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Last night, I watched about 20 minutes of Sean Hannity.

That was all it took.

(Seems oddly telling that his name rhymes with ‘insanity.’ As Joe Leaphorn often noted, there are no coincidences.)

As I watched, I observed the host and his guests putting forth a version of “reality” diametrically opposed to the one in which I and those close to me live. I find comfort in saying that I am fairly confident the reality I inhabit is the one that most accurately comports with objective reality.

 I am not surprised at hearing these men declare t**** the honest one and label anyone of a different view as lying, nor did it startle me to see them parroting the untrue talking points of their great leader, one after another. I was caught off guard, however, by the deceptive way in which they aired crudely spliced video segments of prominent leading Democrats, representing the speakers’ remarks, removed from their original contexts, in such a way as to create a false narrative that suggested they were espousing views in complete opposition to their original intent—the very definition of deceit itself.

The thought struck me that Hannity and the other people party to this enterprise had no shame, that what they were doing to fool impressionable people into believing such dangerous and destabilizing nonsense was totally reprehensible, cruel, immoral, devoid of conscience. This organized, delusional fantasy they were feeding seemed a gross disservice to the show’s audience, undertaken without regard for their viewers’ best interests.  It was, simply put, utterly beyond the pale.

By their actions, these men were willfully and deliberately poisoning the minds of their followers, with no discernible thought as to the consequences of their actions.

As they decried Twitter’s exiling of t**** as further proof of the need to regulate Big Tech, I thought to myself, “these people are the ones who should be regulated.” Mindful of the ironies inherent in censorship, I mused, shouldn’t there be some way to “suspend” people like Hannity from being able to infect his audience without invoking censorship? Isn’t his brand of poison every bit as lethal as COVID and equally in need of containment? After all, the wolf we feed is the one that grows strong.

But, how does a person (or a nation) separate suspension on social media from censorship?  Where does the notion of free speech fit into that schema?

That the propaganda put forth by Hannity and his peers should be deemed permissible in a society such as ours, or, for that matter, in any society, raises serious questions about whether we are capable of the self-governing necessary to tame our darker passions. The behavior of those responsible for Hannity’s show and others like it argues, in the strongest possible terms, that we are not.

One thing seems certain: without containment, the t**** cancer will continue to spread, as it has since his ascendancy, giving agency to the free expression of mans’ darker desires. This malignancy has been around for far longer than the time t**** has disgraced the scene, but it has grown exponentially through his constant and audaciously misleading messaging.

It’s uncannily mirror-like how t**** followers view things the opposite of how we see them, only the reflections they perceive are darkly perverse, twisted and cynical.

 The sense of moral outrage we feel when viewing t***-inspired domestic terrorists ravaging the Peoples’ House is the same feeling the MAGA set experiences when being told how the country is going to the dogs because of liberal, socialist policies, or how they feel when listening to their leader lament about all the ways he’s been wronged by the Democrats, the media, and basically anyone else who disagrees with him.

How are we to re-establish common agreement over what constitutes consensus reality with the almost half of the people who continue to subscribe to an alternate view of reality, folks who jumped on the crazyland train and can’t or are unwilling to find their way off?  Bridging that divide will be the challenge underlying the many social, environmental and economic challenges of at least the next several decades.

This task won’t be easy, but it is and will remain an essential one if we are ever to find our way back to living under a government based on the principles—right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, equality, justice—upon which our country was founded.

Tim Konrad                                                                      January 9, 2021