2 Things Liberals Get Wrong
The Importance of Trust
One common theme that unites many disparate liberal policy proposals is that liberals ignore the importance of trust. I am not talking about the question on the World Values Survey which asks whether most people can be trusted. I’m merely referring to the fact that trust is part of human interaction. When you go to the mechanic and ask what work needs to be done on your car, you need to have at least some trust in the mechanic. If you have a friend who is a mechanic, it would make sense to hire him rather than a stranger since your friend is more likely to give you an honest estimate. Similarly you would prefer to take a new job with someone who you know is a good boss rather than someone who has a sketchy reputation.
Liberals support gun control. Conservatives do not support gun control because we do not trust the government. We think that there is a nonzero probability of a tyrannical government arising in the next 50 to 100 years and we believe that citizens should be well armed in order to guard against that possibility. Vietnam and Afghanistan have shown that an armed populace can make things very difficult for occupying powers.
Liberals support vaccine mandates. Conservatives - even ones who believe in the efficacy of vaccines - believe that allowing the government to force people to take vaccines crosses a very dangerous line. It is not unreasonable to be alarmed when someone you have never met is telling you that they are going to inject something into your body against your will. If you have a doctor who you trust who vouches for the efficacy of the vaccine, you might agree to take it. But not everyone trusts distant bureaucrats in DC (or Bill Gates) to make the right decisions - and frankly, given the dysfunctionality of bureaucracy, they shouldn’t. Those who promote vaccines have an obligation to earn the trust of their patients, and earning their trust should not be treated like a psychological operation to break down the primitive “hesitancy” of the rubes. Treating people like children is both insulting and factually wrong. It isn’t the rubes who are being irrational. It is often the public health agencies who are behaving irrationality when they believe that trust is not a legitimate variable in decision making. Earning the trust of patients should mean approaching people like adults, presenting the facts and making the case that a vaccine is effective.
Related: A few liberals actually seem to believe that considering trust as a real variable is immoral. I have met people who think that it is somehow morally wrong to lock your car, or to lock your door at night, or to own a gun. Many liberals react to conspiracy theories in a very hot-tempered way. They seem to think that it is not just mistaken, but actually immoral to doubt the truthfulness of the government and mainstream media.
The Media, Universities and Schools Lie All the Time
America has a media/academia regime. The highest status tier of this regime is the Ivy League + major TV news networks + major newspapers, especially the NYT. Status within this regime is fungible. If you have high status in the Ivy League, it’s pretty easy to get your writing published in the New York Times. Politicians and their staff in DC read mainstream newspapers and most of them believe it uncritically, so the ideas and stories published in mainstream newspapers and television determine politics. This media/academia regime is a particular historical entity at a particular time and a particular place. Other empires, such as Russia and China have their own media/academia regimes (e.g. China’s newspaper The Global Times). In Medieval Europe it was the Catholic Church.
America’s media/academia regime is right about many matters of fact, but it is wrong about some matters of fact.
The Black Lives Matter Narrative - The first case that woke me up to the Media’s dishonesty was the Trayvon Martin incident. On February 26th 2012, Trayvon Martin, a young black man, got into a physical altercation with George Zimmerman. One shot was fired. Trayvon Martin died. Zimmerman was Hispanic but the media described him as a White man, then changed the description to White Hispanic. The mainstream media went ballistic claiming that a White man had deliberately hunted down and killed young black man Trayvon Martin. They gave the story nationwide coverage for weeks.
Yet all evidence indicated that Zimmerman was innocent. Zimmerman (a member of the neighborhood watch) said he had called 9-1-1-, then pursued Martin, then Martin attacked him, throwing him to the ground and smashing his head repeatedly into the pavement. As Zimmerman tried to get away, his shirt was pulled up, revealing the gun he was carrying. Martin looked down and said “You’re going to die tonight motherf****r.” Both Martin and Zimmerman grabbed for the gun. Zimmerman got it first and shot Martin one time. Zimmerman had injuries on the back of his head from the pavement. An eyewitness had seen Martin on top of Zimmerman, punching him.
The media’ dishonesty went beyond selective reporting. NBC news doctored the audio of Zimmerman’s 9-1-1 call. In the original call, Zimmerman told the dispatcher he saw a “real suspicious guy” and the dispatcher replied, “OK, and this guy is he white, black or Hispanic?” Zimmerman replied “He looks black.” NBC edited the audio to make Zimmerman say “there’s a real suspicious guy. He looks black.”
Trayvon Martin was 17 years old but most mainstream media outlets (including the NYT) ran pictures of him as a little boy.
And it wasn’t just Trayvon Martin. A couple years later a police officer in Ferguson Missouri shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18 year old who was attacking the officer and trying to take his gun. The mainstream media ran a completely fictional narrative that Brown had held up his hands and said “hands up don’t shoot” when Officer Wilson shot him. Multiple witnesses confirmed the officer’s version of events and disputed the media’s lies. Riots rocked Ferguson Missouri and cities throughout the country. The Black Lives Matter movement rose to national prominence and the New York Times called it a “new civil rights movement.”
Lynching - Every American child is taught that back in the bad old days, mobs of white people used to get angry and lynch black people for being black. This story is taught in government schools and reinforced by Hollywood. But the idea of racially targeted lynchings is a baseless myth. Lynchings were a form of frontier justice where courts were unavailable. There were cases of white people lynching white people, white people lynching black people, black people lynching white people, and black people lynching black people. We have statistics on the race of people who were lynched1. Between 1882 and 1968 there were 3,445 known cases of lynching. 73% of lynched people were black while black people made up about 27% of the South at that time. This means that black people were over-represented among people who were lynched by a factor of 2.7. Today black people are over-represented among prisoners by a factor of about 3.0. Today, high black incarceration rates are the result of high black crime rates, not bias. Since the over-representation of black people among people who were lynched was less than the over-representation of black people among modern prisoners, the most reasonable conclusion is that the rates at which black people were lynched was likely just a reflection of higher black crime rates, not bias.
I don’t call them “lynching victims” because lynchings were described by the communities which carried them out as executions of criminals. In the absence of evidence to the contrary there is no reason to doubt that the lynched people actually were criminals.
Lots of black AMERICANS are a lost cause. They have drank the victim koolaid and even being treated equally feels like discrimination to them. They need/want special treatment or else it’s racism.