Whatever the media understand the term “evolution” to mean. Whatever politicians could do about it.
Is it a secret hunger for the fascist dominance so well exhibited by one of their heros, H.L. Mencken?
From O’Leary for News at Salvo:
Recently, Phil Plait informed his shocked readers at Slate of a dreadful secret about Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence:
You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying evolution, and used quite a few misleading, if not outright false, claims.
The fact that approximately two-fifths of Democrat voters are apparently young Earth creationists attracts no similar attention.
It’s a curious feature of U.S. politics, as seen from Canada, that American media—in the face of serious science-related problems like totalitarian nations having access to plutonium—continue to obsess about what Republican politicians believe about evolution. They do not seem to grasp that the remote past may not matter much if the next two weeks prove to be an apocalyptic horror.
One day, years ago, a Canadian political maven turned to me and asked (with respect to a different campaign), “Who cares how old that guy thinks Earth is? Why [does it matter]?” Was he running for president of the Evolution Society? More.
“Evolution” (code for “thinking our way”) matters far more to failing mainstream media people than to most people. That values skew, along with many similar ones, helps us understand the failed predictions and seas of red ink that have come to define their industry.
Their problem is not that they are hostile but that they are just not on top of things… just plain out of it…
The problem for us UD folk, who are genuinely interested in the subject of evolution, is how best to communicate with the public on the new high seas of the internet.
A good problem to have! After all, the sheer noise is dying down.
See also: Nature: Scientists “stunned” by Trump win. I (O’Leary for News) will do no more than suggest that if the “stunned” had spent less time preening and more time examining the problems of the American electorate as the electorate perceives them, they might have avoided the all that “fear and disbelief.”
and
Why the mainstream media was bound to call the U.S. election wrong
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