Carbon dioxide isn't pollution, NewAtlas

Report says plug-in hybrids are almost as polluting as gas-powered cars

The article highlights a report from the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) which purports to show that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) pollute almost as much as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

I submitted this comment:

A review of basic chemistry: carbon dioxide is not pollution. It's an essential trace gas, without which there would be no life on earth. No carbon dioxide, no plants. No plants, no animals. Hybrid engine cars emit a lot less actual pollution—carbon monoxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide, etc.—than internal combustion engine cars because they produce propulsion more efficiently. But leftists fudge the numbers to suit their agenda.

Guess which comment didn't get shown?

Leftists don't like it when you don't stick with their narrative and their contrived definitions. Carbon dioxide makes up 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere and is critical to all plant life. Calling carbon dioxide "pollution" is perverse, yet here we are. Leftists pervert words and meanings to promote their fantasies.

The Leftist Lexicon highlights some words leftists have usurped to mean something entirely different.

I chose the image above from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which coincidentally, isn't actually a bulletin published by nuclear physicists. It's a leftist political organization masquerading as a scientific publication. They purposely edit (distort) the image to make it look like coal power plants are emitting a thick pall of dark smoke. Here's another, published by the AP, in an article about West Virginia challenging the EPA's unconstitutional Good Neighbor Plan that requires states to reduce ozone that crosses state lines, which the Supreme Court has stayed pending court decisions. Once again, they distort the image to look like dark clouds of smoke polluting the air.

Here's what the smokestack emissions of a modern U.S. coal plant actually looks like.

Those thick clouds are white clouds of water vapor, not dark clouds of smoke like in Victorian England. U.S. coal power plants have expensive scrubbers that extract most of the pollution from the emissions. Modern technology has done a remarkable job of reducing air pollution.

But that wasn't good enough for leftists. They've decided that the harmless, beneficial carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels is a pollutant, contrary to science.

Leftist Lexicon - Big Lies and Doublespeak

The Big Lie

Adolf Hitler coined the term "big lie" (große Lüge) in Mein Kampf to explain how people could be convinced to believe a gross distortion or colossal lie because they wouldn't believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." He claimed that Jews implemented the Big Lie to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general and nationalist politician Erich Ludendorff who himself blamed Jews and others for a conspiracy that resulted in Germany's defeat and ignoble standing in Europe after World War I. The irony is that Hitler and Ludendorff were promoting big lies about Jews; lies that led to the extermination of 6 million of them by Hitler.

The notion that repeating a lie often enough will transform it in the public's mind into a truth has been attributed to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and other notorious tyrants, but the idea was probably around centuries before them. It appears in the 1869 novel The Crown of Life in a form that may be the basis for the current expression of it.

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Doublespeak – Doublethink and Newspeak 

In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell invented the term "doublethink" to describe indoctrination by the totalitarian government to compel people to accept conflicting beliefs as truth, usually contradicting their own memory or sense of reality. He also invented "Newspeak," a fictional language invented by the government to limit critical thinking. Doublespeak, which doesn't appear in Orwell's book, is a modern contraction of those two terms. The doublespeak names for government offices were contradictions of their mission. The Ministry of Love interrogated, tortured, and brainwashed enemies of the government. The Ministry of Peace waged war. The Ministry of Truth distorted history, destroyed historical records that conflicted with their agenda, and generated lies and propaganda to promote their dogma.

Leftist Lexicon of Doublespeak

In a spectacular modern example of Doublespeak—almost as if they were the totalitarian government in 1984—leftists have perverted language to mean things disconnected from their original meaning. Some of the terms are a big lie, like "climate change" (see below), which have been so widely and uncritically adopted that they have become a perverse form of received wisdom, even though they are gross exaggerations that are demonstrably false.

