I’ll admit it, I’m a conservative – both politically and theologically. I long ago gave up writing about politics. It’s a morass regardless of which side of the aisle you come down on.
Even so, I don’t think there’s much hope of getting the left and the right to agree on anything when both sides are as eager as beavers to find outrage in the simplest things that people say. Case in point, this article.
Here, Nick Arama tries to paint the fact checkers at ABC as liars at worst, or misleading hypocrites at best over their fact check of a claim that President Biden said that minorities didn’t know how to use the Internet. But if you read the article and its quotes carefully you see this:
Not everybody in the community, in the Hispanic and the African-American community, particularly in rural areas that are distant and/or inner city districts know how to use — know how to get online to determine how to get in line for that COVID vaccination at the Walgreen’s or at the particular store.
That’s what President Biden actually said. Of course the article on RedState.com, and many of TownHall media’s readers try to spin this as a racist comment. It’s not. President Biden did not say that no one in those communities was able to use the Internet. He did not say that Hispanics and African-Americans are unable to figure out how to get online. He said that not everybody in those communities could do it. The same could be said of Caucasians and Asians too.
There is a distinction between not everybody and no one, just as there is a distinction between some and all. President Biden’s remarks weren’t racist, nor should they be made out to be.
As long as we’re looking for a grievance, we’ll find one. Nick Arama accuses fact checkers at ABC of attacking a straw man, because they emphasized that President Biden didn’t tweet his message, even though he said what he said on video. Pot, meet kettle.
Please note: I am not defending President Biden’s record of actual racist comments. He has made more than enough of those in the past.
The words we use matter. We need to be careful too not to read into the words of others our own ideas. One of the reasons there is so much false religion in the world today is because of this sort of eisegesis. If we want to find meaning in what someone says, we should be careful to pay attention to the words and phrases they use, and their true meaning.
Knowing that President Biden has a racist history it’s all too easy to inject our opinions of him into what he says rather than taking its actual meaning. The left and “cancel culture” do this all the time. We on the right should know better.