Let’s work together to exorcise the ‘Big Lie’
I grew up surrounded by the Chester County Republican Party. My dad was a longtime committeeman, our family and many of our friends were deeply involved members and candidates. Party members and elected officials (from both sides) would stop my dad on the street any time he stepped out of his office. Going to lunch with my dad could take hours.
Towards the end of 2020, after over four years of reading about “fake news” in the media — and more alarmingly, in my personal social media stream — my concern for our national dialogue reached an uncomfortable level.
As an intelligence officer in the United States Navy my office relied on the media to bolster what we already knew and to report on breaking events that we had not yet received intelligence on. We were able to fact check these accounts against the US intelligence community’s resources and we found that major news outlets are very reliable at presenting facts.
While I have had a few people tell me that things have changed over the last 20 years, I would point out that media bias is not a new invention and it is one that is easily outmaneuvered. A liberal newspaper and a conservative newspaper will often report on the same story from their own angles and draw different conclusions, but the facts they both present will typically agree.
The rise of the internet starved many newsrooms of their income and this curtailment of our established professional news sources was dangerous all by itself. That danger, however, has been greatly amplified by the rise of dumbeddown “sources” purporting to be news.
Social media lacks the critical thinking and fact finding we used to associate with news. When we get our news from an algorithm-based echo-chamber, our news is curated for us based on what stories we have already reacted to. The algorithm ensures that we will only get exactly the news we believe or, perversely, the news we will definitely not believe.
Technology has also made it relatively inexpensive to start a new outlet. Websites are cheap. Cable and satellite companies have basically no limit on the number of channels they can carry. With the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine dismantled, the only check on media bias is the market, and extremists on both sides can be a market for “news” designed to reinforce existing views.
It has been a year since January 6th. So real was the threat that day that only a tiny handful dared to defend it in real time. I would ask you, whether you consider yourself left, right, or center, to recall how you felt as you saw images of our Capitol being ransacked by a mob with uniformed police assaulted and trampled.
The Capitol is the place where all of our different ideas about what America should be are rendered into a common direction. It is our mutual respect for the idea that our country can be unified even while we may disagree that makes us strong.
This happened because of one man’s lie and the willingness of so many to go along with that lie in spite of its obvious falseness. And the falseness was obvious. A full year later the court cases remain decided and all the recounts and “forensic audits” and hearings have only confirmed the results.
Most of my family are still Republicans as are a large portion of my friends. And they are all reasonable, rational, and good people. That is why I find it hard to believe the polls that show that nearly two thirds of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen.
When such a large portion of the GOP’s voters believe a lie that has been repeatedly disproven, what has really been stolen is the party itself.
I am calling on reasonable, rational, and good people of the GOP to exorcise the Big Lie from your party. You and I may disagree about what direction the country should take, but we agree that there is a process for resolving these differences. If we allow truths to be denied simply because we do not like them, then we give up on the great experiment of our democracy, and no reasonable American wants that.