Here's a partial lexicon of leftist terms that mean something completely different to them than the original meaning the rest of us understand:

racist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

fascist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

misogynist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

bigot noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

homophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Islamophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

xenophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Nazi noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Hitler noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

democracy noun: any system designed to let leftists rule, often referred to as "our democracy" (which some of us write as Our Democracy™), means government by leftists. When Republicans win elections, it's fascism (see above) and a threat to Our Democracy™

climate change noun: catastrophic, imminent, human-caused global warming and imaginary disasters from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now 0.04%, up from 0.03% a couple centuries ago, formerly called global warming

climate denier noun: a pejorative term meant to demean people and conflate them with Holocaust deniers, it means someone winning an argument with a leftist about so-called climate change

A couple more just for fun:

literally adverb: figuratively

ironically adverb: coincidentally

See Steven Hayward's Lexicon of Current Political Terminology for more.

Dramatic Decline of Public Trust in Media

Trust in the media has fallen a lot since the 1970's, when about 70% of Americans trusted them. Now it's around 33%.

See the long-running Gallup poll details here.

Why has trust fallen? The Internet and alternative media has made it easier to fact-check the legacy media. Most journalists and editors lean left politically. What they report and the way they report is influenced by their biases. Not a lot of people knew that in the past. Now they do.

Timothy Groseclose published a landmark study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics quantifying media bias while he was a professor at UCLA, entitled A Measure of Media Bias.

He concluded that the "political quotient"—the degree to which Americans lean one or another on issues—is shifted leftward (he calls it "liberal") by around 20 points, which significantly influences the way they vote. Groseclose went on to publish a book on this bias, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind."

For a recent example of how a simple, quick check of the facts contradicts the claims in an article on CNN, revealing their bias, see my post "Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan."

Trust in the media by leftists (in other words, Democrats) is still fairly high, which is understandable because it's normal to trust those who have similar views as you, although their trust waxes and wanes according to who is in power, which is pretty funny.

When it's a Republican president or Congress, their trust in the media increases because the media is far more critical of Republicans than Democrats. When it's a Democrat president or Congress, their trust in the media drops because occasionally—rarely, actually—the media will be critical of Democrat leaders.

Republicans don't generally exhibit this oscillating trust because they tend to be better informed on issues, as numerous polls illustrate, and have come to understand the longstanding leftist bias in the media.

What the Public Knows about the Political Parties (Pew, April 11, 2012)

Media Twists a Mother's Heartbreaking Story to Support Hamas

Here is a classic example of why trust in the media has fallen dramatically since the 1970's. This is what they've been publishing this week, this heartbreaking image of an emaciated child.

And this is what the real story is:

The Truth Behind the Viral Gazan Famine Photo

David Collier says:

"There’s another layer of cynicism here. From everything I’ve learned, Mohammed’s mother is simply trying to find help for her child. She’s not hiding the truth. She tells the full story to anyone who asks. Yet every journalist who has spoken to her has made the same cynical decision: ignore the medical reality, strip the context, and turn her child into a propaganda weapon. No one is trying to help. No one is interested in telling the truth. All they seem to ask is: 'How can this image hurt Israel?' — and they build their coverage around that."

David Collier points out that the image has cropped out his brother who is clearly healthy, and that the mother has never claimed her son was starving but is in need of specialist care for a congenital health problem he's had since birth.

The media cynically ignores her real need for her son and uses her as yet another prop to condemn Israel for trying to eradicate the Hamas terrorists, a story that is completely unrelated to what's going on in this poor family.

The legacy media reporting on the Hamas war with Israel tends to promote Hamas propaganda with little, if any, fact-checking, while carefully scrutinizing and contradicting Israel's claims, usually without supporting evidence.

Most people think that Israel started the war, which illustrates their unconscious bias influenced by the way the media reports the conflict. Hamas has been at war with Israel since before 2006 when they were elected as the political leadership of Gaza. They fired tens of thousands of mortars and rockets at Israeli civilians between 2001 and 2023, before Israel invaded Gaza. Israel responded to their constant attacks by building a rocket defense system.

After the large-scale slaughter of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Israel realized that walls, fences, checkpoints, and rocket defense wasn't enough to protect Israelis. Hamas had to be removed; a campaign that continues until Hamas either surrenders unconditionally or is destroyed.

