| Using Sam Harris as an example is way too charitable to the average person. Most people are not first-principles thinkers about politics. They are self-interested. Where that motivation is considered unsavory, they will deny it, even to the point of deluding themselves. Race is a prime example, because, like all forms of identity, everyone is biased in favor of their own ingroup, but admitting this bias is far more stigmatized than admitting other forms of ingroup bias. If you take nearly everyone in the United States at their word, then racism has been effectively wiped out. And yet the indirect evidence of it is everywhere. Which means people aren't being honest with others--and possibly even not with themselves--about being biased in favor of people who look, speak, and act like they do. This gets even worse when we start talking about politicians, who are trained to routinely lie, to the point where the media starts to safely, and correctly, assume that what they say is motivated entirely by self-interest and completely detached from the truth if it deviates in any way from what would advance their self-interest. Notably, politicians who buck this trend--Justin Amash, Bernie Sanders, Thomas Massie--aren't generally stigmatized by the mainstream media as self-interested troglodytes. Their views are criticized, surely, but few question that they genuinely hold those views from first-principles reasoning, because they've demonstrated that they're principled people. This suggests that the media is actually pretty good at distinguishing troglodytes from the truly principled, and while that may rub off on people like Ben Affleck the wrong way, directing your hatred at "the media" is misplacing it. Also, the guy who wrote this article wrote a conspiracy screen about Obama's "plot to overturn the 2016 election" literally two days before. So him calling out others for impugning their political enemies' motives as coming from bad faith is pretty rich. |