It Depends on Where You Get Your ‘Facts’

In brief, it was predicted that he would never concede, that he would claim that he was robbed, and that he would continue to be insulting to his enemies. Notice that I use the word "enemies" rather than "opponents" because it has become increasingly clear that this is how Trump actually sees his opponents. (Photo above: Rush Limbaugh, right wing radio broadcaster.) 

But the deeper lesson is for those of us who have been hoping that somehow, people who supported Trump out of policy and principle would eventually find it in their minds to look for some common ground. I've even invited some mutual searching for that common ground in these pages, when I wondered publicly whether healing (as Joe Biden is asking for) is something that is possible. 

Maybe for some of us, this will turn out to be the case. But I'm coming to believe that for much of the American people, finding common ground will never be possible. There are still people who want to claim that Trump really won the election because reasons -- and those reasons range from flimsy to nonexistent. 

(I'm going to insert an aside here that may ultimately point at the best we can do, which is to learn to do hard bargaining with the Mitch McConnell Republicans in the senate, and out of that get a few things that will ultimately be mutually acceptable.) 

Back to the wishful thinking part of the discussion: Is there any middle ground between the 80 million people who flocked to the polls to vote against Donald Trump and the 74 million people who voted for him? I think there is a lot of common ground that will go unrecognized -- much of the Bill of Rights, for example -- but we won't be talking about it that way because we have learned to adopt entirely different vocabularies to make large differences out of the small. 

This insight (if you want to call it that) comes from a brief bit of research I did over the past week by listening to talk radio. By talk radio, it should go without saying, we are referring to right-wing radio, which is referred to by its practitioners as conservative. 

The intent here was to listen to what the other side was saying (on the not unreasonable assumption that talk radio is about as far to the right as you can go) and thereby collect some data on what, if anything, we might ever agree upon or what we shall never agree upon. This may have been a useless venture because, it would appear, the talk radio universe isn't really looking for any points of agreement. That doesn't appear to be what they are about, but more on that topic at another time. 

So, what were they saying? In case you are curious, I did not hear even one host admit that Biden had won the election, even though it was after the networks had called it for Biden on November 7. But neither did I hear a full throated assertion that it was in the bag for Trump. I think, had I been listening on the night of the election or the day after, that we would have heard a lot of self-congratulatory words, back when Trump was ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But by last week, we were in that never-never land where Trump and his supporters were trying to turn reality on its head. 

One technique was to provide a sort of parody of what the other side (i.e.: the mass media) was saying, and then manage to find fault with it. Here is one example: The talk show host pointed out that the media were saying things like, "Trump has lost 27 out of the 31 lawsuits he has filed." That same host then went on to claim that most of those lawsuits were not actually filed by Trump. In fact, he said, Trump himself was only involved in 3 of those lawsuits. And when they came to court, we would see. 

The idea that those dozens of other lawsuits could be ignored as irrelevant to the question was pretty remarkable, particularly as the Trump forces were bragging about all the litigation going on, but when you've got to fill a lot of air time and you simultaneously want to present an indefensible position, you've definitely got your work cut out for you. So out of that sort of quandary, we get fatuous claims like that one. 

A little later in the week, another host spoke about the verdict in the Pennsylvania court which got so much press coverage. As you may remember, the judge was absolutely caustic in his view of the Trump side, pointing out that regardless of the fact that the lawsuit was officially filed in the name of two plaintiffs, it was in reality an attempt to disenfranchise seven million Pennsylvania voters. The judge then wrote some truly negative things about the logic and lack of facts brought by the plaintiffs. How did this particular talk show host handle the mass of factual findings and logic in the judge's findings? 

The answer to this question is important, because it indicates where we are probably going to go with respect to our political differences for years to come. 

The response was pretty much entirely ad hominem. The judge was accused of bias and of being connected in some unsavory way to the Senator from Pennsylvania (a Republican, at that!) and blah, blah blah. The lay public will recognize that this is the standard way that the right wing deals with its critics. 

Early in his presidency, Donald Trump complained about a judge because of his possibly Latino heritage. To Trump and his supporters, it's all about where you came from and not what you learned along the way. To Trump and the right wing, those who criticize anything Trump does are either called "disgruntled" or deep-state liberals or worse. 

In brief, in the world of the right wing, it's always one's personal motives that are attacked, not one's logic or facts. In fact, I listened without hearing anything that spoke to facts or logic, nearly the entire time. 

And there's a clue here that suggests something truly unfortunate. It would appear that in the right wing universe, facts and logic are the least of any argument. What mainly comes to the fore is which side you are on, and if you are not on the side of the right-wing, you are automatically open to snide remarks about your motives. I even heard one of the right wing talk show hosts using that tired old term, "commie." 

Wow. In an era when the Soviet Union has been gone for three decades and where Donald Trump has been playing footsies with the dictator of North Korea and with ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin, you would think that calling somebody a commie would be close to being a compliment, but apparently not. I think it's just habit in the talk show universe, but even so, it still has a startlingly nasty ring to it. 

We are stuck with a country in which nearly half of us desperately want to believe what they are told by Donald Trump and his close supporters. As of the past week, there are numerous articles from legitimate news sources that have investigated the accusations of vote rigging. They dig into the data, such as it is, and conclude that there is no evidence to support any such claims. 

Let me take it a step further. A reasonable person has to understand that when legitimate journalists scour the evidence and can't find a thing, it just isn't there. This was about as clean an election as we've ever had -- not necessarily because everybody wanted it so, but because so many people were looking and because there were so many sophisticated tools to aid in the search. 

So if you believe Donald Trump when he tells you that the election was stolen, you are relying on him alone, plus a few of his supporters like Rudi Giuliani. But when they are asked for evidence, they are at a loss. Here's a curious point that the Trump supporters might force themselves to consider: When they went to court, Trump's lawyers didn't actually claim that fraud had occurred in the election. Isn't that weird? But it's true, as detailed by Dean Obeidallah in a CNN essay.  

That's right. The lawyers didn't claim fraud or other violations that you hear on talk radio or out of the mouth of Donald Trump. You see, lawyers are constrained (as Obeidallah points out) because if they lie to a judge in open court, they are subject to discipline up to and including losing their licenses to practice law. So Trump's lawyers refrained from outright lying about fraud, because it wasn't there. 

And that's where we are right now in the factual universe. There is a huge amount of data that says the election was as fair as we can get, and essentially none -- nada, zilch, zero -- that points in the other direction. Yet even in these pages, we get remarks that the election was stolen and it's all a vast conspiracy, and so forth. 

To me, this comes across as lazy thinking. If you look hard at the data (hell, if you even look lazily at the data), you can't conclude logically that thousands of people were in on the fix to steal millions of votes. There were too many people watching, and too much data they were looking at. 

But for some people it is easy to believe, in spite of what reason and critical thinking would imply. But as deep thinkers have pointed out, the question is how you get your facts. And depending on how you get your facts, you and I are going to be on opposite sides of a deep chasm.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw