Thomas B. Edsall: Trump Is Staking Out His Own Universe Of "Alternative Facts"

I've already posted one long screed this morning. I'm screeded out. Lucky thing for you.

This is long and ranty. 

I started skimming pretty quickly. I'm not saying Edsall is wrong. But it made me want to start singing my one and only tune: the progressive left is now--at least arguably--worse. At the very least, they're no better. At the very very last, they're not better enough to ignore the very vices they complain about in the right.

To again quote the great Don Henley: I could be wrong but I'm not.

Politics seems to bring out the crazy in people. There's a lot that's long concerned me on the right. Including and especially the religious right. (And I really, really don't get this Trump is anointed by God business. All I can do at that is shake my head. God--I suppose--knows what's up with that.)

At any rate: there may be good stuff in the Edsall piece, and I intend to go back and actually read it. But very quickly I just, well, started shaking my head. What's astounding to me about the progressive left is that they seem completely blind to the fact that they have virtually the exact same failings they complain about when those problems appear on the right. The groupthink. The hatred and intolerance of those who disagree. The antirationality in general and antiscientific...ness?...in particular. And as for the groupthink: since the left controls all aspects of the culture, their groupthink is almost necessarily groupthinkier than that of the right. There's data--at least somewhat relevant--that indicates that conservatives know what liberals think--they're much better at articulating the positions and arguments with which they disagree...because they're surrounded by them. They can't turn on the t.v. without liberal/progressive views being represented explicitly or implicitly. Lefties, OTOH, aren't as good at articulating righty arguments because they're rarely exposed to them. And less and less so now that there's active Big Tech censorship of those views. 

   I mean...how can Edsall make the arguments he's making even as his own newspaper--the nation's most prominent--has only recently got done promoting and helping to create perhaps the greatest conspiracy theory of my lifetime--as should go without saying: Russiagate? And only gave it up when it became impossible not to... And then switched immediately to a second fantasy or conspiracy theory, the "1619 Project"--entirely of their own creation? Which they maintain despite copious refutation? And which they help force onto college students and even school children? And that same news paper has refused to acknowledge the release of evidence that seems to show that what actually happened was virtually the opposite of the Russiagate hoax? And, finally, that the president who they supported slavishly for eight years seems to be implicated in a massive effort to subvert democracy? 

   And none of that is even to mention what may be the most astonishingly antirational cultural/political development of my lifetime, the creation, promotion, and implementation of transgender ideology.

   And none of this means that Trump doesn't have a lot of the flaws they attribute to him--though, of course, their own groupthink, coltishness, tribalism and so on aforementioned leads them to exaggerate and distort all that, too.

   Anyway. I hope there something more than tu quoque afoot when I say: physician, ****ing heal thyself.