The United States has entered into a post-reality era, in which facts, logic and truth have apparently become irrelevant. The problem affects thinking, politics and policy on both domestic and foreign issues.
One salient example can be seen in the protests on college campuses, that illustrates the warped intellect that has replaced actual information and realism in public discourse. The organization, “Queers for Palestine,” has advocated in favor of a middle eastern movement that has punished homosexuality with death. Those who have sought to inform the members of the incongruity of their position have been met with rage, threats and taunts.
On a far greater scale is the issue of human-made climate change. Whether or not one subscribes to the existence of it, the reality is that none of the “solutions” advocated would have any significant impact on the matter.
Writing in Current Affairs, Benjamin Zycher notes that “The implicit assertion of various climate proposals is that they would, upon implementation, yield significant beneficial effects. Yet curiously, their proponents almost never specify the future effects in terms of temperatures and other important climate measurements. The reality is that even policies that would most aggressively reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would likely have only very small effects on climate…Even if we were to incorporate assumptions that exaggerate the impact of reduced greenhouse-gas emissions, full implementation of the “net-zero” emissions goals of the Biden administration would reduce global temperatures by 0.17 degrees Celsius by 2100. That effect would be barely detectable given normal variation in the global temperature record.
James Temple, who believes climate change is an existential threat, noted in MIT Technology Review that “We simply don’t know whether some of these proposed interventions will actually work on large scales, or what negative effects they could have on complex and interconnected ecosystems, says David Ho, an oceanography professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa who studies ocean-based carbon removal. These are also real dangers that plowing ahead into areas where the public is deeply uncomfortable will stall, not speed up, research in these fields.”
Progressive policies such as Universal Basic Income have become popular with the U.S. left recently. It’s not altogether new. The question of how it would be funded seems to have been downplayed. As far back as 2015, even the leftist-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that “There are over 300 million Americans today. Suppose UBI provided everyone with $10,000 a year. That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years. This single-year figure equals more than three-fourths of the entire yearly federal budget — and double the entire budget outside Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. It’s also equal to close to 100 percent of all tax revenue the federal government collects.”
Nevertheless, many Democrats continue to advocate for it.
The increasingly urgent threat of a significant conflict looms large. China’s navy is vastly larger than America’s, and it uses its force to invade areas belonging to a U.S. ally. Iran, whose leaders have pledged “Death to America,” is about to get a nuclear arsenal. Russia’s Putin continues his invasion of Ukraine, and possess the planet’s most powerful atomic arsenal. Yet the media barely discusses the issue with candidates. The Biden-Harris Administration has proposed defense budgets that actually, accounting for inflation, reduces funds for the Pentagon.
The Democratic Party has nominated a candidate who steadfastly refuses to provide policy specifics, and denies responsibility for many of the most important policy positions she has taken during her five years in the Senate and almost four years as Vice President. Despite, literally, thousands of newspaper, internet, and electronic media articles proclaiming her the “border Czar,” the post-truth media, with limited exceptions, assists her evasion of any responsibility for the disastrous problems caused by the illegal immigrants flooding into the country during her watch. The crises facing America are complex, even existential. The failure of progressive politicians and their media supporters to address them honestly and factually presents an unprecedented level of danger.
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