So far, Hama shows no inclination to surrender. They prefer to use their own Arab civilians as both cannon fodder and propaganda to appeal to Western media and their governments to stop Israel because they know they can't win on their own. They are radical zealots whose founding charter declares their intent to obliterate Israel and replace it with a Muslim Arab government "from the (Jordan) river to the sea." They have never wavered from that goal and refuse to accept the existence of Israel, which is a secular democracy that guarantees all of its Jewish (73%), Arab (21%), and other citizens equal rights. Arabs have far more rights in Israel than they do under Hamas (in Gaza) or Fatah (in the "West Bank"). The reason every proposed "two-state" solution has failed is because Hamas and Fatah refuse to accept them. Israel is happy to live peacefully alongside the Arabs in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, and has made many unilateral concessions to try to promote peace. Palestinian leadership, however, does not want to live alongside Israel, and Hamas in particular has built a vast terrorism infrastructure to continually attack Israel.

Read the 1988 Hamas Covenant to understand why Hamas has never accepted a "two-state solution" and never will. Pay attention to Article Seven, Article Eleven, and Article Thirteen in particular if you don't want to read the whole thing. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood from which they derive their principles believe that all of modern Israel is part of an Islamic waqf (an inalienable endowment) declared by Allah in perpetuity for occupation by Muslims under Islamic law. They believe that any claim to that land by anyone other than Muslims—for example, by Israel—violates Allah's endowment and is therefore invalid. Never mind that Jews lived on that land for thousands of years before the religion of Islam emerged in the 7th century AD. The 1988 covenant was updated in 2017 to remove some of the antisemitic language and replaced references to "Jews" with "Zionists" but it hasn't changed the fundamental character of the charter.

The United States of America designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1997. The European Union designated the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization in 2001 and all of Hamas in 2003. The United Kingdom declared the military wing as a terrorist organization in 2001 and all of Hamas in 2021. Many other countries have also designated Hamas as a terrorist organization but the UN refuses to, despite the well-documented record of thousands of indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, even in so-called "peacetime."

Comedy News Network on Texas Floods

 

This is the summer of flooding across the US, and scientists know why (CNN 2025-07-20)

Fossil fuel pollution — alongside other compounding factors — has transformed these months into a time of mounting peril, punctuated by relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding.

“These events are of course much more frequent *because* of human-caused warming,” [climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania] said in an email.

there is absolutely no doubt that climate change, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, is making extreme rainfall more extreme.

Mann is the author of the infamous and debunked "hockey stick" study purporting to show that tree rings showed a dramatic increase in temperatures in the late 20th century. He excluded tree rings that didn't fit his hypothesis and applied a statistical method that produced a hockey stick even from random noise. His analytical techniques haven't improved.

Meanwhile the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report tells us:

The SREX (Seneviratne et al., 2012) assessed low confidence for observed changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods at the global scale. This assessment was confirmed by AR5 (Hartmann et al., 2013). The SR1.5 (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018) found increases in flood frequency and extreme streamflow in some regions, but decreases in other regions.

See section 11.5.2 Observed Trends in Chapter 11: Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate. Most of the contributers to the IPCC reports are biased toward the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are the primary cause of climate change. They rely almost solely on computer models to support their hypothesis but if you take the time to dig through the observations chapters—measurements of climate and weather—the data generally contradict their model-based hypothesis. I suppose they don't notice the irony that the measured data refutes their computer-generated predictions.

This report in the Journal of Hydrology from July 2017 finds no increase in frequency or magnitude of floods and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data for Texas shows no increase in the number of floods over time.

It doesn't seem to occur to the prognosticators of climate doom that their predictions are contradictory and the contradictions make them look silly; for example "relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding." In other words, they predict more droughts and more rainfall. All caused by humans. Go figure.

