Several times a week, I listen to C-Span Washington Journal to listen to the opinions of average Americans on topics of real concern that are rooted in political policy making. More times than not, I am disappointed by the comments and the people making them. So many are painfully misinformed, uneducated, and illogical. However, they are very passionate, and I don’t necessarily blame them. I blame us. We, the American public, have allowed our flow of information to be contaminated by a few wealthy individuals, corporations, and foreign actors, even though we are aware that no one can make wise decisions when the underlying facts are flawed, hidden, or misrepresented. It is scary to listen to people who are angry, frustrated, and terrified because news organizations, bots, and our own elected officials have convinced them that their lives and livelihoods are in constant danger.
I would be disingenuous if I claimed that the level of truth manipulation was the same for Republicans and Democrats because I don’t believe that to be the case at all. The evidence is showing that people who watch Fox News, are on social media, and listen to conservative talk shows are being fed a steady diet of contrived and unsubstantiated accusations against Democrats, teachers, labor unions, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people of color, and liberal activists. All the while, relevant information, science research, and contextual history is being withheld from them on a regular basis. I agree with President Biden’s remark at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner last night about the job of the press being to inform and not inflame. He insisted that truth mattered for a healthy Republic. And Trevor Noah in his more serious remarks stated how a free press has a huge responsibility to provide the truth. But we all know that too many in the press are too busy trying to enrage and entertain for viewer ratings that translate into advertising dollars. They know that anger and outrage garners more clicks and views even when it is fabricated.
It’s no wonder conservatives are continually terrified that their children are brainwashed by critical race theory, gender and sexuality realities, and science itself. They are encouraged to believe that Democrats gladly open the Southern border to people who steal our jobs, traffic drugs, commit violent crimes, and spread disease and most importantly vote illegally for Democrats in elections. They absorb repeated suggestions that the pandemic was orchestrated by Democrats to control people and steal their liberties. They believe that high gas prices were designed by Democrats to force them switch to renewable energy. They are repeatedly told that Biden is senile and that his son is a criminal. They believe Democratic policies caused inflation, ignoring a pandemic that shut down production and supply lines. And of course, they believe that Democrats are socialists, abortionists, and pedophiles hellbent on destroying America and eliminating police departments. The list goes on.
In the interest of viewership and monetary gain, the conservative press introduces more and more false accusations every day to fuel a culture war based on outright lies, exaggerations, omissions, and the misrepresentations of facts. Social media companies benefit financially from a culture war, so they highlight the outrage rather than the truth. Beyond monetary gains for the conservative press and social media, the Republican Party supports the lies and misinformation in order to win elections without ever putting forth a policy agenda to actually tackle problems in healthcare, inflation, income inequalities, immigration, future pandemics, climate change, and gun violence. Foreign actors have their own agenda to destabilize the country from within through division and they are finding success. China and Russia are aware that a nation divided against itself cannot stand and so they are using our free press and freedom of speech against us.
The irony is that Republicans like to lay claim to Christianity and Bible teachings as their foundation. But in my humble Christian opinion, they have replaced some fundamental truths in service to their greed for money and power. One of the Ten Commandments makes it a sin to levy false accusations against another person. My Bible tells me that God hates liars. Lying is a sin and I guess they forgot that Jesus said that it is the truth that will set us free and that the devil is a liar and the father of lies. And as I recall, all liars have hell waiting for them. They’ve forgotten Jesus’ lesson about welcoming strangers and outcasts and not judging others. They’ve forgotten that we are called to help the poor, the sick, and the prisoner. This Republican Party that so many “Christians” support and vote into office do not stand for any of these values and certainly do not follow any of these principles. These white Republican Christians today have turned into some of the most hateful people around. They claim to protect children, yet they allowed Trump to separate infants from their parents at the border as a punitive measure. They think preventing abortion puts them on God’s side when nearly 1/3 pregnancies end in miscarriage. Does that make God an abortionist, eliminating even more babies in the womb than all the doctors on the planet combined? Or are these simply human bodies under construction that will one day contain an eternal human soul with the first breath of life? And we all know they are okay with allowing babies to wallow in poverty once they are born.
With all that said, the time has come for us to demand the truth from our news media and from lawmakers. We need to demand that social media companies remove the divisive foreign actors on their platforms. It is our civil and moral responsibility to hold news outlets, lawmakers, companies, and our friends and family accountable for creating and spreading lies, misinformation, false accusations and exaggerated nonsense. It’s important because we rely on accurate information to make good decisions about our lives and our livelihoods. Our future, our children’s futures, and that of our country and the planet itself are at stake.