We keep hearing people, especially people on the political left, make the claim that “Facts aren’t important!”
For example, back in 2019, during an interview with Anderson Cooper, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said “…I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” Within that statement you see that she believes that it’s more important to be “morally right” than “factually correct.” In other words, she was basically saying that she believed that the “facts aren’t important.”
I’ve seen situations where African Americans are approached with facts concerning the Democratic Party, which most of today’s American blacks identify with, about their party’s long and sordid history of being racist, and of black oppression, that dates back as far as the late 1820’s, before the American Civil War, when their party was the “pro-slavery party.” Or facts are shared with them about how our country’s social welfare programs, pushed by their political party, has done much to destroy the black family and community, and little to help them. When they are approached with this information, they scold you, tell you in so many words that “facts aren’t important,” and that you are in fact racist for actually looking at the facts.
So, with this in mind, let me explain to you just exactly why facts are important.
Why Facts Are Important
So, you see an injustice happening to someone, or to some group of people. Your heart aches for those people. Your blood boils. You get angry, and this seething anger drives you to action. You want to do something, and use that emotional drive to go out to attack and destroy whatever that injustice is that you see hurting people.
It’s great that you see something that you deem to be an injustice, and you want to work to fix, and eliminate, that injustice. You can use your heart, your feelings, your emotions, your spirit, as the drive that pushes you to action, that motivates you to push through the hardships and difficulties that need to be worked through to fight against and destroy that perceived injustice.
Now that you have the drive that motivates you to action, this is where “the facts” come into the picture. The facts are important in guiding those emotional energies in a way that allows you to truly work to eradicate and destroy those injustices, and in the most efficient and effective and impactful ways possible. The facts, if applied, can truly help you to make a real dent in whatever that perceived injustice is.
What the facts do is to make your drive to eradicate whatever that injustice is more effective and efficient. By letting the facts guide you, it allows you to have the most impact. On the other hand, by not letting the facts guide your emotional energies and drive, you’ll end up expounding your energies in wasteful and inefficient ways that hinder you from making a real impact.
In fact, if could get even worse than that. Not letting the facts guide your emotional drive to destroy an injustice, because you believe that “facts aren’t important,” can actually cause you to focus your energies in ways that make the problem worse. Think about that – you want to work to destroy a perceived injustice, but your disregard for the facts leads you to do things, and support policies and programs, that make those very injustices even worse. And when that happens, you’re working against yourself, and against your ultimate goal, not towards it.
Let me give you an example.
Racial Disparities – Ignoring the Facts
So, there are a bunch of disparities, which at first glance, look like racial disparities, that are categorized under the label of “systemic racism.” For example, you see the fact that a much higher percentage of young black men end up incarcerated versus the lower percentage of young white men. You see that a higher percentage of blacks are living in poverty versus the lower percentage of white people. You see these disparities, and many others, and it bothers you. These disparities make you angry. These perceived racial injustices motivate you and drives you to action. You see our social welfare programs that we have in place as one of the primary ways to help alleviate these disparities that you see in the black community. There are people around you that oppose these programs, particularly the Republicans and other conservatives, and you incorrectly perceive that because they are opposed to those programs that they don’t care about black people, so they must be racist. You look at them as the enemy that must be stood up to, you vilify them, and you are ready and willing to fight against them with all your might.
But then you realize that the black community has been suffering from these disparities for decades, that the problem isn’t going away, and in many cases these disparities are getting worse, not better, for the black community, all while other people, other people of color, immigrants from all over the world, tend to not have these problems at all. You decide that if you really want to work to eradicate the disparities found in the black community, and make a dent in this set of injustices, that you need to research them and figure out just what the underlying root causes of these disparities are – that way you can work to change these root causes, and by doing so can be more impactful towards eliminating these disparities. Because of this, you are now using your emotional energies in a way that’s truly impactful.
Upon researching the causes of these disparities, you discover that, according to some experts, they can be explained more accurately by looking at them from the perspectives of type of family structure or household environment, rather than by trying to analyze these disparities from a racial perspective. For this perspective, you take the young people in the black community, and divide them into two groups – one group comes from intact family structures where a mother and father are both present, and have a healthy and mature relationship with each other; the other group is being raised by a single mother, where there isn’t a father figure present in the household. This second grouping is way too common in the black community, and you know it. So, then you compare and contrast these two groups. What do you discover?
