Right-wing Justices prioritize religion over science

The U.S. Supreme Court declared New York State's resrictions on religious gatherings unconstitutional (last Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving, if memory serves).

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has a cogent explanation of the 5-4 decision. As he put it, "the court proved the dangers of scientifically illiterate judges overturning government decisions that were based on scientific evidence".

It's too bad the Founders didn't think science worth mentioning alongside speech and religion in the First Amendment. If they had, the blinkered, religiously overzealous right-wing Justices in the majority might have had a harder time excusing their otherwise inexcusable elevation of religion over public health.

I don't care about the devout contracting CoViD-19. That's their choice. Unfortunately, their disregard of public-heatlh guidelines endangers the rest of us, unless they're willing to segregate themselves — and their disregard of our well-being is ethically indefensible.

So to all those pious believers and clergy bleating about how just and noble this boneheaded decision is, and decrying jurisdictions that currently enforce similar restrictions (I'm talking to you, S.F. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, you arrogant twit), I dare you to square your cries of "religious freedom" with the physical health and well-being of the others with whom you share breathing space.

Do your moral precepts let you excuse endangering our health? If so, your religion (or at least the way you practice it) is as ethically bankrupt as I suspected.

If not, you need to disavow the religious authorities, including the demonstrably religiously non-neutral Justices in the majority on this decision, who aren't just elevating religious interests over state ones, but are prioritizing religious interests over our very physical health and well-being.

Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, you have sullied the Court's reputation. You obviously cannot be trusted to restrain your religious zealotry even in the face of sickness and death.

If you were looking for a way to delegitimize both the Court and your own religions, you succeeded, brilliantly.

The conservative media problem

Most Republican pols refused to call on Trump to admit defeat even after it became obvious to everyone in the real world that Joe Biden had won the election. These pols are undoubtedly relieved that Government Services Administration head Emily W. Murphy finally certified Biden the winner on Monday, 23 November 2020, removing the need for them to duck into a closet every time a reporter approached.

Still, those Republicans aren't out of the woods: one angry tweet from the domestic Dear Leader and millions of Republican voters will turn on the targeted politician.

So goes the conventional wisdom, anyway. However, is it true?

Trump does have a disturbingly firm hold on nearly half the voting population. This Reuters piece, "Why Republican voters say there's 'no way in hell' Trump lost", includes statements from fifty Trump voters, all of whom "said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate".

Considering the numerous statements from both state and federal elections officials asserting that no significant election fraud took place anywhere in the country, Trump supporters' belief that fraud took place is remarkable. It's also quite bad from a state-of-the-country point of view. Nearly half the electorate believing a lie about a foundational element of our republic, elections, is a recipe for disaster. Worse, Trump's supporters seem willing to believe any accusation he levels, no matter how outlandish. By all appearances, they've surrendered their skepticism and given their judgment over to him.

Yet Trump didn't gain his stranglehold on his supporters through hypnosis. He got it from good old repetition and amplification: he said (often untrue) things, repeated them often, and got others to repeat them as well. It's the way propaganda has worked since the dawn of time.

And while social media, notably Twitter, played its part, Charlie Wurzel at the New York Times noted recent research "that suggested 'social media played only a secondary and supportive role' in the recent high-profile voting disinformation campaign".

Mr. Trump’s “position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media,” the Harvard researchers argued.

The "media elites" would be people like the opinion hosts at Fox News, along with numerous radio talk show hosts. And that brings me to my point.

The researchers are right.

We will continue to be in serious trouble as long as high-profile media figures — mostly on the far right of the political spectrum — give credibility and oxygen to hare-brained conspiracy theories and outright lies.

No question that courage is unknown among most Republican elected officials these days, but they're not entirely to blame. The party has been captured by the rabidly, blindly zealous mob drunk on the fever dreams peddled by irresponsible rabble-rousers, including Trump, who see in electoral loss a massive conspiracy to deny Trump his second term. The mob also has been conditioned to accept Trump as savior, a dangerous position to which to elevate anyone.

This conditioning has happened in plain sight on right-wing media outlets. For years people like Sean Hannity have instilled in their listeners and viewers the idea that their ideological opponents are not their neighbors (and friends and family members, for that matter), but their sworn enemies in a literally deadly battle for control of the nation's soul and destiny. The so-called mainstream media is corrupt and evil, as are elected Democrats. Trust could be given only to the voices on Fox News and other right-wing media.

Seeing in Trump a figure that galvanized the right in a way that hadn't been seen since Reagan, right-wing media glommed onto him, riding his rocket into space. In return for giving him a largely uncritical megaphone through which to send (and re-send, and re-send) his desired messages, he gave them huge audiences. Individual pundits learned that uncritically repeating his talking points was the way to hold those audiences. Dissenting from him guaranteed controversy and audience disaffection.

Giving the people what they want is certainly a recipe for success in business. It's not responsible news coverage, though. It sure as hell isn't responsible political discourse, not when you pander to people's darkest, most paranoid, most angry, most hateful impulses.

Pundits aren't "reporters" as such but they're supposed to color within the lines of the facts. The trouble with right-wing media is that it has long disdained inconvenient facts. If you say that mainstream media disdains different inconvenient facts, you might be right. What mainstream media doesn't do, though, is promote garbage conspiracy theories day after day after day. Mainstream media also doesn't declare its allegiance to a messianic figure and give him its imprimatur of credibility.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what right-wing media outlets have been doing during the entirety of Trump's time in office, and even before then. "Birtherism" wasn't a thing before Fox News and company got a hold of it and repeated it ad nauseam. "Pizzagate" and "QAnon" were plucked from deserved obscurity by right-wing media, then repeated uncritically (and, needless to say, without a shred of evidence) until the audience could sing along.

We're still living through, and dying from, the public-health catastrophe that is "Masks don't work" (and its relatives, like "the virus is a hoax" and "masks are dangerous"), another patently false and actively harmful garbage conspiracy theory that panders to the most delusional wishful thinking.

Now the choir's belting out "Trump was robbed" and the audience has, again, learned the tune by heart.

It would certainly help if more Republican lawmakers and officials would condemn bullshit when they hear it. But it's just as important to condemn the right-wing media that is peddling the bullshit to an eager and largely uncritical audience. By ginning up a fake reality that caters to the audience's dearest wishes, those media outlets encourage that audience to behave irresponsibly and to demand flatly unrealistic and often dangerous policies.

Mendacious right-wing media outlets poison our body politic just as surely as a heroin dealer poisons an addict.

The body politic can't even begin to recover until right-wing media stops injecting the poison of lies, bullshit, paranoia, and hatred. The rich men and women funding and/or controlling those media outlets know this.

It's time to put their feet to the fire — to make them confront the sickness they've induced in their audiences.