In ‘information age’ we see a dumbing down of America

Editor:

I recently wrote about problems with the Republican Party and many of its current candidates. As expected, someone wrote and disagreed. I have learned that this will run after the election so there are a couple of comments at the end.

The unfortunate thing was that so many of the facts and conclusions seemed to come from Rupert Murdock-owned tabloids. He has 163 with Fox TV and the New York Post heading up the US arms of his empire. It also appeared that there were may have been things from equally illegitimate sources like the National Inquirer, Washington Times, and Judicial Watch;

I did recognize any of the daily lies from the Russian-based sites that one of our former elected officials publishes daily on Facebook but we have to be careful about that too.

False, misstated, contradictory material, and conclusions and programs put forward with false promises are endemic in the Trump era. But Trump did not start it. Congressman Gingrich started the trend to put partisan politics before truth even after elections were over in about 1993. His approach of putting the country second has grown to the point of ruination. Worse, with internet tabloids pervading what we see and read, intellectual slough has become a norm.

Any person who does not fact check and votes based on fear and fact free nostrums is guilty of being unpatriotic!

Here we are in the midst of the “information age” but what we are seeing is the dumbing down of America. Worse, the Russians are helping! With no common base of facts to discuss, the glue that holds us together is disintegrating. When each person lives in their own fantasy there can be no democracy or intelligent debate to sustain it. That’s why I beg all to fact check and, in this election, vote for democratic candidates.

Comments:

The first comment is that we are have no good plan for health care. You should look

this up but the Obama plan was first developed by the Heritage Foundation in the 1980’s as a was to solve our health care problems with subsidized private insurance. It was presented to Congress in the early ’90s by Senator Chaffee of Connecticut and praised far and wide by the Republican’s including Speaker of the House Gingrich. (And when the Republicans liked it they did not claim there were going to the death squads which, of course, never happened either.) The provisions which permitted subsidization are now under attack by the Republican Party so a primarily private solution is now highly unlikely.

The second is if you look at those states where Donald Trump successfully took his statistically false racist message about immigrant hordes at our door step worked best in the old Dixie states. It is not true they just wanted to keep slavery. They invaded the north to seize the country and caused the death of hundreds of thousands of our ancestors. Trump’s time in office is time limited but the flame of racism is harder than we thought to quench.

Conrad F. Cropsey

Albion