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It would seem that this weekend, there was a fire at the house of one Diane Goodstein, a judge who Trump does not like. Reddit being Reddit, they immediately assumed the fire was arson and accused the right wing of violence; the linked story made the front page of Reddit. However, the investigation so far shows no evidence of arson: “At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set. SLED agents have preliminarily found there is no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.
Point being, the radical left (i.e. Reddit) will say lie after lie after lie how how Charlie Kirk’s killer couldn’t have possibly done it because of his left-wing beliefs, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points that way, then they will turn around and accuse the right of right wing violence without any real evidence to back up their claims.
The truth matters. Objective fact matters. I have decried it when the radical right was telling lies, and will decry it as long as the radical left tells themselves lies.
I'm perfectly happy to accept the official narrative, if investigators say that it wasn't arson.
However, we live in an era where the internet has created so many different epistemic bubbles that question whatever the experts and authorities say, on both the right and left. On one hand, I think this can be a healthy thing. If you're a woman in the 1940's, and the medical authorities are telling your husband that he should get you a lobotomy to deal with your various issues, is it better to be married to a sheep who follows everything the authorities say, or a contrarian who maybe rubs some people the wrong way but whose questioning of authority leads him to rejecting lobotomies (maybe without any good evidence or reason for his actual rejection)?
I agree that objective facts matter. It is my hope that all people will embrace the idea that even if deferring to experts and authorities is often a necessary shortcut for getting by in the world for most people in most circumstances, you should be prepared to do your own research and have the independent conscience to depart from the crowd if that is what your reason or character tells you to do. On the other hand, sometimes you're going to lose to reality, and it will turn out the experts were right all along.
But it's all about humanity not putting all of its eggs into one basket. It is positively good for humanity as a whole if a small portion of us become Amish, or reject modernity for religious or ideological reasons, or join cults, or have their children die of diseases we have reliable vaccines for, because the diversity of practices maximizes the odds that there will be at least one group of humans available to inherit the ashes after the sheep do something so stupid and destructive that it kills billions of humans, or leaves most of humanity infertile, or does anything that almost wipes out the whole species.
There should be room for normie rule-followers, of course. They're the salt of the Earth, and society would be intolerable and impossible without them, no matter what shape society takes. But I think we should feel grateful for the insurance policy that groups that are often easily mocked or not taken seriously because they depart so far from consensus reality provide.
All this to say, I think it is completely fair to mock lefties that are so caught in their epistemic bubble that they can't conceive of the idea that fires just happen, and there's no need to invent an arson conspiracy with corresponding government conspiracy. Probably, they are just wrong, and they're just departing from objective, consensus reality for no good reason. But that's also not the worst trait a group can exhibit.
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