Socially constructed delusions

We are pretty far down the deconstructionist, social justice, postmodernist road where plain facts cannot be acknowledged, where politicians are socially constructing a pseudo-reality out of emotional heartache and the mainstream media is facilitating delusion over reality.

From Fact-Checkers Give Stacey Abrams a Pass on Victory Claim by Mark Hemingway. Hemingway is more focused on the fact that mainstream media fact-checkers are being inconsistent in their standards of evidence. And he is right.

But we know that the fact-checkers are epistemically challenged and ideologically biased. That has been well established for a number of years. It is a polite indulgence to refer to them as fact-checkers. Particularly when, as is so often the case, they are actually "fact"-checking opinions and jokes with which they disagree. Their postmodernist educations did not equip them to understand that de gustibus non est disputandum.

I take away something different from this issue than Hemingway and that is the almost conscious and willful construction of an alternate belief system freed from reality. The mainstream media is almost willfully deluding itself in the midst of deceiving its readers.

Abrams is just a local, moderately competent, retail politician with no life or legislative achievements to speak of. She is no rising star. She is a thin reed being clutched by the Mandarin Class.

This absurd motte-and-bailey argument that she won the election for governor of Georgia despite losing by 50,000 votes is delusional. Were she to claim that she won a moral victory, well, that would be a different argument and one that has at least some semblance of credibility. That as a black woman and as a Democrat she came that close is a respectable achievement.

But that she won? That does violence to language and logic and evidence. Mayhem that that the mainstream media seemingly fully supports.

African-American registration was up 31%, a greater increase than any other racial group. Voting participation by all registered voters nearly doubled. This was a consequential election with vigorous campaigning, some real, though generally unpleasant, choices, and robust citizen engagement by every measure. She lost. She indisputably lost. While the margin was thin in percentage terms (1.4 percentage points), it was solid and large in terms of number of votes, 55,000 more people preferring Kemp over Abrams.

The fact that the New York Times and other mainstream media keep providing a forum for Abrams to make counterfactual claims, and indeed keep pushing her argument in the face of plain facts and reasons seems to indicate that amongst postmodernists, reality is indeed socially constructed. The tragedy (for them) is that reality has real teeth which can not be socially deconstructed.