How conservative pundits helped fracture reality

Sykes would want you to know he is not backing down from the idea that mainstream news media are biased against conservatism. Nor should he. News media, like any institution created by human hands, harbor biases, including against the political right. I recall the light that went on in my head when a conservative media critic decried the use of the modifier “arch” to describe those who hold staunch right-wing views. When’s the last time you heard someone on the left called an “arch liberal”?

That’s one example; there are others. But instead of calling out biases in the mainstream media structure or simply creating a parallel media structure to tell their side of the story as women, African-Americans, LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities have done, conservatives sought to raze mainstream media to the ground.

Sykes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others advanced a narrative in which no institution or authoritative source — not statistics, not science, not history, not polls, not CBS, CNN, or The New York Times — is legitimate if it contradicts conservative orthodoxy or questions the latest harebrained conspiracy theory.

The result has been nothing less than the unraveling of the American mind. We have become a nation of junk history, junk science, junk fact, junk logic, a nation where not knowing things is no longer a bar to high office, a nation where Donald Trump followers think the election will be “rigged.”

Nor are bizarre conspiracy theories limited to the right. As anyone who has argued the supposed link between vaccines and autism can attest, they have infiltrated the left, too.

This, then, is the legacy of modern conservatism: a nation where left and right have no real ability to communicate across the issues that divide because, in a fundamental sense, they have no language in common. We cannot confront our most pressing problems because we cannot even discuss them.

It’s gratifying to hear Sykes admit conservative culpability, but any temptation to gloat is drowned by the reality of America’s plight. We’ve now had a generation of young people come of age with ignorance, intransigence and incoherence as their daily norm. The damage from that is profound and will not be easily fixed. It took us years to get here.

The Olympics came to a close last weekend and Team USA stood tall over the rest of the world.

It was a record-breaking year for American athletes, who scooped up 121 medals, including 46 golds, more than any other nation. The United States dominated every category of sport, a winning streak that hasn’t been pulled off at a Summer Games in 40 years. Of particular note were the women, who won well over half the American golds.

That gets you thinking: throughout much of Central Africa, women aren’t just unlikely to be Olympians; they’re barred from holding government positions, brutalized by