Watts Up With That? (wattsupwiththat.com) and its Reference Pages are an excellent resource to fact-check the incessant fear-mongering about "climate" from the predominantly leftist media about weather and climate; for example:

Texas Flood Hysteria: Media’s Climate Blame Drowned by History and Data (2025-07-20)

Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan

For the first time in modern history a capital city is on the verge of running dry (CNN 2025-07-19)

Population growth, the climate crisis, and relentless over-extraction have depleted groundwater levels, experts say, and nearly half the city’s boreholes have already gone dry.

Less than 5 minutes of searching for "Dams in Afghanistan" turns up this:

Water Management Policy in Afghanistan After the Fall of the Afghan Government (tearline.mil)

The root cause of the water crisis in Afghanistan is unique in that it is not a shortage of water resources. Afghanistan is rich in water, with a total of 75 billion cubic meters available. This abundance of water resources also supports neighboring countries. Instead, the intensity of Afghanistan’s droughts are primarily a result of inadequate hydrological infrastructure, decades of infrastructure damage during war and political instability, and institutional failures in water management practices.

The Comedy News Network beclowns itself daily. This is what happens when your staff's minds are so infested with leftist drivel that there is no room for rational thought, healthy skepticism, or even something as simple as 5 minutes of fact-checking.

Rampaging control freaks vs. helpful solutions

I ran across this anguished heart cry from a sanctimonious control freak agitated park visitor.

Hiker shares photo after national park tourists blatantly disregard warning signs: 'It really does ruin it for the rest of us'

Here is the Reddit thread that inspired the article.

Others taking risks doesn't "ruin it for the rest of us." It ruins it for the risk-takers when things go wrong.

I responded to the thread with a sardonic comment, milder than the ones that got the most upvotes, and was promptly blocked from seeing the thread. It wasn't hard to see the thread by opening an anonymous browser session, and I noticed that a few had replied similarly, but the comments that got the most upvotes, by far, were the ones offended that people would do something so sociopathic as to take a measured risk to walk out to a rocky point to see the view.

Many years ago my family hiked the Sol Duc Falls trail in Olympic National Park to the bridge over the falls. I wanted to get a picture from downstream like the iconic image I'd seen in calendars.

When we reached the bridge, I backtracked to find the side trail that I must have missed; the one that led to the viewpoint where so many pictures had been taken. There was none. What I saw was a sign along the log fence bordering the trail a hundred yards or so before approaching the bridge, warning people to stay on the path because landscape or habitat restoration was in progress. A path on the other side of the fence through the undergrowth had seen a lot of use. It led through the trees to the edge of the gorge with an unobstructed view of the bridge. It was a treacherous place, a tiny cliff edge barely wide enough to stand on, perched fifty feet or so above the narrow gorge. One slip and you would fall off the cliff into the rushing water below. But people regularly took the risk to capture a spectacular photo.

I thought about the Park Service blocking a trail that thousands of people had trodden over the years. Clearly it was a spot that many people wanted to visit, despite the danger, to see the view and take a picture. The sensible thing to do is build guardrails at the cliff edge to prevent people from falling. But they decided to block the trail with a warning. And the warning wasn't about potential danger, probably because they thought it might encourage the people who were looking for the view they had seen in pictures. It was a strange response.

Over the years I've noticed similar perverse responses. I remember chuckling about a well-worn path across a lawn on a college campus that students used as a shortcut between sidewalks. The grass was worn away to the soil, which was compacted from regular use and turned muddy when it got wet. It was a blemish on a beautifully maintained lawn. The administration tried for years to dissuade its use by roping it off and erecting signs, but it remained heavily trafficked, for obvious reasons. Finally some bright soul realized that nothing worked and paved the shortcut. Problem solved. Students regularly use the handy shortcut now, the lawn on either side is lush, and the path never gets muddy.

Too bad we don't have more creative problem solvers in government. And fewer people looking down their noses on those who do things that don't affect them.

Florida redistricting complaints are racist

ProPublica posted a review leftist political screed complaining that the redistricting done by Governor Ron DeSantis was racially oriented and illegal.

How Ron DeSantis Blew Up Black-Held Congressional Districts and May Have Broken Florida Law

As with all leftist grievances, the facts don't support the allegations. Before reading the article, which is heavily tinged with racist views of voting and congressional districts, just glance at the voting districts in question before 2022 and in 2022.

