Fact-Allergy

Human beings are a special kind of animals because we have big brains. We are able to reason, transfer knowledge and are able to adjust our environment to our liking. One of the main reasons why we've come so far, is that we use facts about the world to our advantage. There is however a worrying trend among groups of people, where facts aren't valued anymore.

I'm talking about the Republican Party of course and other right wing political parties and politicians around the world. So, what is a "fact"? The Cambridge Dictionary describes it as "something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information." Pretty simple, right? "Donald Trump was the American President from 2016 to 2020" describes a historical fact. "I'm writing this post right now" describes a fact. "Stars are like our sun" describes an astronomical fact. Facts are data about things, events and so on. They are independent of belief and opinion.

Donald Trump's presidency started of with a wild discussion about the size of the crowd attending his inauguration. Trump claimed it was the biggest crowd in the history of all inaugurations, which was a blatant lie. When his first press secretary defended this lie, she couldn't do better than to claim that the crowd's size as described by Trump and his team was an "alternative fact". That defense perfectly describes the trend I'm talking about here, and it's a dangerous trend.

We progress, as a species and as a society, by working with the facts that are known to us. We wouldn't last very long if we accepted as a fact that humans can breathe under water. Right? Because we're able to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next, we stand on a rapidly growing body of known facts about the world and human societies. As we progress, we learn new things and adjust accordingly. We once believed that the sun and stars revolved around the earth, but now we know for a fact that the earth revolves around its axis; that's pretty damn important if we want to plan launch-dates for satellites or manned space missions. We once believed that illness was punishment from God, or the gods. We now know that many illnesses are caused by germs that are invisible to the naked eye. That's a pretty damn important factor in our being able to expand our life-spans to almost double of what it was two centuries ago.

Knowing facts about the world is a good thing. It makes our lifes better. Where we once thought that different races had different levels of intelligence, we now know we are created equal. Once it was believed that being homosexual was a sign of degeneracy, or an illness. We now know better. Where gender was once believed to assigned at birth, the same as sex, we now know it's a spectrum determined by biological, social and psychological factors. Or at least most of us know. Most of us accept new knowledge and scientific research as an inevitable part of that ever growing and changing body of known facts, and most of us accept that with new knowledge we have to change accordingly.

But not the conservatives. It's in the very word: to "conserve" means to make things stay the same. And when new knowledge arrives too soon or all at once, the conservative movement becomes that old geezer down the street who shakes his fist at the clouds, angry at all the degeneracy among "the new kids". It's really a sight to behold, how the Republicans wage war against transgenders, critical race theory, female M&M's and other progressive changes that are based in new knowledge, an honest reading of American history or feminist ideology. The rejection of science and scientific facts is amusing, but dangerous. They've set back the fight against climate change for decades by simply not accepting scientific facts. I don't know how many have died needlessly because of the anti-mask and anti-vax hype.

And now some Red states are engaging in a modern version of book-burning by banning books on history and influential African American writers, like James Baldwin, from schools. It's as if they try to ban and deplatform any knowledge that doesn't align with their ideology. That's dangerous. Watch the below linked video about a fed-up parent who rages against the policies in the state of Florida, turning one of Florida's progressive schools into a conservative hellscape.

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