Egg-regious Lies: Are Stories About ‘Cancelling Easter’ Really All Just Fake News?
Every year as we approach Holy Week, a story appears in which it is alleged some misguided organization or other has just “cancelled Easter” by removing all official mention of it from their output. Concerned Christians and conservatives then move in to object, calling such measures yet another case of politically correct pandering to hair-trigger minority groups like Muslims or queers. Usually, the organization so targeted then denies having cancelled Easter at all, generally by picking up on a minor inaccuracy in initial reporting and thus arguing critics have been “misinformed,” a line happily repeated in wholly uncritical fashion by the largely anti-Christian mainstream media.
At this point, most initially irritated citizens simply take this media-dispersed denial for granted and move on. Yet those few hardy souls inclined to look into the matter further will often find that, while the denial of the organization concerned is technically correct, in actual spirit just such a cancellation of the religious element of the festival really has taken place after all.
A classic illustration occurred last Easter in Great Britain when, in a piece of quite literal gesture politics, it was reported that the U.K.’s leading chocolate manufacturer, Cadbury, had begun selling generic “Gesture Eggs” instead of “Easter Eggs” to the public, possibly to avoid offending Britain’s ever increasing number of Muslims. One of the country’s best-known religious pressure groups, Christian Concern, promptly accused Cadbury of trying to “erase the connection between Easter and eggs.” Cadbury then denied doing any such thing, pointing out their seasonal products “reference Easter very clearly on the packaging—sometimes multiple times,” making Christian Concern’s allegation “factually incorrect.”
The company’s public correction then allowed online fact-checking sites like America’s Snopes—once a reliable, nonpartisan, urban-myth-debunking site, now a biased left-leaning outlet more devoted toward exposing alleged right-wing “fake news”—to claim the whole story was false.
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
