As I read postings on my Facebook wall this morning, I was struck by the number of conservatives who were just utterly shocked at the outcome of this election, as if it was something that was totally unexpected. It mirrors something that progressives have been saying about conservatives for some time,that they seem to have a bubble mentality. Those who were following anything other than Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, ad nauseaum, should not have had any surprise about how the election turned out. In fact, one of the big stories of the morning is Nate Silver's dead on predictions about the election. In other words, those of us who live in the world of reality and seek out sources that are rooted in scientific reasoning and that accurately convey reality have a far better grasp of what's going on in the world than those shocked conservatives who, apparently, sought out sources that only validate their particular worldview without challenging them in any way or bursting that bubble that they live in (Fox News, their church, talk radio, etc.).
So this leads me to ask this question of my conservative friends and family, which is posed in all sincerity, how long will you continue to be duped by your conservative sources? What is it going to take to make you realize that they are totally untrustworthy? I recall many of you making light of the whole Harold Camping affair, when Harold Camping,a fundamentalist Christian preacher, attempted to convince everyone that Jesus was going to return first in May 2011, and then after that failed, October 2011. You puzzled along with the rest of us about how anyone could continue to follow him after those failed predictions, yet, you continue to turn to your conservative news and talk radio sources even though they have repeatedly been wrong. In fact, it could be argued that they have an even worse failure record than Harold Camping. At least he was wrong only twice. Conservative pundits have been wrong going back as far as 1996. I know because I was staunch conservative myself, until I grew tired of being duped by the conservative talking heads.
My first time voting in a presidential election was in the 1992, George H.W. Bush vs. Bill Clinton, election. I was huge fan of Rush Limbaugh, and in 1993, even drove all the way to Fort Collins, CO from El Paso, TX to meet him at Dan's Bake Sale. In the leadup to the '92 election, I recall Rush telling us dittoheads, first, that Bush was going to win, the polls be damned. Second, he said that if Clinton were elected, it would be the end of America as we know it. Socialized medicine. Taking away our guns. Gays running rampant through the streets. You all know the spiel. In 1996, my conservative tunnel vision was unable to discern the fact that none of these things had happened, so I continued to listen to Rush tell us how if we elected Clinton for a second term, shit was really gonna get real. Clinton was only holding out for the first term because he only wanted to get re-elected. If he was re-elected, there would be nothing holding him back from implementing the entire socialist/communist/gun-hating agenda. Hell, there would probably even be martial law imposed with blue-helmeted U.N. troops roaming through the streets. When 2000 came, and none of those things had happened, I finally began to wake up. Not only had those things not happened, the country was at one of its most prosperous periods in my lifetime. I finally decided that maybe Rush didn't know as much about the world as he tries to make out that he does. At roughly this same time, I received my graduate degree in sociology and realized that I really didn't need any radio pundits to tell me how to think about politics and culture, so I quit talk radio and began my journey out of conservatism. The ultimate death knell in my conservative worldview was the eight disastrous years of the Bush 43 administration. The worst terrorist attack on our soil occurred (Do you recall that all of you Benghazi-obssessed conservatives? I don't remember any of you getting all fired up about the deaths that resulted from that leadership failure.). We went to war with a country that did not attack or threaten us in any way. And then finally, our economy teetered on the brink of disaster and collapse at the end of the Bush nightmare. So as we approached the 2008 election, with me solidly supporting Barack Obama, I decided to check out Rush's show to see if any of the events in the last decade since I had really followed him had changed his view. Nope! To my utter amazement, he was restating virtually word-for-word the same crap he had spewed about Clinton: socialized medicine, communism, coming for your guns, blue-helmeted U.N. troops, rampant homosexuality, blah, blah, blah, but now with a few new things thrown in: Muslim, not an American, etc. My first thought was, "Really!" Geez, even most mediocre comedians change their material from time to time. This guy was still spouting the same nonsense, and, amazingly, some people were still believing it. And even more amazingly, some people who had followed Rush from the early 90s like myself. As the old saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." If you listened to Rush spout his bullshit throughout the 90s about Clinton, and you still believe that, maybe one day, all of his ridiculous scenarios of the Democratic apocalypse are going to come to pass, then you are a complete fool. And then to top it off, Limbaugh, Fox News, Levin, Coulter, and the rest of the tinfoil hat brigade is doubling down on crazy. Just like Limbaugh did back in 1996, they're all crying about how now, things are going to get REALLY bad since Obama got a second term. Now he's going to be totally uninhibited with his America-hating, socialist, gun-snagging agenda. Yeah, right! And I've got some nice beachfront property to sell you here in good ol' El Paso, TX.
Seriously, though. These people have made ridiculous claims about liberals and the Democratic Party for two decades now that have never even remotely manifested into reality. Anytime they are confronted with facts that show their bullshit for what it is, they claim some grand liberal conspiracy in every facet of life is keeping people from seeing the truth. If only there wasn't a liberal bias among the media, Hollywood, science, academia, public schools, unions, statisticians, Wikipedia, Snopes, Google, and...you get the picture. Well, public elections are a perfect time to test whether their bubble mentality is really on the mark, or whether they need to break out of the bubble. And this time, the bubble mentality was using the old liberal bias meme against Nate Silver, claiming that his polls were off because his liberal viewpoint was skewing his results. It couldn't be that Silver's scientifically-based model was actually measuring reality. No. Anytime something looks good for the liberals, it must be a part of the grand conspiracy. But this morning we saw that Nate Silver's model was dead-eye accurate. And the conspiracy-minded were completely way off base....just like Limbaugh in 1992...and in 1996...and in 2008...and ultimately in 2016. Because they don't live in a world of facts and logic. They live in a world of fantasy and belief like a child believing in Santa Claus. And the only way to maintain that fantasy world is to believe in a vastly sweeping, grand liberal conspiracy that forces you to live in an echo chamber where you only hear your own beliefs reinforced. And then when reality smacks you hard on the ass (like it did last night), you act completely shocked and confused about events that everyone living in reality saw coming a mile away.
So I ask again, how long are you gonna continue to trust your sources that continually mislead you? I'm a big fan of the Walking Dead, Revolution, Book of Eli, and the Terminator series, and I know that apocalypses are really cool, with their idea of being a hardened survivor fighting against the machines, zombies, or mutants. I get the appeal of that. But those are just movies...fantasies. You're not gonna be the hero of an apocalypse brought about by Barack Obama, or any other Democratic president for that matter. If you really want to be the hero of an apocalypse, do what I do, and play some Fallout: New Vegas. And if you continue to buy into this cock-and-bull scenario peddled by snake-oil salesmen posing as radio and television news pundits, then you don't need more guns and bullets, you need more tinfoil. And while you're preparing for this bogus apocalypse that will never come and fretting about how a liberal president is going to destroy your fantasy-version of America, all while attempting to fix these phony problems through the use of Bible verses and talk radio, the adults will be busy progressing our society into the 21st century and beyond through the use of science, reason, and logic.