The enemy of empiricism is ideology. Translated that means politics make people see the world as they want it to be, rather than as it is.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/30/when-fantasy-trumps-reality/
Take the NFL. Any disinterested observer could see that since 2016 and the beginning of Colin Kaepernick’s crusade to sit or kneel during the National Anthem, the player protests have been an utter financial and public relations disaster for the NFL.
Depending on the calibrations of game attendance and television viewing, and adjustments for diverse local markets and weekly venues, most estimates range from a 15 percent to a 20 percent drop in patronage from the pre-Kaepernick 2015 norms. The league stands to lose well over $1 billion per year.
Yet social justice warriors still praise Kaepernick to the skies and suggest that he is making headway in winning over others to his cause. Supporters of the protests have even said the NFL was mostly unaffected financially or, in Orwellian fashion, that a drop off in viewers was actually due to Kaepernick’s supporters’ own solidarity with the protesting players.
For more than a year sports analysts have cited almost every possible extraneous reason for a decline in viewership—from worries over brain injuries to saturation of the market to competition from other entertainment and recreation. All, in theory, are true. All, in fact, are not the main reason why the league is suffering an abrupt erosion of support.
The truth is, most NFL viewers—middle-aged, male, and center-right politically—want entertainment and a refuge from politics. They do not tune in for multimillionaire players to insult the National Anthem. They do not want uninformed, 20-something multimillionaires lecturing fans on their purported sins. How can it ever be wise for a business to insult its consumer base? Again, reality apparently has been intolerable to the owners, the players, and the media. So it is massaged, disguised, or rejected—up to the point when facts make further fantasy impossible.
Collusion Fantasies
The same disconnect is true of the entire “Russian collusion” narrative. An empirical examination would conclude that if several congressional committees, federal investigators, a frenzied media, and highly motivated Democratic operatives could not—after a year(!)—find proof of Trump’s personal collusion with the Russians, then there likely was none. To save the credibility of the investigation Mueller has had to advise indictment for former and fired Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, in part on the basis of his wheeler-dealer past.
If Manafort’s indictment now sets the bar for “collusion,” then an entire array of Clinton, Inc. operatives are facing even more exposure. Why would Russian interests pay Bill Clinton $500,000 for a brief speech or give more than $140 million to the Clinton Foundation (do they continue to do so now?)—when at roughly the same time control of sizable percentages of small but vital U.S. uranium holdings were transferred to Russian companies, sanctioned by a decision in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had considerable influence?
Why would anyone believe that a “dossier” with bizarre salacious detail, funded by an opposition research firm with a history of destructive invective, and purchased by the Clinton campaign—and later by the FBI to warrant politically motivated surveillance on U.S. citizens—be considered disinterested “proof” of Trump wrongdoing, especially given that it relied on bought Russian sources? And how could a fine man like Robert Mueller escape charges of conflict of interest? His very appointment was the result of deliberate leaks and machinations of his former associate and successor at the FBI, the now largely discredited James Comey—while Mueller himself had overseen, in 2010-11, FBI investigations into Russian efforts to rig the transfer of U.S. uranium? Eventually, there will be an investigation into what Mueller himself found out about Russian collusion six years ago, what he did about it, and why his findings were either ignored or set aside. Pretending there is no conflict of interest, does not mean there is not any.
Despite the absence of proof of Trump collusion and the plethora of evidence that pointed the other way, the media and larger culture have clung to the Trump collusion narrative all the way to the point of absurdity. If Paul Manafort’s indictment hinges on Robert Mueller’s evidence that Manafort was receiving Russian money, it will more likely establish standards by which the Clinton campaign will face even greater legal exposure—given that its purchase of the Steele document was, in essence, a transfer of monies to Kremlin sources.