Race and Grace
“Show me the facts.”
“Stick to the facts.”
“I don’t care about your feelings. I care about facts.”
“I want facts, not emotions.”
These kinds of declarations have grown in popularity among conservative news commentators and political pundits in discussions about social issues, such as discrimination and police brutality.
Recently, a wave of conservatives have abandoned this faux moral high ground of privileging facts over emotions.
They have exploited the murder of Mollie Tibbetts, an Iowa college student, for their immigration agenda, like a starved hyena swooping upon an injured baby gazelle, left behind in the dry Tanzanian grasslands. Because the alleged perpetrator, Cristhian Rivera, is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, it seems like midterm election gold to numerous conservatives.
Politically, it might make sense to the conservatives (and the liberals who engage in similar stunts) who are willing to go to questionable lengths to win elections. Yet, what makes political sense does not necessary make decent sense.
From the perspective of being a decent human being, these actions, as President Trump would say, are “bad, very bad.”
In this post, I examine why conservatives manipulate the emotions of people for political gain. Afterward, I discuss three ways conservatives have contradicted and abandoned their political rhetoric by politicizing Mollie Tibbetts’ death.
Why Conservatives Use the Media to Manipulate Emotions
The conservatives, who are quick to call people race baiters prove themselves to be hate baiting using the death of Mollie Tibbetts and her grieving family.
Then again, what more can we expect from the very people who have repeatedly stated their disinterest in people’s feelings?
Instead of asking people to choose either feelings or facts, I contend that we encourage living as healthy functioning human beings who care about people and also use data to help make informed decisions.
The more I explored why conservatives pushed this “facts over feelings” rhetoric and examined how conservative media contributed to their share of mass-manipulation, I realized why it was a necessary talking point that news commentators, podcasters, YouTubers, and political pundits hammered away at like it was no tomorrow.
It keeps people wedded to a conservative movement.
The more conservatives keep people’s attention, telling them what they want to hear, and discouraging accurate analysis of the social phenomenon, the more they can be told what to think and believe.
Their process is quite simple, too: Conservatives pick an issue to which a liberal has blown out of proportion, which is not easy to find, or had an emotional reaction to and exploit it to no end.
If conservatives do not care about feelings, then they would lead the charge in ceasing political rallies in favor of endeavors like hosting MOOC courses to share data with its political base.
But this move would feel boring to masses of their followers.
Therefore, conservatives do not only focus on facts because, they, too, fuel and manipulate emotions just like the liberals. I suppose I am one of those mythical creatures who also recognize and critique liberals engaging in their share of using mass media to manipulate emotions.
They relentlessly employ this “facts over feelings” political rhetoric to manipulate the feelings of people. You see it in the headlines priding themselves in their perceptions of “taking down” and “destroying” a liberal with their use of “facts.” Sounds pretty slick and emotional to me.
The result pays off with their unquestioning followers praising each other for feelings of superiority, as they look down on the stupid and emotional liberals.
Three Contradictions in the Conservative’s Politicizing of Mollie Tibbetts’ Murder
There are a host of ways in which I have observed conservatives contradicting, albeit abandoning, their political rhetoric. In this section, I delineate three examples from the murder of Mollie Tibbett.
1) So Long Facts. Hello Emotions.
When the issue of race comes up when unarmed Black people are killed by police or by White people, conservatives ignore feelings, grieving for Black people. They refuse to let their emotions to be manipulated by liberal media.
I agree that we should not allow an emotional situation to be exploited by liberal media. Liberals are not the only ones who are in the mass media manipulation game. I refuse to allow conservative media to do the same.
Let me be clear: I find all of this manipulation disgusting.
Any group acting as if it received a heavenly political halo from God is a potent cocktail of delusion and self-deception. In the case of Mollie Tibbetts, the fact is that the conservative media has worked to exploit people’s emotions for political gain. There ain’t no angels here.
If they were indeed people who prized facts, they would let people grieve. They would not ignore that most violent crimes happen by legal immigrants, not those who illegally reside in the United States.
With this being said, I do not need anyone using a grieving family to convince me that we need severe immigration reform. I am not in favor of open borders. I am in favor of focusing on all illegal immigration, not just targeting People of Color.
Therefore, I do not appreciate political pundits, news commentators, and politicians attempting to manipulate me into thinking something I already know and feel.
I do not need to be convinced that our country needs to get illegal immigration under serious control by conservatives acting as if illegal immigrants are causing great violence.
Each life is important. This principle can be honored in immigration reform and in police reform without attempts to create hysteria.
Like many of you, I feel grieved about what has happened with Mollie Tibbetts. I cannot imagine what Mollie’s parents are going through. I would not blame them if they wanted to build the highest walls possible to keep anything like this from happening to another family.
I would not fault them if they burned with unquenchable anger. I would not blame them if they were not in the space of forgiveness. I would understand if they were angered by the political vultures who are using their child for their own gain.
Because I empathize with this nightmare of a tragedy, let us really care about people’s feelings instead of caring for the potential gain from manipulating them.
I suggest more conservatives encourage each other to question their practices, for they share the liberal’s need to think outside their political boxes. I recommend that conservatives who play these games admit how they care about feelings over facts when it is convenient for them.
