53percenter's Blog

Ten statements, five factual, five opinion. The task from Pew: Simply identify which is which. You can take their quiz yourself by clicking here. See if you too can reason like a 10-year-old.

Which, apparently, most American adults can’t. Just 26 percent went five for five on factual statements while 35 percent went five for five on opinion statements. If that’s not depressing enough, Pew notes that just 24 percent went four for five on factual statements. Fully half of all Americans couldn’t do better than three for five on a rudimentary gut check about discerning assertions from opinions.

Explaining why is more complicated than blithely insisting that people are stupid, although “people are stupid” is surely in the mix here. There were notable gaps (especially in gauging factual statements) within groups according to certain criteria — those with “high political awareness” versus those with low, those who are “digitally savvy” versus those who aren’t, those who trust the media more versus those who trust it less. All of that may boil down to the idea that people who read more, especially those who read the news, are apt to have a more finely honed sense of fact versus opinion since they’re constantly encountering both — sometimes with one deliberately passed off as the other for political gain.

But personal biases play a part too. Go figure that the more a statement happened to jibe with someone’s political prejudices, the more likely they were to label it fact rather than opinion. Everyone wants to believe they have The Truth on their side. Here’s the list of 10 statements with the partisan numbers on each:

Sourcing also mattered. Democrats and Republicans showed no difference in discerning a statement as fact when presented by the New York Times or USA Today. But when it was presented by Fox News, the share of Republicans willing to describe it as fact ticked up a few points while the share of Democrats willing to describe it as such ticked down. Relatedly:

A lazy take on those numbers would be that distrust of the mainstream media is linked to lower education, which in turn leaves a person less able to tell fact from opinion. A smarter take, I think, is that distrust of the mainstream media is linked to more voracious consumption of partisan news media, whose whole business is questioning the facts and assumptions advanced by the mainstream media. For instance, one of the factual statements offered by Pew is “President Barack Obama was born in the United States.” If you’re an Infowars fan who’s read a hundred articles questioning O’s birth certificate, you might choke on the idea of characterizing that as “fact” even though Pew specifically told people before quizzing them that they shouldn’t base their determination of whether a statement was factual on whether they thought it was accurate.

Or, if you’re reading any sort of right-wing blog, you might pause when confronted with the statement “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient.” After gorging for years on information supporting that belief, you might have a hard time classifying it as an opinion. Which it is. A very smart opinion, one with loads and loads of corroborating evidence, but a bit too sweeping and dismissive to be treated as absolute fact. The point remains, though: As with any other type of diet, one’s news diet will affect how one copes with real-world challenges. Just look at how Democrats did in the first chart above when asked whether a $15 minimum wage is “essential.” By 2020, 75 percent of them will be calling that fact.

The only one of the 10 statements that’s genuinely tricky, I think, is the one about illegals having rights under the Constitution. That has nothing to do with illegals per se; it’s just that debates over law, particularly constitutional law, frequently are proxies for political opinion. Right-wingers would tell you it’s a fact that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, and they’d be correct. Left-wingers would tell you that’s a matter of opinion, albeit one that’s momentarily the law of the land thanks to the Heller opinion. (If Pew really wanted to mess with people, they’d have used “Abortion is a right under the Constitution” instead.) It is in fact true under Supreme Court jurisprudence that illegals enjoy *some* rights under the Constitution; even if it weren’t, the statement would still qualify as fact under Pew’s rules since it’s being offered as an assertion of legal reality. Online readers are so used to seeing opinions couched as “constitutional facts,” though, that I’d give anyone who whiffed on that one a bit of a pass. A 10-year-old would probably choke on it too. Although maybe not an 11-year-old.

Monday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh attributed the spike in media coverage of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border to a desire to “change the subject” away from the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report finding wrongdoing within the agency and the positives of the American economy.

Limbaugh described it as “made to order” and a “manufactured crisis” to give Democrats positive momentum headed into an election season.

This children and families being separated at the border? It is an entirely manufactured crisis. It’s entirely manufactured. This has been going on for years. It happened during the Obama administration. Nobody said a word about it, primarily the media. Some might say, “Well, that doesn’t excuse it continually happening.” You gotta keep it all in perspective, and wait ’til you understand why. This is all about asylum seekers, folks. It’s all about people attempting to invade our country, not emigrate here.

And I’m gonna do my best. You know, this is a very complex issue. Well, it isn’t. It’s been made to look complex, and after they try to make it complex, then they try to simplify it by simply suggesting the United States — no, Republicans — hate kids and Republicans like separating families. And that’s what they’re trying to boil all this down to. So I’m gonna spend some time today explaining what this is all about with the aid and assistance of a few others.

And by the time we finish, you will understand how yet again this is just another manufactured crisis. Look, they’ve gotta change the subject. They have to change the subject. The economy is rip roaring. They’ve got to change the subject from the IG report. For crying out loud, that’s a devastating report about the culture of the FBI. They have got to change the subject. They’ve got to move off of the problems the Democrats are having electorally, culturally, and politically.

And so made to order, this manufactured crisis, somehow that Donald Trump is heartless, that Republicans are heartless, that they want to bust up families. Let me tell you who’s been busting up families. The Democrats. The Democrats have been literally subsidizing single motherhood in the black community for decades. It used to be called AFDC. You could also say that Planned Parenthood is excelling at separating families, couldn’t you? You want to talk about separating families, look no further than the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood.

I fully expect these comments to be controversial because they are bull’s-eye right on target. The Democrat Party has prospered from separating families. The Democrat Party has prospered for decades by assuming the role of father and provider in minority communities all over this country by subsidizing single motherhood. It is the Democrat Party who is seeking to have children brought here on trains from Central America without their parents, to create just the kind of scenario we are finding ourselves in the middle of today.

