“Come now, and let us reason together,” was the invitation of God to His people as quoted in Isaiah 1:18. But no one today seems inclined to accept such an invitation to polite dialogue. Both sides of the political spectrum seem so entrenched in their ideologies, no, not even ideologies, in their beliefs, that they can not for a second entertain the thought that their argument might contain some flaw. Then candidate Trump once famously said that he could publicly commit murder in Times Square and many of his followers would still believe in him. Likewise, he could find the cure for cancer, end the wars in the Middle East, and bring prosperity to America and many on the left and in the media would rage about how he was colluding with Putin to rule the world between them. Logic and reason no longer play a role in politics.
One of my Facebook friends, for example, nearly daily comes out with comments like, “The election is over. He won the electoral vote but he didn’t win the popular vote and he can’t get over it. He doesn’t care about America, just himself!” She conveniently forgets, of course, the many months that she claimed he was an illegitimate president, not her president, didn’t really win because more people voted for Hillary, etc. She gets lots of responses to her posts, many supporting her and many pointing out where she is wrong in her ideas. She responds and the debates rage on, usually without much in the way of real fact backing up either side. I responded to her a few times, as well, pointing out facts from various sources that suggested her arguments were flawed, but I have had to stop. “Why do you always have to respond to my posts?” she complained. “I don’t respond to yours!” Obviously, facts are bothersome annoyances that get in the way of “Trump is a bigot!” “Oh, yeah? What do you think Obama was?”
We watch Tucker Carlson from time to time because he refuses to let his guests get away with avoiding his questions and manages to clearly shine a light on their bias. It can be quite entertaining. Last night he talked with a former Mitt Romney advisor, Max Boot, who decried the idea that Trump would ever consider working with Putin to destroy ISIS since Putin is a former KGB agent who has undoubtedly had many of his political opponents murdered. Carlson pointed out that sometimes the U.S. has to work with governments who have deplorable civil rights records simply because it is in our best interests to do so. Boot, vehemently disagreed. Finally, Carlson pointed out that with the Lend-Lease program during WWII, the U.S. had provided arms to Soviet Russia under Stalin despite what we knew about him, since at that point we deemed Hitler to be the more immediate and common foe. Boot sputtered and mumbled and finally decreed that it was not at all the same thing. He then launched himself back into his talking points about the evil Putin. No one believes Putin is anything but an evil dictator under the guise of an elected leader. However, as Carlson pointed out, our country has had to ally herself frequently with less than desirable countries in order to advance the good of America. Once again, however, Max Boot demonstrated that facts are an annoyance to be avoided at all costs, both by the left and by the right!
Try to engage someone on the sacrosanct idea of climate change. Try, as I have, to provide facts from multiple sources showing that some scientists have manipulated figures to show that the earth’s temperature is rising by taking those temperatures in heavily metropolitan areas which are always hotter because of reflected heat from cement, engines, factories, and so on, or even by changing the figures themselves. Try providing news sources that relate emails between scientists discussing altering data that does not support the global warming theory. Try reminding them of the whistle-blower scientist who admits that data has been changed. No one wants to listen to you. They haven’t heard those reports on CBS, NBC, ABC, or CNN and so they rush back with “Science is real!” I like to counter that argument with, “Tell that to Galileo!” But perhaps some of them don’t know who Galileo was.
In another Facebook discussion I read, but didn’t comment on, one dissident quoted an online news source for a fact that disputed what the original post had said. “Who is that?” the original poster queried. Another person answered with, “Oh, that is just a Christian website.” “Oh, yeah,” the original poster concurred. “According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Washington Post it is run by a White Supremacist and often has anti-gay and anti-Jewish articles.” Really? Dismiss it because it is a Christian website? Call it anti-gay and anti-Jewish (when Christian groups are the most pro-Israel groups in the country) and run by a White Supremacist because that is how the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Washington Post describe it? Here again are individuals who do not know the bias of the news agencies that they are quoting. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Washington Post are about as far left as you can get and not exactly trustworthy in the fair and unbiased department. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center did a study of hate crimes in schools following President Trump’s election and published only hate crimes against non-whites, despite the thousands of reports of bullying and hateful speech reported by teachers across the country which had been directed against white students. That is hardly unbiased reporting! But those sites are liberal and the Christian site quoted by the dissenting voice was a conservative site. The liberal Facebook poster was not about to consider that the Christian site might have accurate reporting or that the liberal sites which condemned it might be biased and unfair in their judgment of it.