If conservatives espouse a principle, then I encourage them to at least do a better job at upholding it. As a matter of fact, in the spirit of First Lady Melania Trump’s anti-bullying campaign-one that emphasizes caring for others, instead of doing better, conservatives can “Be Best.”
2) “All Lives Matter” Includes Mollie Tibbetts and Excludes Nia Wilson
Various conservatives love to espouse that all lives matter. Again, this rhetoric is a way of positioning themselves as the more rational ones who are genuinely for unity and the valuing of all lives as compared to the divisive and irrational liberals who think only Black people’s lives matter.
Yet, many conservatives (and liberals) displayed quite the opposite in their responses to the deaths of Mollie Tibbetts and Nia Wilson. Nia Wilson, the young black woman who was recently slain by a White man, has not received the kind of marked emotional response to her brutal murder as Tibbett.
A critical issue lies in a lack of empathy for all people. Judging by the emotional response and media coverage involving the murders of Tibbetts and Wilson, it seems like Tibbett’s life matters more than Wilson’s life. Thus, “all lives matter” reveals itself as another empty linguistic tool conservatives wield against liberals without an attempt at walking their talk.
Many of us do not need someone to share the same race, gender, religion, politics to empathize. I do not.
Yet, we have a tremendous current of people in this nation and in this world, who are blind to the callousness and ambivalence in their hearts. Commonly, they perceive themselves as caring for all people, but their actions betray them.
If all lives matter, we would have widespread grief at by the murder of both Nia Wilson and Mollie Tibbetts.
As discussions of “mental illness” come up about Wilson’s alleged murderer, I have not observed people who care about the mental health of Tibbetts’ alleged perpetrator.
It seems like even psychological health is another ploy used when conservatives want to avoid politicizing an issue.
These people who fight to find mental illness in young and older White men who kill masses of people do not strive to do the same for People of Color, whether they are undocumented immigrants or natural born citizens.
Do they not care about the facts of the situation or would they rather ignore them?
I raise this question to show how this moral high ground, often taken by conservatives engaging in these tactics, is none other than an unethical pit.
“All lives matter” become words that do not matter if when the rubber meets the road, they fall apart and fall short-gravely short.
Furthermore, President Trump has used the very swamp tactics he promised to drain by both politicizing the murder of Mollie Tibbetts and discouraging the valuing of all lives.
In the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting, President Trump graciously set aside politics for one moment to recognize lives lost. His first response to the public was one that grieved with families.
One could argue it was for political interests, but I am giving him credit. Trump did not immediately pounce on the situation to speak for or against gun control.
Sadly, Trump and his administration used Mollie’s death to invigorate conservative efforts at immigration reform. They did not make it a point to express care about the death of Nia Wilson or encourage their followers to show it.
Their ignoring of Nia’s death and attentiveness to the death of Mollie’s shows that one life is perceived as more important than the other. Silence can speak as much volume and even louder than words.
In the midst of the storm of politics, many conservatives have failed to live up to all lives mattering.
3) Individuals Versus Collective Until It Benefits Conservatives
Most conservatives emphasize colorblindness and individualism. They purport that they do not see color and that Post-Civil Rights era social or institutional factors no longer inhibit people from achieving the American dream.
They critique the idea of collective social identities as liberal attempts to frame specific groups of people as victims. And given the ways many liberals solely focus on oppression, their critiques have some merit.
Nonetheless, this colorblind individualism has disappeared in raging conservatives now that an undocumented Mexican immigrant has killed a young White woman. Suddenly, Mexican immigrants who are here illegally are part of a collective.
Words like “Third world” and even “sub-human” spew from certain conservatives, as they lump all undocumented Mexican immigrants into one big group. The whole group is now responsible for one violent crime.
I get the impression that emotions have been clouding conservatives from adhering to their own principle of colorblindness and individualism.
Logically (conservatives claim to be avid proponents of common sense), if one is genuinely committed to the ideas of individualism, then one would resist such a way of putting people into a collective to achieve a political goal.
If different conservatives are committed to facts over feelings, then they would not allow the emotions of the situation to avoid seeing Tibbetts’ alleged murderer as an individual.
Instead, they should consider owning up to the duplicity in their rhetoric to expand their ideology to better align with their actions.
Besides, a trending number of White men have been waking up to the reality that both individual and collective identities matter in this social world, and conservatives need to stop the double-talk.
As a result, articles have been written about older White men getting the short end of the employment stick as they face ageism in different fields. They are feeling the weight of issues that People of Color and diverse women have long spoken about only to be dismissed as being divisive.
They have dealt with institutions’ invisible-hard to prove- ways of preventing employment and career advancement.
It could prove useful to expand conservative ideologies to recognize how collective identities are at work in ways, beyond the methods they use to criminalize and vilify groups of people in their agenda.
Collective identities can be a source of understanding how we can expand our thinking into making the world even freer for individuals to craft a meaningful life for themselves and their families.
I believe it is time for more conservatives to take responsibility for how they consider both individuals and collective identities and reduce people to numbers for self-serving purposes.
Instead of spinning a different mass media narrative, what if conservatives chose to add substance to their walk instead of spouting empty political rhetoric?
We are a world of humans, not statistics and numbers.
In this world, people matter.
Facts matter.
Emotions matter.
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