Which map looks more obviously gerrymandered? In other words, which one looks like it was drawn to purposely incorporate a large and disproportionate population of a specific racial group in one district? 

The pre-2022 map of District 5 was drawn to include specific parts of one large city (Tallahassee) then stretched across the state to include specific parts of another large city (Jacksonville) over a hundred miles away. Compare that to the districts in the 2022 map which have large contiguous areas that look like they weren't drawn on purpose to overrepresent a specific racial group which also happens to vote for Democrats 90% of the time. For reference, blacks are about 13% of the population of the United States nationally, though they are more concentrated in many big cities. It makes sense that voting districts that have large black populations should also have representation that is higher than the national average but this is definitely "stretching" the point. Heh.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 states:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Section 5 allows redistricting as long as it:

does not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color

The 2022 districts are clearly legal and also accomplish representation of the higher percentage of blacks living in those districts despite all the complaints in the article. It's astonishing that the Florida Republicans in the majority left the District 5 map alone when it was clearly drawn by the former Democrat majority in a way that favors Democrat candidates. Apparently they haven't learned yet how the Democrat Party has been running circles around them with redistricting and voting procedures that heavily favor Democrat candidates. It's time for them to wake up and even the playing field.

It's interesting that leftists spend so much time viewing the world through the lens of race. The allegations of racism they levy against their political opponents look an awful lot like projection of their own unconscious racism.

Sea Level Perspectives

We are told by the media and other climate alarmists that sea level rise is unprecedented, disastrous, and accelerating, but measurements by tide gauges and satellites show us something completely different. Here is a plot of current (29-year) global sea level rise measured by satellites. (See here for the latest.)

Here is a plot of sea level rise for more than 160 years at Battery Park in Manhattan, New York; one of the longest tide gauge records available anywhere in the world. (See here for the latest.)

Sea level has been rising for roughly 18,000 years since the last glacial maximum when the two-mile-thick glaciers covering huge swaths of North America and northern Europe and Eurasia began to melt. Here is a plot of global sea level over the last 18,000 years.

120 meters of sea level rise is 394 feet. This cycle of global warming and cooling has happened several times over the last million years or so. Here is a reconstruction of sea levels over the last 1.8 million years based on the content of the isotope oxygen-18 in deep ocean sediments.

The important points:

• Global sea level rise and fall has been happening for billions of years.
• The rate of sea level rise and fall changes for numerous reasons, all entirely natural.
• What causes global warming and cooling and the subsequent glacial and interglacial periods isn't fully understood, though Earth's periodic orbital changes over tens of thousands of years is among those postulated to have the greatest effect. 
• The current rate of sea level rise is insignificant when viewed in historical context.
• It is impossible to measure the theorized effect humans have on sea level rise but the rate is so small compared to natural forces as to be inconsequential. 
• Based on measurements, the claims of 0.6 meters or more of sea level rise by 2100 are clearly unrealistic. The current rate measured by satellites suggest about 0.3 meters. It's even less according to the rate measured by tide gauges.

Humans have been dealing with sea level rise for thousands of years. The Dutch and others have successfully protected their land from sea level rise and even reclaimed land from the sea thanks to clever engineering. Humans can adapt to the current rate of sea level rise with the same clever engineering. The cost of doing this is far less than starving the world of fossil fuels and destroying economies in a vain attempt to "stop" global warming.

You can see for yourself what the current rate of satellite measured global sea level rise is at the University of Colorado Sea Level Research Group website.

Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) measured by satellite 

Historical Global Tide Gauge Sea Level

Sea level rise, and sea level decline in many place in the far north, is not uniform. It differs a lot because of land subsidence and uplift (post-glacial rebound). You can easily see it in this interactive map of tide gauge data from NOAA.

Sea Level Trends

The tectonic forces, gravitational perturbations, and even potential influences from beyond our solar system over the eons that shape our planet and its climate and weather are endlessly fascinating, but they happen so slowly that the ingenuity of millions of humans engineering solutions to their local problems can easily adapt to it. Beware of "global" solutions. They are always, without exception, a really bad idea with a plethora of destructive consequences.

