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Let’s don’t dig the hole deeper



You’d think that radical centrists, whose perpetual wrongness is exceeded only by their perpetual smugness, would give up and go away. But their latest project is harassing the New York Times’ op-ed pages for “lack of opinion diversity.”

We liberals are said to live in a bubble, you see. We are regularly scolded for failing to “reach out” to Trump supporters. We are said not to understand Trump-supporter grievances and Trump-supporter views.

Here I need words for maximum contempt, maximum derision, and a healthy burst of anger. To say what I actually think would be too rude. But the truth of the matter is that I understand Trump supporters perfectly well. There is no need to “reach out” to them, because no bubble could possibly be good enough to prevent us from hearing all about what they think. We are fully immersed in it, even after we clean them out of our Facebook feeds. I know exactly what Republicans are going to say before they say anything. I know all their talking points. Name an issue, and I’ll tell you what Republicans think. And it’s 98.6 percent horsewash, an ugly mix of distortion, denial, fallacy, meanness, corrupt theology, and constantly repeated lies.

The idea, then, is that in the name of “opinion diversity,” the horsewash that saturates the right-wing media and that has warped the minds of about 40 percent of the population should also be allowed into the New York Times. It is alleged that this would somehow improve the minds and politics of we liberals who read the New York Times. It’s medicine we need that the Times ought to give us, an antidote to our lefty “partisan” views.

But this is exactly how we got to where we are today. When Fox News came along 25 years ago and learned how to make a profitable billionaire-owned business out of brainwashing ignorant old white people without a pot to piss in into becoming ever-angry foot soldiers for the billionaire agenda, the mainstream media were caught off guard. Often, those in the mainstream media knew a lie when they saw one, but to say that something was false and intentionally deceptive was not permitted on grounds of “balance.” And so, for 25 years, the mainstream media’s line was “opinions differ on whether the world is flat.” Thus the mainstream media was paralyzed and was unable to report, as a matter of plain fact, that Donald Trump is a corrupt and dangerous madman. Terrified of being accused of lack of balance, the mainstream media remained easily manipulable and thus actually wrote much more about Hillary Clinton’s emails than about Donald Trump’s criminal history and foreign entanglements. A media catastrophe enabled a political catastophe. Now we’re on course for a constitutional crisis and a catastrophe for the American democracy. And yet we’re told that we need yet more of what got us here.

The world is not flat. If an op-ed policy that refuses to coddle lies and distortion makes a bubble, then who would resent that bubble other than those who have lies to sell and those who enable them with their centrist apologetics?

Radical centrists see politics as inherently symmetrical. If there are irrational partisans on the right, then radical centrists assume that there must be equally irrational partisans on the left, in equal numbers. If partisans on the right lie and distort, then partisans on the left must equally lie and distort. Only centrists, they believe, can see things with objectivity and clarity and avoid partisan excess. Yes, there are those on the left who think that we have some sort of religious duty to “reach out” to Trump supporters. Let them alight from their Priuses and actually get some Trump-supporter spit in their faces, rather than sermonizing about it on Facebook, and see what they end up learning from those Trump supporters.

The right-wing media and right-wing politics have dug a very deep hole. With a still-unknown amount of foreign help, we have all fallen into that hole. “Opinion diversity,” which really means tolerating lies and disguised agendas, is not going to get us out. It’s how we dig the hole deeper.

3 Comments

  1. Karren Coplen wrote:

    Thank you for such a clear statement of the situation. I sincerely hope we find a way to dig out of this hole we’re in before the sides collapse in and bury us all.

    Monday, March 5, 2018 at 11:28 am | Permalink
  2. Henry Sandigo wrote:

    Hmmm…maybe you could condense what you state here into say one sentence, then I could hand it to the “idiot” supporters so they can understand what it is they defend without their understanding.

    Thanks David,

    Henry

    Tuesday, March 6, 2018 at 6:25 pm | Permalink
  3. DCS wrote:

    How the Anti-Democracy Movement Used Media to Command the Narrative

    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43769-how-the-anti-democracy-movement-used-media-to-command-the-narrative

    Shorter, funnier version:

    http://www.truth-out.org/art/item/43780-the-columnist

    DCS

    Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 2:16 pm | Permalink

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