You discover something totally alarming. When comparing the second group of black young people, who come from households where there’s only a single mother present, to the first group of young black people, who are raised in homes inside intact two-adult families, you discover that they are many times more likely to commit suicide, drop out of high school, abuse chemical substances, have mental health issues, live in poverty, and end up in prison. In other words, black youth that come from intact two-adult family structures fare much, much better than black youth that are raised by single mothers. They have a level of privilege and advantage over their counterparts who are being raised by a single parent. You realize that by looking at these facts and figures that if you really want to help the black community, you need to strengthen the black family – the more black youth raised in intact two-adult families, the lower the number of people in the black community that will end up in prison, or living in poverty, or doing drugs, or dropping out of school, etc.
With this information in mind, you proceed to look at another statistic, one entitled “Children in single-parent families by race in the United States.” What do you discover? More than 65 percent of black youth are being raised by single parents; compare that to the only 25 percent of non-Hispanic white people, or only 15 percent of Asian Americans that are raised by single parents. You ask, “What if only 25 percent of black children were raised by single parents so that it was the same percentage as white children? Would the disparities found within the label of ‘systemic racism’ still exist?” The answer: no, those disparities would, for the most part, go away. So, you found your problem – if you really wanted to make an impact on alleviating the disparities found in the black community, then you need to work on strengthening the black family. You need to work to transform the black community so that less black youth are raised by single parents, and more black youth come from intact two-adult families, because as this change takes place, you will start to see these disparities found under the label of “systemic racism” start to shrink – the first step in making those disparities eventually disappear.
After you discover all of this, you start to delve into history. You realize that in the early 1960’s, back when the Democrats first passed into law our modern social welfare state, with all of its programs, only 25 percent of black youth were being raised by single parents. “But, wait a second!” – you say, “Only 25 percent of black youth back then were raised by single parents, but now it’s a whopping 65 percent! What caused this change?”
You discover that our social welfare programs, pushed by the Democrats and other progressives since the mid-1960’s, had a built-in perverse incentivization program built into it. These programs were designed to “help” single mothers, but also stipulated that in order for single mothers to keep receiving welfare payments, they had to stay single, and not get married, especially to a man who had a job. There was nothing in the system that encouraged and incentivized the creation of new intact two-adult families, or to go find meaningful employment, but only penalties for doing so.
Single mothers were basically rewarded for staying single and raising their child alone, even though the creation of intact two-adult families would have been far, far better for black children. Over time, that perverse incentivization program slowly changed the dynamic of the black community. More and more households with single parents took root, and less and less two-adult families were present. By the time of the Clinton-era welfare reforms in the 1990’s, around 75 percent of black children were being raised by single parents, and that number has remained roughly the same, dropping just a little bit, showing how single-parent households has become an ingrained part of the black community and culture.
This information, these facts, are an eye-opener for you. You now realize that the social welfare programs created and pushed by the political left haven’t helped the black community at all, and has done everything to basically destroy the black family, and by doing so, has helped to make worse, exacerbate, and grow, the very disparities that you think they’re working to eliminate. You realize that the Democratic party doesn’t really have the back of the black community like they claim, that they’ve been working to destroy it, and that maybe the conservatives, under the guise of the Republican party, have been right about this all along. Maybe they’re not the bad guys like you thought, but are the good guys. You realize now that by supporting the Democratic party, and its social welfare programs, which you did by ignoring the facts, that you’ve been working against yourself the whole time, and have helped make things even worse in the black community.
With this in mind, you now realize that you need to do even more research, and find out the histories of the Democratic and Republican parties, to see what else you can find. You discover that in the 1840’s and ‘50’s that the Democratic party had a lot of power, and endorsed the slavery of blacks, being the “pro-slavery” party. At the time, there were many disparate groups working to try to bring an end to the slavery of blacks, and they didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere, so they decided they would be more effective at their ultimate goal to end slavery by coming together and working under the guise of a single political party – this became the Republican party. Did you get that? The Republican party was originally created as a coalition of antislavery groups that wanted to be more effective and impactful at ending slavery. You now realize that modern American society, especially those on the political left, particularly those in the African American community, have completely lost this history, and are completely ignorant of these facts.