GOP is the party of real racial justice

I know that will blow some minds but it's true. Virtually every mainstream media and social media platform has been propagating the theme that Democrats unite Americans and Republicans divide them. It's exactly the opposite.

The Democratic Party has been promoting black subjugation and segregation for over two centuries. Before the Civil War they were the party of slavery. The Republican Party was formed in 1854 specifically to resist the expansion of slavery. Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican President in 1861 and the Republicans gained control of Congress.

After the Republican Party passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution between 1865 and 1870 reinforcing civil rights for black Americans, a large block of the Democratic party continued to denigrate black Americans by instituting Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the South until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in schools and public accommodations was unconstitutional and ordered all states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed" but without an enforcement mechanism. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proposed a civil rights bill to enforce the order to desegregate. Though they had lost their brief, slim majority in the House and Senate by then, Republicans managed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 over Democratic Party dissent to protect the right to vote, and to establish the Civil Rights Commission and Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 likewise was passed with enthusiastic support from Republicans, far greater than Democrats (see House and Senate vote counts).

Civil Rights Act of 1964

In June 1963 Democratic President John F. Kennedy proposed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but it was held up in the House Rules Committee by Democrats to prevent it coming to a vote. In August 1963, the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place with Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Five days after Kennedy's assassination in November, newly-installed President Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to push the stalled civil rights bill forward as a legacy to the late President. The Democratic Party had a solid 60% majority in the House and despite their even larger 67% supermajority in the Senate, they didn't have enough votes in their own party to pass it in the Senate. Only 46 of the 67 Democrats in the Senate voted for it. Republicans, ever dedicated to the self-evident truth and American ideal that "all men are created equal," enthusiastically supported the bill while Democrats were bitterly divided over it. Here's the vote tally in the House and the Senate.

House vote

Democrats: 153 yea (60% of Democrats), 91 nay, 2 present, 12 not voting

Republicans: 136 yea (76% of Republicans), 35 nay, 2 present, 5 not voting

Senate vote

Democrats: 46 yea (69% of Democrats), 21 nay

Republicans: 27 yea (82% of Republicans), 6 nay

Republicans were even more supportive of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with 80% of Republicans in the House and 94% in the Senate voting for it, compared to 75% of Democrats in the House and 69% in the Senate.

Change in party affiliation

The Democratic Party's support for labor unions and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's anti-poverty programs began to attract black Americans toward the Democratic Party. The outreach by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the fact that the Democratic Party held both houses of Congress and the Presidency at the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act began to persuade even more black Americans to the Democratic Party, despite the dirty secret that Democrats were less enthusiastic about minority rights than Republicans. The nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate for President in 1964 drove them away en masse from the Republican Party. Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act (21 Democrat senators voted against it). Though a supporter of civil rights who had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act, his declaration that he voted against the 1964 Act because he thought it was unconstitutional was dismissed. The Democrat Party misrepresented it for political purposes as Republicans suppressing minority rights, despite the obviously better voting record of Republicans than Democrats. They succeeded in promoting the lie and drove a wedge between Republicans and black voters that has lasted to this day.

Over the next 60 years, Democratic Party politicians pandered to blacks by dangling legislative trinkets that amounted to essentially nothing. The bulk of the work to secure equal rights and opportunities for racial minorities had already been done by Republicans. Those legislative trinkets that did pass resulted in disastrous social changes for urban black communities and generational dependency on government handouts which weren't modified in any meaningful way until the Republican House and Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 to reform the welfare system.

While Republicans have long sought the goal of being "color blind" and treating all Americans equally, the Democrats continued to view Americans through the lens of race. In the modern era Democrats have adopted a "soft bigotry" of low expectations and race-based college-admissions. They are attempting to eradicate voter ID laws supposedly to "help" black voters who Democrats think can't get a photo ID. Their platform is centered on a social theory that segregates people by race and other categories and promotes the idea that white people are inherently racist. They inflame racial grievances, especially against the police, promote false narratives of racial inequity in arrests and incarcerations, and have celebrated thugs and criminals and denigrated accomplished black Republicans like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Their supposed "compassion" for blacks looks awfully condescending.

