Substitutes feeling for facts

 Hugo Gurdon:

“What those images suggest … [is] quite different than learning what actually happened, determining the facts.” This was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas trying to have it both ways in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. He wanted to justify his and President Joe Biden’s disgraceful condemnation of mounted border officials controlling Haitian migrants, yet also insist that those officials would be investigated fairly.

His weasel words betray a poison in our politics that gives as much weight to feelings as it does to facts, even when the feelings are based on false perceptions and deliberate lies. Philosopher Allan Bloom drew attention to this trend, corrosive of good government and moral coherence, in his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind.

A quarter of a century later, tyrannical impulses have free rein (as long they come from the Left’s, not the Right’s, tin-pot dictators) to destroy the lives and careers of people whose opinions they dislike. An earlyish example of this was Google’s sacking in 2017 of James Damore , a software engineer who suggested there might be fewer female engineers than males not because of sexual discrimination but because fewer women want those jobs.

There was mass outrage over Damore’s countercultural point, and this entirely outweighed any thought that perhaps what he said was true. There is, in fact, a great deal of social science data confirming that men and women want different things. Never letting the facts get in the way of a good story was something we joked about on Fleet Street 30 years ago, but today, it’s an article of woke faith. The narrative is all, and truth be damned.

Everywhere around us, political activists demand that public policy assert what ordinary people know is false. We’re supposed to accept, for example, that black people are more in danger from rogue police officers than from black murderers, that women can impregnate men and that it’s appropriate for genetically male fighters to beat up women in cage matches, that trillions of dollars of government spending cost “zero” because they’ll be paid for by the biggest tax hike in history, etc., etc.

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There is more.

Conservatives have started responding to this wokeism by saying facts do not care about your feelings.  It is a debating point that the woke have no good response to. The example of the Border Patrol horsemen is just the latest attempt by the left to use emotion to win a debate they were losing.  Emotion also appears to have been behind Pelosi's response to the January 6 events.  She took an emotional leap to calling a trespass case an insurrection and told the Chairman of the Joint Cheifs she was worried about Trump launching nukes against Chian based on no facts at all.