So, why can we not sit down and reason together? Why can we not debate the issues with each side presenting their proof and supporting arguments? Because in large part, few of us actually know the facts. We accept the message of our preferred news organization and do no research on our own. Why should we, after all? The News is supposed to give us the facts, so we don’t have to find them out for ourselves. But unfortunately, few news organizations just give us the news anymore. The Media Research Council found that CBS, NBC, and ABC “crowded their stories with quotes from citizens angry about many of his (Trump’s) policies, while providing relatively little airtime to Trump supporters,” and their “anchors and reporters often injected their own anti-Trump editorial tone into the coverage.” In one example, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley on Feb. 6 commented: “It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality” (as quoted in The Daily Wire). Speaking of former President Obama, Chris Matthews famously said he felt a thrill running up and down his legs when he heard Obama speak. He even cried over one of his speeches, comparing Obama to Jesus. This from a supposed impartial news reporter for MSNBC.
Indeed, the press has an undeniable liberal bent. In April of 2016, the Washington Free Beacon reported the results of a survey of White House reporters which indicated that not a single one was a registered Republican. All were either Democrats or unaffiliated with a political party. Later, in October, the Washington Examiner quoted a Washington Post reporter, Chris Cillizza who had tweeted “Let me say for the billionth time: Reporters don’t root for a side. Period.” But then the article went on to quote a report by the Center for Public Integrity which had released the 2016 campaign analysis just two days after Cillizza’s tweet, showing that of the 430 journalists who had given $200 or more to a presidential campaign, 380 of them, 96%, had donated to Hillary Clinton a whopping $382,000 compared to the $14,000 donated by the other 50 journalists to Donald Trump. And self-proclaimed Democratic journalists outnumber Republicans by 4-to-1, according to research by Lars Willnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana University (Politico).
It takes a great deal of integrity to endeavor to insure that your reporting does not reflect your bias. Sadly, few reporters today seem to have the strength of character or integrity required to deliver an unbiased news report. Consider the New York Times who first broke the Russian/Trump collusion story based upon “anonymous sources” from various supposed intelligence agencies. Former FBI Director James Comey later related before a Congressional hearing that the story was filled with lies, but that it wasn’t the job of the FBI to correct inaccurate news stories. Consider CNN who was forced to fire several of their reporters after another Russia/Trump Collusion story was shown to be totally fictitious. Consider that when radical Islamic Terrorists attacked London for the third time in only a few weeks, most news organizations spent little time on the attack, focusing instead on the latest leaks about Trump associates and their Russian conversations. Consider that few Americans know anything about all of the bills that President Trump has signed into law or about all of the presidential orders created by President Obama that he has countermanded, freeing up portions of the economy from crippling regulations. No one is reporting those things except Fox News and some conservative internet sites. The News sources themselves don’t necessarily believe what they publish or broadcast. A video of a CNN executive shows the man calling the Russia/Trump collusion a bunch of BS. Total BS. But, he admits, it gets CNN ratings and so they keep perpetuating the story.
We need, as a country, to be able to sit down together, right and left, conservative and liberal and discuss rationally the problems that face this country at home and abroad. We need to understand that repealing and replacing Obamacare is not going to murder thousands of the poor and elderly, and that defunding Planned Parenthood for a year is not going to murder countless mothers in back alley abortion clinics. We need to understand that reducing the budget of the EPA and removing the ridiculously invasive government regulations on farmers’ ponds and creeks is not going to poison the air with smog and fill our drinking water with toxic wastes. These are nothing but the deliberate, fear-mongering lies of the opposition. Let us lay aside such stupidities and discuss how to reduce government regulation without sacrificing safety measures, how to prevent taxpayer funded abortion without removing availability of other health measures from women in poor areas, how to fix a health system that if left alone, or simply bandaged together, will soon fail the very people it was intended to save. But in order to be able to talk reasonably about these issues, we must become educated on them. We must look beyond our favorite news source, search the web, read opinion pieces and news articles. We must become aware. Then and then only can we sit down and reason together. Then and only then will anything be accomplished.