Republicans continue to promote policies that measurably improve the lives of black people instead of offering platitudes and unfulfilled promises. Here are a few recent ones:

• School choice that allows parents to move their kids out of underperforming schools. This is very popular with urban parents and is supported by 76% of black Americans.

• Prioritizing a strong economy and ending onerous government regulations to allow the business sector to grow and provide jobs, which has resulted in the lowest unemployment rate for minorities in U.S. history, 5.1%. See also here.

• Strengthening police forces and budgets to better patrol crime-ridden urban neighborhoods and reduce crime.

President Donald Trump has signed laws and executive orders and initiated other plans to improve educational and business opportunities for black Americans and economic prospects for poor people. All of this has been noticed by black Americans who are increasingly throwing their support to him as they distance themselves from decades of failed promises and policies by Democrats.

If you would like a copy of this graphic to print as a 24" x 18" yard sign, you can download the PDF file here and submit it to a print shop.

How to Argue

Other viewpoints, facts, and truth are often upsetting, especially when they repudiate a narrative that you believe and feel strongly about. The hallmark of a maturing person is the ability to hear other viewpoints and consider them thoughtfully even if you disagree with them. It's not only a Biblical proverb, but it's also key component of the scientific method.

If you're emotionally attached to a hypothesis that can be proven incorrect by experiment you will find it harder to consider or embrace a different hypothesis. Knowledge and understanding are gained by being able to accept a new hypothesis that better fits the evidence.

Disagreement and argument are fundamental to exploring and understanding truth and are legally protected rights in many countries. Calling people names ("racist!") is the lowest level of the hierarchy of disagreement (from the essay by Paul Graham about "How to Disagree"). It's childish; something that thoughtful, self-correcting, disciplined people grow out of as they mature. Unfortunately, it's a common mode of argument in the media today.

Pro tips for having a disagreement without being disagreeable

You could try a Monty Python Argument Clinic or these suggestions:

1. Ask the other person why he thinks the way he does and listen to understand, not to criticize and formulate an attack. Be precise and neutral. Start with easy questions and refine for clarity.

• "Why do you think the police are racist?"
• "I didn't mean 'why are they racist?' I meant what makes you think they are."
• "Do you think all police are racist or a lot or just a few?"
• "What do you think is the solution?"
• "Is that practical? Are there other solutions that might also work?"

2. Affirm his reasons for thinking that way. You don't have to agree with the point to validate him for having that point of view.

• "I can see why that makes sense"
• "I understand why you feel strongly about that now"
• "If I were in that position I'd feel angry too"

3. Ask if he's interested in hearing more information about the subject, or your viewpoint.

• "I've thought about this too. Do you want to hear?"
• "Do you know what some of the other arguments are? Are you interested?"
• "I read a different view that makes sense to me. Would you like to hear it?"

If he's not interested in hearing counterarguments, your discussion is over. The aphorism "a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still" applies. He's not willing to be persuaded and you won't be able to convince him. Move on to something else.

If he is willing to listen it will lead to a counter-argument. Respond to it as described above: ask, listen, affirm, offer to explain your point of view.

The more neutrally you question and the more you listen thoughtfully, the more likely you can maintain a conversation with a low emotional response. This is important because if it becomes emotionally charged your amygdala takes over and you retreat into an adrenaline-fueled binary fight-or-flight mode that short-circuits your brain's ability to reason complex or nuanced arguments. It's often called an amygdala hijack.

If you know the other person holds a viewpoint that is objectively false, the best way to persuade him is to let him figure it out himself with neutral, probing questions that may inspire him to reflect carefully about why he has come to that point of view. If it's obvious where the misunderstanding is, the other person will arrive at it from just asking questions. Keeping emotions calm is crucial for your brain to be able to consider new information and process it.