You’re wrong! And if you don’t agree with me, you’re an evil, lying moron

By David McElroy · March 25, 2012

There was a time when I was mostly worried about politicians lying to me. These days, I’m just as afraid of the vicious lies from political activists. The ones who know they’re lying are bad enough, but the really scary ones are those who are so full of hatred that they have no room for nuance — or even truth.

Truth can be a nebulous concept to an angry person. For someone who is filled with rage and is convinced that the other side — whichever that “other side” might be — consists of evil people, anything is justified as long as he strikes out at those enemies. If he lies a little in spreading his message, well, the other sides is even worse about that. Besides, since it’s the only way to get people to listen to the ultimate truth, a little lying is justified to get their attention.

You can’t just give a reasoned opinion today if you want to be heard. You have to scream. You have to be angry. You have to demonize the people who disagree with you. If you try to be reasonable and understand why different people see the world in ways that are different from your ways, the truth is that your voice is going to get lost in the crowd. It’s going to take a lot longer to be heard. It’s a lot more work and there are fewer immediate rewards.

So many people who write and speak to the world politically take short cuts. They lie when it suits their needs. They don’t worry about little things such as fairness. They don’t worry about holding themselves to a higher standard than they expect of “the enemy.” And they scream their message to a willing audience that’s angry, too, and will amplify the message by way of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media tools.

In my Twitter feed this morning was a link to an article headlined, “Obama Signs Bill That Ends Free Speech.” This was either another deception or I’d missed the biggest story to come out lately, so I went to check. Here’s the link for you to read the story yourself. I defy you to find any fair and honest way to come up with that headline from anything the story says. Even though the new law might be bad, it very definitely doesn’t end free speech. It’s on a website for a very conservative group with Christian roots, so I’d like to think that the concept of truth means something to them, but it clearly doesn’t. As with almost everybody else, they’re shouting and sensationalizing in order to be heard.

If you’re on the progressive left and you feel smug seeing that the offender here was some social conservative outfit, don’t be that way. The folks on your side are just as bad. Taking a look at something such as Daily Kos means finding the same sorts of casual dishonesty and unfairness plenty of times.

I have to be honest and say that there are times when I wish I could take a more sensationalistic tone here. It would certainly help readership. Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — I can’t do that. It’s not me. If I were to do that, I would be far too conscious of the unfairness and dishonesty of what I was doing. It would be corrosive on the inside, I’m sure.

Unfortunately, most people want inflammatory articles that they already agree with. If they already hate Barack Obama and various liberal Democrats, they want articles to feed their hatred. If they already hate religious people and various kinds of conservatives and Republicans, they want articles that pander to what they already believe, too.

With as many articles as I write, not all of them can be thoughtful and insightful. (Some might not think any of them are.) Some of what I write has to be a matter of holding up something that someone has done — from either side of the mainstream, for the most part — and saying, “This is a terrible thing this person or group has done.” Those are the least interesting things I write and they’re the least useful for making you think, but they’re also the articles most likely to be shared on Facebook and Twitter. The articles that I think actually do have insight — which do come along every now and then — are the ones most likely to be ignored.

I’m frustrated at the state of public discourse, but it’s something Neil Postman predicted in his classic 1984 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” which I’ve mentioned before. To a large extent, the media we use make it impossible to fairly and reasonably communicate complex ideas and learn from each other. I highly recommend the book, which was the catalyst for me giving up television about 15 years ago.

Reasonable people have to find ways of talking and disagreeing. We have to find some sort of political and intellectual framework that will allow us to disagree — rather than feeling it’s a fight to the death and everyone who isn’t on “our side” is an enemy to be destroyed. I don’t know if there are enough people who are interested in this. I don’t know if there are enough people who yet realize that some of us are going to have to peacefully go our separate ways. But that conversation has to begin sometime.

In the meantime, I’ll keep talking about whatever is on my mind and hoping to find the tiny minority who are interested in those things. I think it’s important that those of us who feel that way find each other. Even if we disagree on deeply held beliefs, our civility might lay the groundwork for something important in the future.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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