Reading news articles, essays, and social media posts over the last few years has convinced me that conservatives and leftists now inhabit alternate universes. We’re a Venn diagram with two circles that barely overlap. President Reagan once remarked that liberals “know so much that isn’t so.” Today, many leftists offer declarative statements and accusations with absolute conviction but no grounding in fact. Sometimes it’s misinformation; increasingly, it’s disinformation — deliberately false claims meant to cause harm.
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The widespread circulation of these narratives through media and social platforms has done real damage. It has reduced trust in our institutions, polarized our society, warped public decision‑making, and produced real‑world harm by undermining shared reality.
Examples abound: extreme political rhetoric, selective media coverage, climate alarmism that ignores data, and celebrity exaggerations that warp public understanding. Ironically, “fact‑checkers” and legacy outlets often fail to scrutinize claims from preferred political factions, allowing nonsense to spread unchecked.
Political and racial hyperbole now poisons public discourse. Prominent figures routinely equate ordinary policy disagreements with historical atrocities. Rep. Ayanna Pressley has claimed the Trump administration seeks to return America “not even just to Jim Crow … but even to pre‑Reconstruction.” I guess she’s referring to when the Democrats owned the slaves. Florida Democrat Angie Nixon asserts that Republicans are trying to kill black people. Rosie O’Donnell has claimed that ICE agents run “concentration camps” where they impregnate migrant children. Art Garfunkel has threatened to leave the country over climate change. I’m not sure how we’ll manage if he joins Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, and James Cameron.
Leftist pronouncements often contradict themselves in the same breath. Actress Sophie Turner recently explained her move back to the U.K. by saying she couldn’t fathom being a mother of a child killed in Uvalde, insisting America “would rather have rights to guns than give kids a right to life.” She then complained that women are being “stripped of their rights” to abortion. First she demands a “right to life” for children, and in the next breath, she laments limits on ending unborn children’s lives. Do they not hear themselves?
In one of the most self‑refuting headlines ever, KTSP‑News in Minnesota posted: “Minnesota has now served 450 million free school meals as the program’s cost continues to rise beyond early projections.” Make it make sense.
Another tactic is selective silence — letting inconvenient stories “die on the vine.” Environmental alarmists, for example, have largely stopped discussing the Great Barrier Reef because years of dire predictions have been contradicted by data showing coral cover rebounding to near‑record levels.
Crying wolf with exaggerated threats and false narratives drives expensive, ineffective, or panic‑driven policies. They desensitize the public when predictions fail and divert attention from measurable problems. When public figures accuse President Trump of being a pedophile or “literally Hitler,” it dehumanizes him and, by extension, all conservatives. It inflames tensions, discourages compromise, and encourages hostility. When such claims face little pushback from mainstream outlets, they gain legitimacy and deepen fractures.
Legacy media routinely downplay or ignore the consequences of open borders and crimes committed by illegal aliens. They rarely acknowledge the slow‑motion collapse of cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. If a story highlights Democrat failures, it’s ignored; if it showcases Republican successes, it disappears. I have yet to see a legacy outlet congratulate Tom Homan and his team for rescuing over a hundred thousand migrant children trafficked into the country under the Biden administration.
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The result is that leftists and conservatives no longer share a common factual universe. Republicans have little in common with Democrats beyond occupying the same patch of ground. Not long ago, everyone agreed that killing children is evil. Now mothers who kill their unborn children are celebrated, and people like Lindsay Clancy get fan clubs. Governors sign bills legalizing abortion up to the moment of birth while surrounded by cheering supporters. Squatters are protected by law, illegal aliens receive government‑issued driver’s licenses, and some may soon be eligible for jobs in the Danbury, Connecticut police department.
Can you name anything a prominent leftist has said or done in the last 25 years that has made America safer, stronger, more prosperous, and more united?
Nevertheless, some accountability exists — fraudsters are being prosecuted, and violent illegal aliens are being apprehended. Conservatives are becoming more informed and more vocal in countering leftist narratives. We no longer care what the left says, nor do we believe anything leftists say. In fact, when they speak, we usually assume the opposite is true.
But more remedies are needed. Media and public figures must face consequences when they push disinformation. We need greater viewpoint diversity, consistent fact‑checking regardless of ideology, and a restoration of cultural norms that reward evidence over emotional hyperbole.
What we do not need is censorship. Let leftists talk — they reveal how dangerously unmoored from reality they are.
A society that loses its fear of being wrong, or its capacity to correct falsehoods, invites the very lunacy that emerges when disinformation faces no scrutiny. Truth‑seeking — not narrative protection — is the only sustainable defense.
Meanwhile, someone should tell Art Garfunkel the Great Barrier Reef is doing just fine.
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Image: Don Hankins via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).