DENYING REALITY

Recently during his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump announced that he was giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom award to one of the audience members: right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.  The president's own daughter gave him the award right then and there.  The moment was timed for maximum pathos as Limbaugh had just recently disclosed that he had late term lung cancer. 
It might have been moving if not for the fact that Limbaugh has a history of making bigoted and misogynistic statements on his radio show, which in many ways paved the way for Trump's own hate filled speeches.  But beyond his politics, which I find repulsive, there is another reason that it is hard for me to feel much sympathy for Limbaugh: over the years he has repeatedly downplayed the dangers of tobacco smoking while promoting his own love of cigars. 
Limbaugh's denial of the dangers of smoking is part of a pattern that the right wing media has been following for years: the denial of reality.  Put simply, the right wing media promotes the ignoring of basic facts, pushing the notion that because whatever they (and their audience) want to believe is true, is therefore true.  While all human beings engage in some kind of self denial just to deal with getting through our day, the modern conservative movement in this country has reached the point in which it  often seems completely divorced  from reality.
Sometimes this manifests itself in the denial of evolutionary science and other times in the party's dogged faithfulness to Trump, no matter how offensive his statements or obvious his corruption.  It can certainly be seen in Trump's own behavior, from his assertion no less than six times that he was once given the Michigan Man of the Year award (no such award exists) to his claim that the leader of the Boy Scouts told him that his speech to the Boy Scouts Jamboree was the best ever given (he said no such thing). 
On the one hand, ignoring facts and going with strongly held beliefs is often harmless (and, speaking from experience, almost impossible to shake in Trump supporters).  Obviously, people have a right to believe that the earth was created in a week, and as long as you don't use the country's tax dollars to promote the idea, I'm fine with that.  Heck, you can believe the earth is flat if you really want to.
But there are other ways that it can have devastating effects on the world.  Just look at Limbaugh: while we have no way of knowing how many people took up smoking(or refused to quit)  because of him, but given how many listeners he has and how loyal they are to him, it's easy to say that he has had a definite negative effect on some people's health.  And then there are those who think that vaccines for children cause  autism, despite numerous studies to the contrary, that has caused a resurgence in certain illnesses in the country (and to be fair, this is a brand of idiocy that has landed on both sides of the political fence).  And as Nicholas Kristof once pointed out in the New York Times,  right wing denial of reality had lethal consequences  back in 2009 when, during an outbreak of swine flu, right wing commentators (especially Glenn Beck) questioned the Obama's administration's desire to get people vaccinated.  Around 18,000 people died in that outbreak, some of them surely did just out of spite against Obama.
But to me, the single most dangerous denial of reality lies in the Republican party's rejection  of climate change science.  It seems inconceivable that anyone could continue to deny the reality of climate change, given the record high global temperatures and increased droughts and wildfires happening all around the world.  But, according to The Guardian, a few years ago  Sondre Båtstrand at the University of Bergen in Norway published a study looking at conservative party platforms from around the world and found that the American Republican party is unique in its blanket denial of climate change.  Part of this is because oil and coal companies give far more to their party than to Democrats, with the billionaire oil barons Charles Koch and his late brother David spending massive amounts of money spreading disinformation on this issue.  But another reason is that Republicans have branded it as an issue only for Democrats to care about.  It's seems insane that one party in one country can single handedly move the entire world in the wrong direction on such an important global issue, but that's just how big and influential America is.   And there is no indication that the party will ever change its mind, so the only way for the country to move in the right direction on this potential disaster is to vote out as many Republicans as possible.  And that may prove difficult, and even then conservative judges that have been given lifelong appointments may strike down environmental legislation for decades to come.  I hate to just throw up my hands and say that there's nothing that can be done about this issue, but it will be hard, no doubt.  The Republican war on science and reality has been going on for decades, and for now, the party is winning.