The current US political climate has far reaching consequences on the world at-large. Issues revolving around the divide between progressivism and conservatism, socialism and capitalism, are of no inignificant value. And by virtue of the internet, the debate has more or less been exported into this country. We notice a fanbase of people with shared interests on either political side. As conservative myself, I have been following quite a few conservative groups and personalities on social media.
But some of my observations on the Philippine political arena is a little more troubling. We have people and groups who while claiming some form of alliance to conservatism seem to hold views inconsistent with its ideals. The proximity of the Philippine presidential elections renders the community a lot messier with conservatives siding with different presidential aspirants.
This said, the spread of misinformation is not lacking, even among those who ally themselves with the conservative cause. This may be the result whenever people pledge themselves to personalities rather than principles, or simply, truth.
The following is an example by a certain Thea Tan, who, while proudly claiming to be conservative and well-informed, could not seem to harbor decent information on the internet. In this post she pompously “debunks” a fact-checking group on the issue of Marcos’ supposed gold possessions.
Her main source for this rebuttal was a Wikileaks document supposedly confirming Marcos’ [legitimate] wealth: “Did you know that Wikileaks gives us some information about the Marcos wealth? These are declassified cables and intelligence files not previously available to the public,” she says.
Unfortunately for Thea, the Wikileaks document she cites is no source at all. It is neither an official email from Stratfor, nor an internal email within the company, but an email sent to Stratfor by a certain “Gerald Bakes.”
This heading should be clear at the very outset, and if Thea was actually serious about research she should have at least noticed this from the start. This email was also sent to various media outlets, groups, and personalities like Politico, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few. The sender apparently wanted to sell his story to the press.
The email does not contain material from “intelligence files” as she boldly asserts, but, as we shall see later, are simply wild musings of a 9/11 conspiracist. Wikileaks describes Stratfor as “a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher” and this conspiracist, wanting to get audience for his wild theories, emailed the firm. The address where the email was sent was simply the address posted on the [old] Stratfor website then available for anyone who wanted to contact the agency.
Moreover, the contents of the email is apparently simply a copy-paste of existing online material on 9/11 conspiracy theory. Wikileaks has the email sent Dec. 4, 2011, but a huge part of the email is available online before this date. For example, this totally unrelated comment on a blog post, dated Sept. 11, 2011, is an exact verbatim of the content starting from “The following is an attempt to present in a compact form the claims made by Dick Eastman…”
This need not be belabored further. The content of the material, the style of writing, and the relative anonymity of the sender, can hardly be relegated to a “source,” much less a credible one. I should reiterate that this is an email (or rather, spam) sent to the Stratfor group and many other media outlets about a conspiracy theory on 9/11. Just because one finds it somewhere on Wikileaks does not make it any more true. It seems Thea’s bold accusation of “mediocre research” falls back on her.
The other “source” Thea brings forward is another Wikileaks page proving, for her, Marcos’ “gold diggings.” And yet again, the classified document from the State Department only speaks of possible allegations against Marcos — not that he actually had the loot or that he obtained it by legitimate means:
“Case involves allegations that Marcos for personal gain master-minded attempt to establish cover operation in Philippines to “launder” extensive secret caches of loot stolen from Southeast Asia by Japanese troops and buried them in Philippines during World War II. “Laundry” operation was apparently intended to render loot (including gold bars, gems, coins and objets d’art) disposable on world market.”
I’m not sure if Thea actually reads the sources she cites, because it’s anything but what she says. It’s also noteworthy that on her previous Wikileaks source she seems believe the connection between Marcos’ gold, the Federal Reserve, and 9/11 — something that the spurious email, a copy-paste of an anonymous online comment, tries to make.
The “reliability” of her sources are conditioned by her inner bias. Instead of carefully sifting through data from credible sources, she seems to be content standing on spurious information found in the internet simply because it aligns with her views. The discipline of carefully weighing information should be a trait of every individual, and should definitely mark someone who calls herself conservative.
This article does not aim to disprove or verify the gold claims. I simply wanted to point out the sloppy Wikileaks “research” Thea Tan audaciously presents as facts, since she proudly parades herself as a well-informed conservative. As a side note, the way she writes her posts seem to display an outburst of emotions. Emotions are good, but if we let it control our understanding of what should be true, we will end up in a cobweb of lies. Facts do not always align with the disposition of our emotions. As Ben Shapiro would quip: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
I probably wouldn’t bother writing this article (there’s too much false content online to even take seriously) if Thea Tan doesn’t call herself conservative and have quite a following. But for someone who calls herself one while at the same time feasting on material we can aptly call rubbish, she effectively destroys her own witness and puts Filipino conservatives in a bad light.
[Postscript: At this time of writing Thea Tan has blocked me from her page for simply questioning (on the comments section) some of the sources her followers cited for her assertion. The thread OP was one follower asking for additional resources to back her claims up. I simply pointed out that other “sources” out there were simply self-published material by 9/11 conspiracists. I thought she welcomed intelligent discussions? Is she a true conservative? I don’t know. But I’m quite certain this woman is no more concerned with truth than she is with her own propaganda.]
