is that people, when presented with the documented facts (unassailable videos and transcripts), will start making up facts that comport with their belief system.”

Having said all that, I present to you a question:

“IS there a similarity between the evolution of a hoax and the adamant assertion that fallen human beings still have a libertarian ‘free will’ that is exactly the same as was Adam’s free will before the Fall?”

I ask the question from having noticed that there is a widespread assumption in Christendom that the Fall of man had no effect whatsoever on the human will. That is to say that fallen men can ‘by nature’ choose Christ as Savior and Lord. In fact, NO amount of presenting the Bible’s view of fallen men, what they literally ’can’ and ‘cannot’ do, in and of their natural selves, will result in libertarian free will advocates even examining the issue! You can ask almost all ‘free will’ advocates if they have asked Scripture about the state of the human will after the fall, but they find the suggestion nonsensical. After, we all KNOW we have complete free will and natural power to come to Christ all on our own.

At the same time that ‘free will’ in matters spiritual is a foregone conclusion by most Christians these days. IS there a connection/similarity in this issue and the evolution of ‘hoaxes’ described in the American Thinker article? I’m not coming to any conclusions here, although the ‘free will’ assumption has been around for a long, long, time.

Food for thought………