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Don’t Check The Facts: Inconvenient Scientific Truths

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Imagine if Charles Darwin was still alive today and how his groundbreaking scientific work on evolution would be treated by neocons and MAGA types. Social media would light up like the site of an atomic bomb explosion. Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths. We have got to the stage where people are choosing which facts they will acknowledge, as if they are choosing from a range of colours for an item in an online store. Terms like ‘alternative truths’ have been invented to describe the current situation. If we cannot agree on what is fact and what is not we are in big trouble.

President Trump Calls Astronauts During First All-Woman Spacewalk (NHQ201910180019)
President Trump Calls Astronauts During First All-Woman Spacewalk (NHQ201910180019) by NASA HQ PHOTO is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

Scientific Facts Vs Religious Beliefs

Of course, there are still folk out there arguing about the validity of evolution some 175 years since the publication of On The Origin Of The Species. Many of these Americans are a part of the Trump MAGA coalition. Human beings stubbornly believing in things, despite the evidence against them, is nothing new. Religion stands like an antique edifice, now in the shade, but still with zealous adherents handing down revised interpretations based upon ancient codices claiming to be the words of God. No evidence, no scientific evidence, exists for the claims made by these various religions. Supernatural entities stand outside of our base comprehension, apparently, which like a magic trick for the masses, is convenient for proponents.

Why Fact Checking Is Inconvenient For The MAGA Faithful?

Donald Trump leads a coalition of crooks, Christian Nationalists, oligarchs, and disgruntled Americans looking for someone or something to blame. Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths. This caveat is useful for all of these groups in different ways. The crooks want to mislead and defraud their scamming targets among the American and global populations. These business people do not want fact checking  and regulation getting in their way. Christian Nationalists live in a world of lies based on a blue eyed Jesus, where believers act as if the Nazarene was actually an American. Religion is a farrago of distortions and misrepresentations. Fact checking upon this world long ago hung out the ‘highly unreliable’ sign. Believers must check their doubting Thomas at the door prior to entering.

jsc2020e031677
jsc2020e031677 by NASAKennedy is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

The oligarchs, billionaires and Big Tech bros want to influence and shape the universe in their image. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk do not want the Lina Khan’s of this world to rain on their parade. Free speech concerns? What a load of manipulated crap this is. The freedom for the powerful to shout down the voices of those who do not agree with them. The freedom for religions to persecute those with different lifestyles to their Bronze Age sourced morality. The freedom to express hate speech on Facebook, Twitter or X, and the other social media platforms. The freedom for the dominant cohort to destroy what little diversity has managed to flourish within Anglo new world nations. Fact checking is not welcome in these realms.

The Internet has had an interesting journey from its inception. It began via government funded defence research way back in the 1960s.

“The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the ’60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.”

Thus, its origin is not some bastion of private enterprise as often claimed. Sure, we had the garage workshops of people like Bill Gates and his peers building on and developing software and hardware to take it the consumer market. The Steve Jobs and his ilk were wonderful self-promoters spinning the illusion that they invented the apple, rather than just gave it a new shine. Later, came the Google search engine phenomenon and this began a trend where Wall Street CEOs were brought into financialize these digital innovations. This is when the alternative culture of Silicon Valley tech is going to save the world theme faded away to be replaced by big corporations with a global monopoly sucking every dollar out of us kicked in. Bill Clinton failed to regulate this emerging behemoth and they have been getting away with financial murder ever since. The richest men in the world are all Big Tech bros now, worth hundreds of billions. Government in the US has been getting weaker and weaker over the decades and we are seeing a huge divide between mega wealthy and ordinary working folk. Still, numbskull Americans keep voting in those who are taking them to the cleaners. Stupid is as stupid does.

Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths just get in the way. Global warming is a hoax in the minds of many. The other half of the MAGA coalition voters think it might be true, but buy the line that technology will sort it out. No need for behavioural change by the business world. Leave it to someone else to solve. These folk are taking a big risk on the lives of their kids; indeed, they are betting with their chips and not their own. Perhaps, if the religion thing turned out to be true, St Peter will quiz them at the pearly gates about selling their kids out and ruining their lives and their children’s lives.

America Matters image Robert Sudha Hamilton

Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths that a mob grown fat on fantasy and fast food ignore at their peril. They have elected their own phony billionaire President, who is still hawking Trump branded stuff just days away from taking up the top job again.

The Teflon Don has managed to sidestep a sentence for his convictions with an unconditional discharge – I thought that might be an STI, when I first heard about it.

Presidential immunity, thanks to SCOTUS, has cleared the rest of his many charges. Stealing classified documents and inciting a coup at the Capitol are merely par for the course for this infamous golf cheat. They call him the Orange Jesus for his fake tan skin and that these two figures share so many fictional characteristics – they are basically inventions for their cult followers. 79 YO and the octogenarian fan club are rubbing their wrinkled hands together in glee at soon having another representative in the White House. Role models for the elderly are a valued commodity in this select demographic. Hot air and compulsive lying will take you a long way in America, it seems.

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.

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