Figures like Candace Owens are “influencers” without experience or credentials to back up many of their views. Owens may have something to say worth listening to about lifestyle and parental practices, and a point of view worth considering on racial issues . . . but Ukraine? Climate change? Macroeconomics? Virology? On a barstool on Frid…
Figures like Candace Owens are “influencers” without experience or credentials to back up many of their views. Owens may have something to say worth listening to about lifestyle and parental practices, and a point of view worth considering on racial issues . . . but Ukraine? Climate change? Macroeconomics? Virology? On a barstool on Friday night, maybe, but in the sober light of day? Seriously?
Some of the most influential US opinion-shapers have been humorists (Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Mort Sahl, Stephen Colbert) and celebrity personalities (Charles Lindbergh, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump), none of whom had as much factual grounding as a college junior or small-business owner about many of the issues they addressed.
That’s a price we pay for living in a democratic society, where people are free to think what they like, to dispute or ignore facts they don’t like, to choose sources of information they trust.
William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” This was long before the Internet and social media blew up the directory; now, the first 2,000 names, neither alphabetical nor geographical, are determined by our individual outlooks and prejudices, filtered through algorithms. (And how many of those 2,000 names are bots?)
To channel JVL, Tom Nichols, et al.: Owens & Co. are not the problem. The problem is their audiences’ inability or disinclination to distinguish information from entertainment, and fantasy from reality. If enough people in the voting population want politics and policy debates to be about “owning” opponents in verbal jousts, actual governance be damned, that’s what we’ll get. Unless enough more voters decide, “Those people are crazy,” and vote accordingly, year after year, for as long as it takes to re-establish contests between sane, reality-based parties.
Tim Miller has been doing heroic work in wading through the MAGA fever swamp. At this point, is he having second thoughts about moving from a place where reefer is legal to a place where it’s not?
Figures like Candace Owens are “influencers” without experience or credentials to back up many of their views. Owens may have something to say worth listening to about lifestyle and parental practices, and a point of view worth considering on racial issues . . . but Ukraine? Climate change? Macroeconomics? Virology? On a barstool on Friday night, maybe, but in the sober light of day? Seriously?
Some of the most influential US opinion-shapers have been humorists (Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Mort Sahl, Stephen Colbert) and celebrity personalities (Charles Lindbergh, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump), none of whom had as much factual grounding as a college junior or small-business owner about many of the issues they addressed.
That’s a price we pay for living in a democratic society, where people are free to think what they like, to dispute or ignore facts they don’t like, to choose sources of information they trust.
William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” This was long before the Internet and social media blew up the directory; now, the first 2,000 names, neither alphabetical nor geographical, are determined by our individual outlooks and prejudices, filtered through algorithms. (And how many of those 2,000 names are bots?)
To channel JVL, Tom Nichols, et al.: Owens & Co. are not the problem. The problem is their audiences’ inability or disinclination to distinguish information from entertainment, and fantasy from reality. If enough people in the voting population want politics and policy debates to be about “owning” opponents in verbal jousts, actual governance be damned, that’s what we’ll get. Unless enough more voters decide, “Those people are crazy,” and vote accordingly, year after year, for as long as it takes to re-establish contests between sane, reality-based parties.
Tim Miller has been doing heroic work in wading through the MAGA fever swamp. At this point, is he having second thoughts about moving from a place where reefer is legal to a place where it’s not?