The prevalence of advocacy journalism as an acceptable weapon in manipulating public perception, or as Trump would call it, “fake news,” created a vicious spiral of lies and counter lies. Who could have seen that coming? But it’s all for the sake of righteousness, making your lies good and their lies bad, based entirely on which side you’re on.

Naturally, this stalemate had to be broken. What to do?

Lawprof Danielle Citron, whose cyber civil rights initiative seems almost quaint these days, reveals the next level of the game, the manufacture of the Honest Broker.

The Blindspot: Must Read New Blog

It seems as if it was only a couple week ago that progressive lawprofs created a new blog to promote their deeply-held and totally fair views of why Trump was literally Hitler. But this new blog would be totally different.

My colleague Max Stearns kicked off his new blog, The Blindspot, whose timeliness is matched by its insights. Max explains:

I’m a different kind of law professor. Over the past twenty-five years, I have come to appreciate that we all have blindspots. We see the world with the benefits and burdens of our own framings. We often don’t realize how those framings, sometimes called “priors,” disallow us even to see what our opponents regard as central to their different understandings of the world. My academic background is a bit unusual, see here, and my interests are varied. One common thread in my academic work has been to shine a light on the blindspots themselves, pointing out what others miss.

And shine the light he is doing.

Well, if Citron says so, who am I to question? But then, credibility had once been something to be established rather than announced. Brave new world we’ve got here. And yet, Stearns’ point about blindspots, about seeing things “with the benefits and burdens of our own framings” (although “priors” has a slightly different meaning to us criminal defense lawyers), was certainly an interesting idea. So why not take a look?

Liberals and conservatives tend to take sharply divergent views of two major issues: global climate change and the looming national debt. But they share one attribute in common. Both sides believe that by focusing on the issue that most concerns them, they, unlike their opponents, are protecting the interests of their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Caring about our progeny demands attending to both issues, and also to understanding how they interrelate.

On the bright side, he doesn’t start by castigating conservatives. That’s good. But then, beyond the simplistic suggestion that all conservatives are climate change deniers, his juxtaposition is with “liberals.” That was worth a cringe. One of the key manipulative techniques is to cast progressives and liberals as if they’re the same. They’re not.

But Stearns soothes the conservative brow with a hat tip to a serious conservative concern:

Conservatives point out the looming national debt, which, as I write, is hovering at just shy of $20 trillion dollars. See http://www.usdebtclock.org. The federal deficit is hovering at $591 billion.

After some explanation for the sake of his readers who have never before considered the national debt as an issue, he acknowledges that it has some merit.

As the debt continues to grow, meaning as we continue to accrue budget deficits, more and more future resources will be allocated to debt service, limiting the financial resources available for other matters, and yes, this is all to the financial detriment of our grandchildren.

Boom. Not merely an acknowledgement that conservatives aren’t totally evil, but they may even have a point. How much more of an honest broker can you want?

Liberals tend to be more concerned about the impact of global climate change.

Wait, what? How does the national debt become the opposite of climate change? What’s that smell? Straw?

Both sides claim that the other side is failing to attend to the needs of our grandchildren. Conservatives lament progressive liberal policies that risk limiting job growth, interfering with markets, and contributing to the federal deficit, thereby worsening the national debt. Liberals lament the unwillingness or inability of our political leaders sometimes to acknowledge, and oftentimes to confront, a crisis looming on a global scale, making life for our progeny unlike anything experienced in the past, risking the displacement of entire populations, and threatening conditions that are unsustainable, both as a financial and humanitarian matter.

Uh oh. There is it, that “progressive liberal policies” thing, and from there he connects up his logical fallacy that financial solvency and climate change are inherently incompatible, a zero-sum game. The nexus is “grandchildren,” because reasons. Starve them now or starve them later.

I cannot pretend to be neutral on this divide. Both sides are right that today’s decisions affect future generations. As far as the debt goes, there are only a finite number of responses.

***

But the far greater threat to humanity, and yes, to our grandchildren, is failing to tackle something truly existential. And it is profoundly mistaken to imagine that the differential incidence of the burdens of global climate change somehow immunize those who are well to do and fortunate to reside within the most developed parts of the world.

So in this wholly manufactured head-to-head comparison of the banal debt and the existential threat to humanity, where would a self-proclaimed honest broker come out?

But even if that were not so, there remains a far deeper moral issue. Our grandchildren will suffer, but likely far less than others around the globe. To other people’s grandchildren we also owe a great moral responsibility.

Of course, the “moral responsibility” to “other people’s grandchildren,” even while his suffer. But Max Stearns isn’t some ideological demagogue. He’s just a fair, open-minded guy who writes about blindspots. Apparently, his own. And this will be the next assault on integrity to fabricate intellectual credibility if prawfs like Citron tell you so.