With the extreme left culturally ascendant, many of our most treasured and valuable national institutions have become houses of progressive Groupthink. Meanwhile, our nation’s founding principles, basic morality, values and even science have come under sustained hostile ideological assault by both the media and academia. Bias and ignorance have been institutionalized. Sadly, according to a new report, voters bear much of the blame for this.
No question, America is a mess. But how did it get that way? The simple answer, the poll of voters suggests, is ignorance, along with pervasive media and political bias.
The study is based on a survey of voters taken shortly after the 2020 presidential election by Just Facts, which describes itself as “a non-profit institute dedicated to publishing comprehensive, straightforward, and rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.”
The group’s most recent study is eye-opening.
It shows, Just Facts says, “that the vast bulk of voters have embraced false and harmful dogmas that accord with their political views.” This, it adds, is largely due to what’s called confirmation bias, “the human tendency to reflexively accept anything that accords with one’s preexisting beliefs and ignore or twist everything that defies them.”
It’s true that both sides of the political debates have their biases.
For instance, among Trump voters, some 76% believe that incomes for the middle class fell during the Obama years. In fact, on average they rose by $5,300.
No group is perfect. But those on the left show themselves to be, well, delusional about what they know and don’t know.
For instance, among Biden voters, 88% believe police are more likely to use deadly force when arresting black Americans than white ones. Wrong. In fact, they’re 42% less likely to use deadly force against blacks.
This, as much as anything, might illustrate why cities around the nation now are wracked by race riots and political violence by far-left extremists like BLM and Antifa. Ignorant voters decry the violence and property destruction, but then excuse it and vote for those who propagate it.
As for the impacts of climate change, only about 38% of Trump voters but 86% of Biden voters believe that the number of powerful, destructive tornadoes has increased since the 1950s. This, by the way, is part of the left’s narrative that global warming has created far-reaching climatic changes, among them violent tornadoes.
Not true. In fact, the average number of violent hurricanes has fallen somewhat.
We could go on. Just Facts asked 21 such questions of 1,000 randomly selected people in their survey, enough for a 3% margin of error.
The average voter correctly answered just 38% of the questions, were wrong 51% of the time, and unsure 10% of the time. A majority could only answer four of the 21 questions correctly.
Think of that when an HR1 supporter says we need more uninformed people voting to “perfect our democracy.”
Perhaps showing the effects of a pervasively left-biased mainstream media, wrong answers strongly correlated to partisan agendas. The data clearly showed this: An average of 57% of the incorrect answers were liberally misinformed, while just 28% were conservatively misinformed.
“In other words, voters were twice as likely to believe certain progressive myths than conservative ones,” according to the report. No doubt that’s a residual effect from our left-leaning media, which now spews socialist “narratives” instead of facts.
And therein lies the rub.
Because, as it turns out, the left are far more likely to believe things and propagate ideas that are factually false than are people on the right. That’s of course completely contrary to the media’s repeated claims that leftists and progressives are more attuned to “science” and “fact-based” reality than conservatives are.
“For all 10 of the questions in which the electorate was most deluded, the wrong answers they gave concurred with progressive narratives propagated by the media,” the voter study showed. “Moreover, the false answers they gave were often far removed from reality, not just slightly mistaken.”
As an example, Just Facts noted, some 66% of voters thought that by doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, poor families would see their average incomes rise by 25% or more. The real number, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office from actual labor market and income data, is about 1%.
One final point. Here’s the breakdown for the rate of wrong answers given to the survey’s questions, by demographic and voting group. The numbers speak for themselves.
- 61% for Biden voters
- 56% for 18- to 34-year olds
- 53% for females
- 51% for 35- to 64-year olds
- 51% for 65+ year olds
- 49% for males
- 42% for Trump voters
Please remember this the next time some leftist in the media tries to convince you how bright, humane and enlightened the sinistral side of the political spectrum is. And you can expect this delusion to get even worse as the Democratic Party continues its very own political gender “transition” to becoming a straight-up, no-apologies Socialist Party.
As President Reagan said, oh-so politely, years ago, “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
One thing that is not covered in this article that has an immense effect on voter ignorance and bias is the Democrat-union-public-school complex. Indoctrination starts in kindergarten and continues through 12th grade. If the student goes on to college it continues there.
The average income question is a bit misleading. First of all, average income is a bad statistic because a large gain at the top of the income distribution will raise average incomes, even though the rest of the population may not be any better off. This is why a lot of reporting is based on median incomes. And people who remember the Obama years remember that for most of his two terms median household income was lower than when he came into office: real median household income fell from 2008 to 2012, before recovering somewhat in his second term. It ended up rising only 5% from 2008 to 2016. So the question on average incomes is a bit of a gotcha because median incomes did fall for much of his term. And this was a question that a lot of Republicans missed.
I thought about that question myself – and its a tough one, because “wage disparity” or however the dems would like to call it did widen considerably during Obama’s tenure, as the rebound from the 2008 recession greatly favored the wealthy and destroyed the middle class. 2015/16 were the best years for the economy during Obama’s term and so I would not have known where the marker was when his term ended.
“Bias and ignorance have been institutionalized… No question, America is a mess. But how did it get that way? The simple answer, the poll of voters suggests, is ignorance, along with pervasive media and political bias.”
We need look no further for the answer than basic math skills, and how easily the uneducated are looted via the normalization and institutionalization of fraud.
By total amount, all debt in the world today is a direct function of an egregiously fraudulent math-procedure-error in the interest calculation formula used by about 80% of the world’s private financial institutions.
The fraudulent methodology has been banned in the U.K. since 1974 as criminal fraud on the grounds that it is “false and seriously misleading”, and which is itself the understatement of the century.
The same egregious-and-ridiculously-fraudulent-formula that is banned as criminal fraud in U.K, has been expressly required by law for all nominal creditors throughout the U.S. under the 1968 federal (wait – for – it) Truth in Lending Act!
That is why today in the U.S. there is an identifiable group of about five million people who are seriously over-represented among the working-poor, but from whom is extracted about $50 billion a year ($50,000,000,000) in interest charges at an average rate of about 30,000% per annum.
School children in the U.S. are indoctrinated to believe that 100% per month is the same rate as 1,200% per year, because there are 12 months in a year, and 100% x 12 = 1,200%. They don’t have a clue that 100% per month, even if for only a single month, is the same rate as 409,500% per annum.
100 years-ago every high school student in America knew that – yet today not only do they not know it – their government actively denies it to them even as its banker friends systematically harvest the wealth of America and its Peoples.
http://werex.org/nominal-rate-real-fraud/