December 28, 2016
Page 7
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O PINION
Unable to Distinguish Facts from Opinion or Lies
2016, the year of
‘post-truth’
J ill r iChardson
“Post-Truth.” The
Oxford English Dictio-
nary named this its word
of the year for 2016.
This was a year when
campaign lies — most, though not
all, coming out of the Donald’s
mouth — were so numerous that
fact checking became nearly impos-
sible.
Yes, each individual statement
could be fact checked. But there
were so many rapid-fire falsehoods
that it was impossible to debunk
them one by one on TV without de-
voting entire shows to just that.
And, far too often, nobody even
cared if their preferred candidate
was untruthful. The Internet was
awash with fake news that was
more popular than the real news.
One fake news story told Trump
by
supporters that the pope had en-
dorsed Trump, while another one
told Clinton supporters that
he’d denounced Trump. In
reality, he did neither.
Things have hardly got-
ten better since the election,
with Trump making false
claims about “millions” of
“illegal voters” and deny-
ing intelligence assessments that
Russia intervened on his behalf.
This is a difficult time to teach so-
cial sciences, because students often
cannot distinguish between fact and
opinion.
A sociology professor I know
posted on Facebook a line from a
student’s final paper: “If colored
people would just follow the law,
they wouldn’t get shot by the po-
lice.” A real student actually wrote
that and turned it in.
As a professor, you have to grade
students with political views dif-
ferent from your own fairly. But
in addition to the offensive racial
term, this student’s statement makes
a claim that can be proven true or
false with evidence.
As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan said, “Everyone is enti-
tled to his own opinion, but not his
own facts.”
Research can determine whether
police shootings of people of color
are due to law breaking by people
of color or not. In this case, the ev-
idence doesn’t support the student’s
conclusion.
The professor failed the student
— not for his or her opinions, but
for failing to do the assignment
well. What do you want to bet the
student will respond by calling the
professor “biased”?
I’m only a lowly teaching assis-
tant, but I grapple with the current
environment in my classroom too.
This semester, I led students in
a discussion of same-sex marriage.
We wrote each argument for and
against legalizing same-sex mar-
riage on the board. I asked students
to determine which ones were opin-
ions, and which made empirical
claims that could be proven true or
false with evidence.
Sociology can’t really evaluate
opinions, like the claim gay mar-
riage is “unnatural,” or the com-
peting one that same-sex couples
deserve the dignity of marriage.
It can, on the other hand, scien-
tifically evaluate whether children
of same-sex couples turn out okay
(they do) or whether humans use
marriage only for heterosexual pro-
creation (they don’t).
By the end of class, I had a list
of claims made by the anti-same sex
marriage camp listed on the board,
all of which were demonstrably
false. Not one was true.
Was I biased?
I must say, even though I per-
sonally support marriage equality
— as do the majority of Americans
nowadays — I felt uneasy teaching
this lesson. I do my best to keep my
personal political views out of the
classroom, even on subjects I care
strongly about.
Instead, I wanted my students to
distinguish between facts and opin-
ions, and apply their knowledge
from the semester to evaluate the
accuracy of empirical claims. But I
knew it’d be easy to accuse me of
“bias.”
A disgruntled student could even
submit me to the “Professor Watch-
list” — a right-wing website taking
aim at professors conservatives dis-
agree with.
In this post-truth world, it no lon-
ger matters whether a statement is
factual. If you don’t like someone’s
facts, you can accuse them of “bias”
and counter their truth with a story
you got from a fake news site.
Especially when you’ve got the
president-elect cheering you on.
OtherWords columnist Jill Rich-
ardson is the author of Recipe for
America: Why Our Food System Is
Broken and What We Can Do to Fix
It. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
What Part of “Never Again” Does He Not Understand?
A hysteria that
ignores history
J ohn l a F orge
Asked last year
whether he would
require
American
Muslims to register
in a database Donald
Trump said he “would
certainly implement
that -- absolutely.” During a Nov.
16 appearance on Megyn Kelly’s
Fox News show, former Trump
spokesman Carl Higbie said a reg-
istry of Muslims would be “legal”
and that “We did it during World
War II with the Japanese.”
“You’re not suggesting that we
go back to Japanese internment
camps are you?” Kelly asked.
“I’m not proposing that at all,”
Higbie said, “But I’m just saying
there is precedent for it.” To this
Kelly declared: “You can’t be cit-
ing Japanese internment camps as
precedent for anything the presi-
dent-elect is going to do.”
