In his famous speech “A Time for Choosing” Ronald Reagan hit the nail on the head about liberals: they have strong opinions based upon complete falsehoods.

This struck me once again as I read a report from The Skeptic Research Center.  The goal of the Center is to do research into what people think and provide basic information to increase people’s knowledge regarding important issues of the day. I just ran across this particular piece of research and it caught my eye. You will see why in a minute.

The study in question has to do with Americans’ understanding of race and policing, and the results were rather stunning. It boils down to this: Americans haven’t a clue about the basic facts and liberals in particular live in a world completely divorced from reality.

2020 Survey: "How many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?"

The Washington Post's police shooting database says 12.

54% of "Very Liberals" (least accurate) estimated 1,000+.

13% of "Conservatives" (most accurate) estimated 1,000+. pic.twitter.com/zOXADsQ4pm

— Skeptic Research Center Team (@SkepResCenter) April 4, 2023

A liberal would look at those results and probably respond: of course conservatives guess low; they are racists and don’t CARE that unarmed black men get killed by police.” Being right about the facts isn’t necessary to be “right” morally.

I, on the other hand, look at those numbers and see this: liberals haven’t got a clue about the real world and hence should shut the hell up until they learn a few things.

2020 & 2022 Surveys Compared

There was a modest improvement in accuracy.

The greatest improvement occurred among “Very Conservatives.”

While liberals increased how often they gave the false answer of “About 100,” they gave even more extreme answers less often. pic.twitter.com/9gWy05YxMc

— Skeptic Research Center Team (@SkepResCenter) April 4, 2023

Let’s look at the first chart blown up a bit:

What we see in the chart is that 22% of liberals think that 10,000 or more unarmed black men are shot by police officers every year. Almost 55% believe that 1000 to 10 or more thousand are gunned down every year.

The answer is 12 in 2019, and 11 in 2020. That doesn’t equate to being a bit inaccurate. It is not being in the same universe as the truth.

Conservatives overestimate the numbers, although about half of them get it right and the rest are not nearly as wrong as the liberals.

Liberals know a lot, but so much of it is simply not true. In no universe is 12 close to 1000-10,000.

This pattern, I am certain, is duplicated across the issues, and my educated guess as to why has to do with trust in the mainstream media. The media creates panic as a matter of course; it is their business model, after all. And since they are liberals they like to create panics that push people to adopt liberal positions.

So they dramatize problems they feel strongly about and create the impression that a problem that bothers them is an existential crisis for the country or the world. One of my favorite comics, Ryan George, made a great video about this.

Another factor, besides believing the news media, in liberals being so wrong is that they actually want to believe that certain things are true despite having little to no evidence that they are. They call this “following The Science™,” by which they mean following the witch doctors. They invent facts out of thin air and repeat them endlessly in order to create a reality that doesn’t exist.

A perfect example is the plastic straw statistic debacle. Liberals hate plastic and are convinced that an environmental apocalypse is nigh, so when a 9-year-old boy made the fantastic claim that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day, the news media ran with it.

His claim was repeated endlessly, and even the New York Times used it many times. Some enterprising reporter at the paper decided to see where it came from and discovered that a kid simply invented it.

If you’ve read a recent article about Starbucks, Marriott or Seattle banning plastic straws, you might have come across a striking statistic: Americans use about 500 million straws each day.

That figure has been cited widely, appearing in stories by USA Today, CNN, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and, yes, even The New York Times.

But consider the source: The number is based on research conducted years ago by an enterprising 9-year-old Vermont boy named Milo Cress.

It was a guess. A wild-ass guess made by a pre-teen.

Professional estimates of straw usage are hard, but not impossible, to find. Yet, the number this fourth grader came up with in 2011, as part of a personal environmental conservation campaign, has proved surprisingly durable, working its way to the heart of the debate over plastic straws.

“It is honestly a little surprising,” said Mr. Cress, who turned 17 on Thursday. “I came up with this statistic because I couldn’t find anything else about it. If there are other statistics on how many straws we use that are based on more rigorous research than the research that I did, I’m happy to embrace those.”

The kid wanted to be environmentally friendly, thought plastic straws were bad, and guessed a number of how many are used. And the media fell in love with the number and ran with it.

This is how the news works in real life. Enviros wanted a shocking statistic and they invented it. It is the same principle that you find in these police shooting beliefs.

The media wants you to believe that Black men are being hunted by the police, so they create the impression that they are. Liberals want to believe it, so they do.

There are reams of research that indicated conservatives understand liberal arguments but the reverse is not true. Jonathan Haidt, who studied moral attitudes and why people have them, has collected data that demonstrates that conservatives can make arguments from both a liberal and a conservative perspective, while liberals cannot. They simply have no empathy for the views of conservatives and hence cannot understand us.

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right.  Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.”

This leads them to assume all our “wrong” opinions are based upon selfish and immoral impulses. It simply doesn’t compute that we value things differently than they do. And they have no inclination to discover how we think.

Conservatives can be closed-minded, of course. As much as I kvetch about liberals and often complain that they promote demonic policies, I still assume that any random liberal I run across has a good heart and wants good things for the world. I also tend to assume that their grasp of reality is tenuous, and with good reason. The evidence abounds, as is shown in the above survey.

Yet I know that conservatives can be as closed-minded. But it is harder for us, mainly because we are constantly bombarded with liberal propaganda and are forced to question everything we are told. We can’t easily assume that everything we hear in the media is true. (And for those of you who rely fully on Fox News you are making a mistake; they probably do no more research into facts than any other media outlet that needs to churn out content).

So on average your conservative friend is at least conversant with a wider range of opinions and arguments and is a greater skeptic about “facts” that he hears. It doesn’t mean he is right, but it makes him less likely to be certain about something that is false.

The COVID years prove the wisdom of this approach. While liberals went crazy, believing every absurd claim being made by The Science™, conservatives quickly smelled the whiff of BS. We were right, the Left was wrong.

On just about everything.

Will liberals learn anything from that experience?

One word: no. That 500 million straw-a-day statistic still pops up, despite everybody in the MSM knowing it was invented by a 9-year-old.