Eric Allen Bell: Once blind about radical Islam and the Left, but now he sees *UPDATED*

Eric Allen Bell, a former Daily Kos contributor and an independent filmmaker for Left-leaning outlets, had an epiphany recently:  Islam is not a nice religion.  Indeed, it’s a very un-nice religion, one that sees the embodiment of human perfection in a child-raping, misogynistic, antisemitic crime lord.  When he tried to share that epiphany with the liberals who made up his work and personal life, he was blackballed, maligned, and threatened.  He writes about his experiences here.

Bell’s essay is an important one, because it shows that, armed with information, people can change their minds.  However, it’s also a depressing essay because it shows that the Left is bound and determined to keep that information away from the American public.

In that same depressing vein, if you haven’t already read the Daily Caller expose showing how Media Matters (very successfully) works closely with the Obama White House to provide talking points for the mainstream media, you should.  Again, it’s a reminder that, in an information age, lies are precisely as mobile and far-reaching as the truth — more so, in fact, when the liars control the White House, the Media, and the educational institutions.

I frequently remind myself that a conspiracy theorist is someone who takes the absence of evidence as proof of something.  We in the new media are not conspiracy theorists.  We are truth-miners and truth-spreaders.  We don’t need to make up things or weave fragile stories made up of unrelated, and often imaginary, “facts”.  Instead, our responsibility, as Eric Bell has discovered, is simply to break down the media filter between their artificial reality and the facts on the ground.

Troops, we’ve got a fight ahead of us.  A tough fight, but a good one.  Our weapons in this good war are facts, truth, and words.  There are times when we’ll want to give up, but Eric Bell’s story reminds us that the truth can set people free.  Even if we can only achieve victory one person at a time, we still have to fight that fight.

UPDATED:  And since I mentioned the Media Matters expose, here’s another post about David Brock,