But of course he could, because
Mr. Trump appears to win support
by boastfully saying and doing
anything that produces a roar from
the mob -- crowing about sexual
assault, torture, shooting people
in the face, bombing civilians, de-
porting millions -- no matter how
unlawful, bigoted, sexist, hateful
or dishonest it sounds.
The so-called “precedent” in-
cludes the bitter irony that many
imprisoned Japanese-Americans
by
had sons in the military fighting
against fascism in Germany and
Italy. Muslim-Americans likewise
have thousands of children in the
US armed forces. Yet Khizr
and Ghazala Kahn, the par-
ents of Humayun Khan -- an
Army captain who died in a
car bombing in Iraq in 2004
-- were viciously belittled by
Trump, using the same bigotry
with which he attacked Feder-
al Judge Gonzalo Curiel, absurdly
calling him “Mexican.”
News coverage of Higbie’s
Muslim registry “precedent” bal-
loon neglected to mention that
arresting 3 to 11 million undocu-
mented immigrants (Trump calls
this whole class “Mexicans”)
would also require a mass po-
lice-state internment program like
the WWII crimes visited upon
Japanese-Americans. The media
also ignored the fact that the US
government has officially memo-
rialized an apology for the WWII
mass arrests and detentions, and
has erected a monumental promise
never to do any such a thing again.
The National Japanese American
Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
pledges never to repeat this overt-
ly racist chapter of American his-
tory.
The national media’s ignorance
or omission of this national monu-
ment is partly understandable. It’s
not noted on any of the DC tour
maps I consulted. The memorial
is a permanent reminder of the
shameful arrest and imprison-
ment-without-cause of more than
120,000 Japanese-American civil-
ians. What’s more, for a city like
Washington, which is crowded
with mostly self-congratulatory
monuments, the internment me-
morial is a vanishingly rare, direct
and unambiguous admission of
wrongdoing by the government.
Inscribed in the memorial’s el-
egant marble pedestals are Presi-
dent Reagan’s words: “Here We
Admit A Wrong. Here We Affirm
Our Commitment As A Nation To
Equal Justice Under The Law.”
Also carved in stone is this pledge
from the late Sen. Daniel Inouye
of Hawaii: “The Lessons Learned
Must Remain As A Grave Remind-
er Of What We Must Not Allow
To Happen Again To Any Group.”
In 1988, Reagan signed the Civ-
il Liberties Act which apologizes
on behalf of the government and
declares that the mass arrests were
based on “race prejudice, war
hysteria, and a failure of political
leadership.” This sounds familiar.
In The Underside of American
History, historian Roger Dan-
iels writes about early 1942 that:
“Racist feelings were intensified
by wild rumors of sabotage and
espionage, and a variety of groups
demanded the expulsion of Jap-
anese-Americans from the West
Coast.” The US Army and the War
Relocation Authority forces then
used house raids to detain and ship
120,313 Japanese-Americans to
hastily-built, barbed wire-circled
prison camps -- many built in the
desert.
Today’s advocates of Trump’s
“database of Muslim residents”
should consult the 1983 federal
commission on the mass deten-
tions of World War II. It found
there was “no military necessity
for the mass imprisonment of the
Japanese Americans and that a
grave injustice had been done.”
The US started down this road
immediately after Sept. 11, 2001,
when more than 2,000 people in
the country were arrested in se-
cret. The Justice Department re-
fused then to issue a list of names
or the number of those incarcerat-
ed, arguing that “national security
interest” outweighed the public’s
right to know. During these secret
arrests, U.S. Rep. John Conyers,
D-Mich., visited the Krome deten-
tion center near Miami and found
it astonishing that “...the Immigra-
tion and Naturalization Service is
fixated on detaining and round-
ing up countless Arab-Americans
without any justification.”
But Trump would rather we
forget US history, ignore Rea-
gan’s apology, and break Senator
Inouye’s promise. Today’s war-
time hysteria, fueled by Trump’s
baseless accusations against im-
migrants, helps some ignore our
history, especially if it is ugly, and
consider repeating it even if we’ve
promised “never again.”
John LaForge, syndicated by
PeaceVoice, is co-director of
Nukewatch, a peace and environ-
mental justice group in Wisconsin.
The Law Offices of
Patrick John Sweeney, P.C.
Patrick John Sweeney
Attorney at Law
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