This short video introduces a series of videos about how Americans react to obvious, provable deception, lies, and gaslighting by politicians. The quotation attributed to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan was “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” This belief might have been false in 1973, but until recently, I believed most Americans believed that facts could be proven true, false, or flagged for more scrutiny.
Around 2010, a new approach to facts became popular in America. In place of “facts” that could be verified came a soft, populist version. It was no longer necessary to verify facts; it was only necessary to audaciously repeat a manufactured “fact” endlessly. Manufactured facts became accepted as “facts” because they were perceived as factual on non-empirical grounds such as intuition, gut feeling, or an emotional desire to be factual.
The other videos in this series will outline some of the ways that Americans react to this new era of manufactured facts and the extreme degradation of public discourse. To many, it is puzzling that intelligent people would allow themselves to be led by leaders, from all points on the political spectrum, who openly distort reality beyond recognition. However, modern psychology tells us that we should not be surprised.
If you are unable to access the video from above, use this direct link to YouTube: https://youtu.be/2scFLUG8jGk
There will be at least seven videos in this series. If interested in this topic, click the subscribe button appearing at the end of the video.
Biden was definitely getting a little “long in the tooth”. However, as long as he had good, experienced, educated and truthful people around him, I didn’t worry too much about him hesitating momentarily to respond to a question or make an assertion. If he had actually croaked while in office we had people in place to effectively continue rational and productive governance. Trump, on the other hand, abandoned any semblance of filling his cabinet with experienced and effective professionals during his second term. Instead he has ousted career nonpartisan experts and replaced them with pathetic, evil, inexperienced, and destructive, boot-licking jackasses. He was a bad president his first term, but had enough decent cabinet members to restrain his idiocy to some extent. With his dedication to Project 2025 (which he said during the campaign that he had never heard of) and his complete withdrawal of convention, decency and morality from his second term and the requirement of total obedience to him only, not the law or Constitution, we have sped up our race to autocracy and/or anarchy. The question is with donOLD tRUMP is whether he’s always been this bad mentally and ethically or has he actually worsened with age? It’s obvious that aging certainly hasn’t been kind to his current condition and most likely is making it worse. Age discrimination is in general, not good, but when looking at some of our current politicians (examples: Chuck Grassley, Iowa senator, 92 and Mitch McConnell, 83) should we look at upper age limitations just like we have for lower age limits?