Posted on 09/20/2025 11:16:42 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
There is a deep human impulse to whittle reality down into familiar and self-flattering fairy tales.
We all gravitate toward information that validates our preconceptions and vindicates our in-groups. It is cognitively taxing to revise one’s model of the world. And it is emotionally uncomfortable to recognize fault in our allies or merit in our adversaries. So, we are all tempted to sand the jagged edges off events until they fit into ideologically convenient frames.
If this impulse is universal, however, liberals (such as myself) like to believe that we are less vulnerable to it. After all, we are the side that favors scientific inquiry over religious fundamentalism, universalism over ethnocentrism, and critical accounts of American history over jingoistic ones.
Conservatives, by contrast, often recoil at moral complexity. And their leadership is unbound by any sense of fealty to the truth. Or so the progressive historian Heather Cox Richardson suggested, in a recent Substack post.
In Richardson’s account, McCarthyism taught the American right the political utility of shameless lies. By crafting mendacious and simplistic “us” versus “them” narratives — and repeating them ceaselessly — conservatives found that they could “construct a fictional world,” which many voters would unknowingly come to inhabit. Liberals in the “reality-based community” — to use a phrase made famous by the George W. Bush administration — might feel compelled to align their claims with discernible facts. But the American right, feels no such obligation.
As an example of conservatives’ mendacity, Richardson cites the Trump administration’s attempt to pin Charlie Kirk’s assassination on the left. And not without reason: The White House’s brazenly dishonest propaganda about that tragedy does much to support Richardson’s portrait of the right.
And yet, shortly after decrying the GOP’s privileging of “narrative” over “facts,” Richardson wrote the...
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
That there is some pretty ironic projection.
So much bull crap in a few paragraphs.
“Conservatives, by contrast, often recoil at moral complexity.”
There is moral and there is immoral. Does the left wants to do the same as what they did for male and female?
“I identify with a semi-demi, mini, non-normative, super-humanitive morality.”
There are few Democrats who can say what Senator Joe McCarthy did that was wrong. They move on to the intellectual mush of “McCarthyism.” I don’t know if the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) did anything wrong. Whether they did or did not, it was labelled McCarthyism even though McCarthy was a Senator and had no function in HUAC.
Perhaps the “politics of personal destruction” had its start with Joseph McCarthy. It certainly worked on him, not on Bill Clinton.
The rest of the article has no merit.
The Venona papers proved that beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Conservatives, by contrast, often recoil at moral complexity. …So this is the Newspeak form of “immorality”.
Does anyone here believe that Tyler Robinson was such an extreme right wing person, that by comparison, he thought, Charlie Kirk was too liberal?
And then such feelings motivated him to go pick up a gun?
Against someone who was not as conservative as he was, in spite of how successful Charlie Kirk was in spreading the word about conservative values?
That’s what we have to believe, if we are to believe this narrative, that Robinson was just so extremely right wing that even a Charlie Kirk type is just too liberal.
As your "story", not a news article, clearly indicates.
Your view is the only view so there is nothing "cognitively taxing" for you in what you write as it sets the conformity to which others must comply.
The article puts forward the claim the Left is the home of those who are “reality based”. It is all a lie.
The “reality based” Left picks and chooses “science” which support the policies they want. It does not pick policies based on science. The major problem with the left is so many of their assumptions about the nature of reality are false.
Well said.
Yes also McCarthy was right the country is infested with communism but few listened and now it’s a bigger battle.
Where’s the Barf Alert?
I just presumed you were smart enough to come to your own conclusion.
Was I wrong?
In the end, it’s just 2+2=5.
It’s about time this Biatch got some limelight.
I’ve tried once or twice to bring her name up here on FR with littke notice.
She is doing a LOT of damage to us. I’m 90% sure she is the main person that moved a female relative of mine from a moderate conservtive to leftist.
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, propagandist of the left.
Which pushes scientists to skew results toward whatever backs the politicians' (fund distributors) agenda - creating a vicious circle that's literally opposite to discovering truths.
But I'm objecting to Richardson's claim that "by crafting mendacious and simplistic “us” versus “them” narratives — and repeating them ceaselessly — conservatives found that they could “construct a fictional world,” which many voters would unknowingly come to inhabit."
That's totally Nazi Josef Goebbels' baby and Richardson must know that. His attempt to pin it on conservatives is "projection by example".
Yep.
Especially when you consider that McCarthy proved his case in court.
PS See if post image still works….
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