Episode Details
Back to Episodes
Be Forewarned: A Personal Disclaimer
Published 5 years, 9 months ago
Description
Be Forewarned: A Personal Disclaimer
In these days of hypersensitivity and arrogance, sometimes you have to explain to people just what you stand for and what you will put up with. And sometimes you have to be willing to "turn the page" on people you knew yesterday who really don't know you today, especially if they can't divorce politics and ideology from friendship. This week I put people on notice...in an effort to be transparent.
Please subscribe to our podcast at iHeart Radio, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and on podcast platforms like Castbox, Podcast Addict, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spreaker, and anywhere podcasts are heard.
TRANSCRIPT
For the last 22 years, I have been fully engaged in the culture war. I have even been the executive director for a small non-profit that dealt with the threats of Progressivism, Islamofascism, and constitutional illiteracy. In addition, I have written for national publications, think tanks, and foundations on these topics and guested on many television and radio programs not because I am a zealot on these issues, but because I have been recognized as someone who is fair; someone who takes great pains to explore all sides of an issue and who seeks out credible, fact-based information, even when everyone else was acting emotionally.
So, I find it troubling how far to the ideological Left many of my friends and family have jerked in the last 6 or so years. People I respected have suddenly stopped seeking perspective from both sides of an issue; stopped caring about whether what they are buying into is true and unmanipulated, and are full-throatily engaged in advancing political vomit as truth; ideological propaganda as fact. We, as a society – and this includes my circle, large that it is – have mistakenly misconstrued the easy of communicating our opinions with advocating provable truths.
And before you knee-jerk assign me a label, know that I am just as severe on the elitists of the Right as I am on the oligarchs of the Left. Progressives exist on both sides of the aisle and their goals are the same: harness the emotions of the people to divide, advance opportunistic propaganda based on half-truths and manipulated innuendo, and attain power amongst the chaos. Both sides are guilty of it and for that fact, both sides are to blame.
But that does not absolve us from our responsibility to see through the fog of politically charged misinformation, to do that we must dispense with the usual suspect media and start going to sources to read white-paper facts on issues and situations. We must have the courage to call people out when they advance media-driven propaganda and confront power when the elitists in control use emotional knee-jerk to manipulate the people into divide.
No one gets a pass. If you post something that I have found, through my studies of both sides of an issue (and that study goes far beyond the mainstream media rags that do nothing but sensationalize headlines for profit) to be false, misleading or ridiculously conspiratorial I am going to call you on it and I am forewarning everyone, family and friends, that I am finished being polite about it.
For 22 years I have been polite about explaining the information I have discovered, tested, and confirmed, and for some reason, today, because everyone has a Facebook account, opinions trump facts. This cannot and will not stand.
So, for the record:
▪ I am a constitutionalist and not one who only values the Charters of Freedom when it is advantageous. I do not riot if my candidate doesn’t win. I do not loot when the media snaps its fingers. And I do not automatically believe that because someone thinks differently than me that he or she is an asshole. That moniker is saved for when that person proves him or herself to be an asshole.
▪ I do my research before I espouse my opinion. My research takes me to as many v
In these days of hypersensitivity and arrogance, sometimes you have to explain to people just what you stand for and what you will put up with. And sometimes you have to be willing to "turn the page" on people you knew yesterday who really don't know you today, especially if they can't divorce politics and ideology from friendship. This week I put people on notice...in an effort to be transparent.
Please subscribe to our podcast at iHeart Radio, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and on podcast platforms like Castbox, Podcast Addict, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spreaker, and anywhere podcasts are heard.
TRANSCRIPT
For the last 22 years, I have been fully engaged in the culture war. I have even been the executive director for a small non-profit that dealt with the threats of Progressivism, Islamofascism, and constitutional illiteracy. In addition, I have written for national publications, think tanks, and foundations on these topics and guested on many television and radio programs not because I am a zealot on these issues, but because I have been recognized as someone who is fair; someone who takes great pains to explore all sides of an issue and who seeks out credible, fact-based information, even when everyone else was acting emotionally.
So, I find it troubling how far to the ideological Left many of my friends and family have jerked in the last 6 or so years. People I respected have suddenly stopped seeking perspective from both sides of an issue; stopped caring about whether what they are buying into is true and unmanipulated, and are full-throatily engaged in advancing political vomit as truth; ideological propaganda as fact. We, as a society – and this includes my circle, large that it is – have mistakenly misconstrued the easy of communicating our opinions with advocating provable truths.
And before you knee-jerk assign me a label, know that I am just as severe on the elitists of the Right as I am on the oligarchs of the Left. Progressives exist on both sides of the aisle and their goals are the same: harness the emotions of the people to divide, advance opportunistic propaganda based on half-truths and manipulated innuendo, and attain power amongst the chaos. Both sides are guilty of it and for that fact, both sides are to blame.
But that does not absolve us from our responsibility to see through the fog of politically charged misinformation, to do that we must dispense with the usual suspect media and start going to sources to read white-paper facts on issues and situations. We must have the courage to call people out when they advance media-driven propaganda and confront power when the elitists in control use emotional knee-jerk to manipulate the people into divide.
No one gets a pass. If you post something that I have found, through my studies of both sides of an issue (and that study goes far beyond the mainstream media rags that do nothing but sensationalize headlines for profit) to be false, misleading or ridiculously conspiratorial I am going to call you on it and I am forewarning everyone, family and friends, that I am finished being polite about it.
For 22 years I have been polite about explaining the information I have discovered, tested, and confirmed, and for some reason, today, because everyone has a Facebook account, opinions trump facts. This cannot and will not stand.
So, for the record:
▪ I am a constitutionalist and not one who only values the Charters of Freedom when it is advantageous. I do not riot if my candidate doesn’t win. I do not loot when the media snaps its fingers. And I do not automatically believe that because someone thinks differently than me that he or she is an asshole. That moniker is saved for when that person proves him or herself to be an asshole.
▪ I do my research before I espouse my opinion. My research takes me to as many v