A subject which never ends. My fascination with this, yet again, isn’t about politics per se, so much as trying to understand why people believe what they do, and how humanity struggles with the balance of survival vs understanding.
- How Fox News spins crime data;
- How Trump and RFK Jr. are epistemological pals;
- RFK Jr. promises to investigate chemtrails!;
- How Reagan tried out some of the ideas in Project 2025;
- And David French on the Christian persecution narrative.
/>
Media Matters, Gideon Taaffe, 23 Aug 2024: Fox News is pushing data from a former Trump official to incorrectly suggest violent crime is rising during the Biden administration
As the Democratic National Convention continued in the background this week, Fox News personalities attempted to cast over the convention a shadow of supposedly rising crime. The network repeatedly sought to dispel FBI data showing a decrease in violent crime by instead using statistics from a Heritage Foundation fellow and former Trump administration official. By comparing current crime rates to 2019, rather than 2021 when Biden and Harris entered office, Fox News is skewing the narrative to deny that crime rates have decreased during the Biden administration.
\
Washington Post, column by Philip Bump, 26 Aug 2024: The fact-vs.-fiction election, subtitled “The alliance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump makes sense from an epistemological standpoint, if not a policy one.”
They celebrate each other’s inaccurate beliefs.
This reflects the through-line between him and Trump: that there is no expertise or authority that should be given deference over what you want or believe to be true. That scientists and military experts and researchers have opinions that can sit alongside your own. Or, in many cases, have opinions that are inferior to your own, since they are part of informational systems that are inherently untrustworthy by virtue of including those experts.
The base issue:
It’s an epistemological framework that isn’t exclusive to Trump and Kennedy, obviously. It was once assumed that the internet, by allowing global, instant access to information, would lead to broader awareness of issues and a collective understanding. But we’ve seen, instead, that the internet (and social media in particular) instead lead to misleading or overtly false belief systems, cobbled together from bits of cherry-picked information. Self-reinforcing and self-policing communities have emerged. There is an entire economy, powered in part by overtly bad actors, centered on meeting demand.
\\
For example.
Salon, Nandika Chatterjee, 27 Aug 2024: Trump team won’t condemn RFK Jr. “chemtrails” conspiracy, says campaign “proud” to have him on board, subtitled “The Trump campaign isn’t denying Robert Kennedy Jr.’s suggestion that the ex-president would take on ‘chemtrails'”
Think of what else they can promise to get rid of, then claim success. Bigfoot! Nessie! UFOs! But they will never eliminate “chemtrials,” because they’re just water condensation. Let them try!
\\
Republicans are ideological in the sense that they keep trying things based on beliefs that evidence has shown do not work.
LA Times, Opinion by Joel Edward Goza, 25 Aug 2024: Opinion: The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered
It seems the Heritage Foundation, the institute behind Project 2025, was behind a similar plan in 1981 called “The Mandate for Leadership,” which informed Reagan’s policies. Which didn’t work out so well.
Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.
All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.
\\
Let’s end for today with this. From a conservative Christian.
NY Times, David French, 25 Aug 2024: The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow
When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.
Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.
But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.
Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.
After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.
He goes on about those two mistakes. I’ve linked this as a gift link so you can read the article without being a subscriber. French notes:
Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.