Now, to set all of this up, let’s remember some things. As was noted over the weekend… By the way, greetings. Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882. (You know all of that, so I sought not to waste that much time with the usual show open. Lots to do here.) It was — as noted over the weekend — three years ago that Donald Trump announced for the presidency. It was three years ago that he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, and we all remember his announcement speech, and most people’s reaction when that was over was laughter and ridicule and disbelief.

“There is no way this guy is serious! You don’t run for president or any office saying the things that Trump said.” I was one of the many people laughing myself silly at it (chuckles), ’cause I thought it was courageous and brave and way over the to — and I, too, was trying to figure out the motivation. But then I’ll tell you when my mind changed, ladies and gentlemen. That’s when I saw the first poll results. I was pleasantly shocked and surprised that there was overwhelming approval for Donald Trump as a presidential candidate on the Republican side.

That’s when the panic in the Republican establishment began. On the Democrat side, they never took it seriously. (laughing) All the way up to 8 o’clock on election night, they didn’t take it seriously. Except they did, because they were running spies in the Trump campaign as early as 2016! They were running Russian spies, trying to convince Trump campaign officials to pay them to take the information they were offering. The Democrat Party, the media, the FBI, the intelligence community, spent years trying to corrupt the Trump campaign — and with everything they tried, they failed.

There’s no evidence there was any collusion, despite the fact the FBI was trying to create some. Now, all of this is relevant to where we are today. But there is much, much more. What has happened in the three years since Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower? There is a renewed optimism in much of this country. In the vast majority of the square footage of this country, there is vast enthusiasm, a renewed optimism, a renewed pride, a renewed happiness in the future. The economy is roaring.

We are seeing statistics we haven’t seen in years — in fact, in some cases ever. Black, Hispanic, female unemployed rates are at a record, all-time low. The overall unemployment rate is statistically zero. It’s 3.9, 3.8%. This has long been regarded as statistically representative of full employment. The stock market has rallied and is out of sight and is still on its upward trajectory. There is a new satisfaction poll out from Gallup, and it is overwhelmingly upbeat and positive.

“Public satisfaction with the direction of the country is the highest it has been since September of 2005,” but you would never know that if you did nothing but watch Drive-By news all day. You would never have any idea that public satisfaction is at the highest it’s been since September 2005. My friends, that is 13 years ago! Now, 2005 seems like yesterday, but it was the beginning of the second term of the Bush administration, and let’s take a look what happened in 2005. Why is today, the public satisfaction with the direction of the country the highest it’s been since September 2005?

I think she’s finally been fully Trumpified. Took a lot of effort, though!

Inside the Trump administration, current and former officials say, there is considerable unease about the policy, which is regarded by some charged with carrying it out as unfeasible in practice and questionable morally. Kirstjen Nielsen, the current homeland security secretary, has clashed privately with Mr. Trump over the practice, sometimes inviting furious lectures from the president that have pushed her to the brink of resignation…

Technically, there is no Trump administration policy stating that illegal border crossers must be separated from their children. But the “zero tolerance policy” results in unlawful immigrants being taken into federal criminal custody, at which point their children are considered unaccompanied alien minors and taken away.

Whether she really did consider resigning or not, more than one paper reported last month that Trump lambasted her during a cabinet meeting at greeeeeat length over the fact that illegal border-crossings hadn’t fallen.

Trump lashed out at his Cabinet, and Nielsen in particular, when told that the number of people arrested for illegally crossing the Mexico border topped 50,000 for the second consecutive month. The blowup lasted more than 30 minutes, according to a person with knowledge of what transpired, as Trump’s face reddened and he raised his voice, saying Nielsen needed to “close down” the border…

Trump’s tirade went on so long that many present began fidgeting in their seats and flashing grimaces, White House aides said. Eventually, the topic moved on to health care, bringing relief to many in the room.

That’s from WaPo, which reported in the same piece that Trump is known to tell aides that Nielsen’s “not tough enough” and that she’s a “Bush person.” If you want to know where the separation policy came from and why Nielsen is suddenly the face of it, that’s why. Her boss made a spectacle of her in front of her colleagues, all but accusing her of dereliction of duty. Her choice implicitly was either to quit or to clench her jaw and oversee a policy that would prove to him how far she’s willing to go in the name of zero tolerance. She made her choice. Watch five minutes of the clip below from earlier today. She goes right at the administration’s critics: “We will not apologize for the job we do, or the job law enforcement does, or the job the American people expect us to do.”

She will end up apologizing, though, I expect. Not while she’s DHS chief but afterward. In fact, I’d give her a 20 percent chance of following Comey’s general career arc of leaving the government unceremoniously, becoming a harsh administration critic, then cashing in on some Democratic-pleasing tell-all. She is, after all, a “Bush person” and per the Times excerpt above she’s only a grudging supporter of the separation policy. Many prominent Republicans, even some presidential flatterers like Anthony Scaramucci and Franklin Graham, are bashing the White House over it and there are destined to be horror stories involving kids in federal detention as time wears on. (Politico already has a story out today about a federal magistrate telling a detained illegal parent who asked about the fate of her child, “Hopefully, they’ll get you to her.” Hopefully?) There’s a nonzero chance that Nielsen will spend the next few weeks doggedly defending the policy in the media, only to have Trump leave her holding the bag by suddenly changing his mind and canceling it under pressure from his buddies. How long would it take Trump to dump child separation if, say, Kim and Kanye made a direct personal appeal? Ten minutes?

Nielsen’s in fine form here, though, hitting all the major points on the policy’s behalf. This pitch is intended for an Audience of One, as are so many public appearances by Trump officials, but all populists will enjoy it.