When an anti-slavery Republican was elected as president, the southern slave states, which were controlled by the pro-slavery Democrats, attempted to secede from the Union, leading to our American Civil War, where hundreds of thousands of white people shed their blood and died for that “Republican” cause. It was the Republicans that passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to our Constitution, which abolished slavery, made blacks American citizens, gave blacks equal protection under the law, and gave blacks the right to vote – it wasn’t the Democrats that passed those amendments; in fact, they were fighting to block their passage. When the pro-slavery Democrats lost our civil war, and the Reconstruction period ended, they proceeded to become the party of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and the infamous Black Codes. The Democrats were still very heavily the party of racism and white supremacy deep into the 1960’s, during the time when several civil rights bills were passed, which explains why Republican lawmakers voted for the passage of those laws in higher percentage amounts than the Democrats, and why the only real opposition to those landmark laws came from Democrats, not Republicans.
When the Democratic party passed our modern social welfare programs in the mid-1960’s, they were still very heavily the party of racism and white supremacy, all while pushing their social welfare programs, which you now realize was catastrophic to the black community. They were pushing these programs as being good for the black community, as a form of “racial justice.” Given the Democratic party’s long and sordid history of one act of racism and oppression after another towards the black community, one anti-black scheme, after another, it makes you wonder if their social welfare programs were just another in their long line of sinister schemes to keep down and destroy the black community.
You look around today, and you realize that the communities that are predominantly African American are the communities that are the most poverty-stricken, have the highest crime rates, and have the highest illegal drug usage rates, and they all tend to be under the control of Democrats, which they’ve been for decades. It seems to you that it’s under the control of the Democratic party that blacks have been the most down-and-out, and that the Democrats seem to prefer to keep it that way.
You realize that under Trump, a Republican president who represented the conservatives, as much as he seemed to lack a social filter and made people cringe, that blacks under his leadership became more prosperous than they’ve ever been in American history. You also realize that many of the people that voted for him didn’t vote for him because they particularly like him and his antics, but because of what his party stands for, and what it represents – his party’s entire history is about standing for freedom from tyranny, in whatever form it takes, and about bringing more widespread prosperity to the people. They voted for the Republican party because their policies are better for all people, but especially the black people – they don’t particularly care for some of the antics of the president, but didn’t vote for him because he’s perfect, but because of what his party represents, and because they believe, for good reason, based on the facts, that the Republican party’s policies are good for all people, including black people.
By looking at the facts, and you’ve had a real eye-opener, you realize that you’ve had it all wrong. By ignoring the facts, you’ve been supporting the wrong political party the whole freakin’ time. You’ve been working towards the demise of black people, which is the opposite of what you really want. Maybe the Republican party isn’t the bad guy like you thought. Maybe they’re the ones that have had the backs of the black community the whole time.
Conclusion
The conclusions that you reached, when it came to the social welfare programs pushed by the political left, and opposed by the political right, the conservatives, is just the tip of the iceberg for you. You decide that if you are wrong about this, then you might be wrong about a lot of other things as well.
For example, you ask yourself why the holocaust happened. You ask yourself why the Nazi’s, who were fascist, hated the Jews so much. Your delving into history uncovers some surprising and shocking revelations and truths. In this case, you discover that the primary reason the Nazi’s hated the Jews was because the Jews epitomized the hated capitalist system that the Nazi’s wanted to destroy. “Wait! What?” – you say – “I thought that if I hated fascism, then I should hate capitalism too, because capitalism represents fascism! But what these facts are telling me is that the fascists hated capitalism too! If I oppose and hate capitalism, I’m actually in lockstep with the Nazi’s! Maybe I need to do a lot more research into what fascism really is before I act, because if I don’t, I may be pushing our country in the direction of fascism while thinking I’m working against it, and I certainly don’t want to do that!”
You don’t stop there, but decide to start researching everything that you think you stand for, and what the arguments are against it. You want to see what you’ll uncover. Because, now you realize that facts are important, and you’re working against yourself when you ignore the facts.
The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. Proverbs 18:17 (ESV)
