We’re losing the ability to discern between truth, propaganda | Glading

Like most kids growing up in the 60s and 70s, I drank my share of Kool-Aid.  Because of its sugary content, it did little to quench my thirst, but it sure tasted good going down.

When I became an adult, however, I stopped drinking Kool-Aid for one simple reason: it had no real nutritional value.  After all, its two main ingredients are sugar and fructose.

Kool-Aid’s reputation took a hit when cult leader Jim Jones encouraged his followers to drink a cyanide-laced fruit drink in 1978.  Some did so willingly while others had to be coerced or even forced.  Tragically, 918 members of the Peoples Temple ingested the poison and died almost instantaneously.

Fast forward 45 years and an alarming number of Americans are drinking the Kool-Aid once again.  No, they are not traveling to Jonestown, Guyana to drink it ritualistically.  Instead, they are sipping its lethal contents every day in the comfort of their own homes and communities via our federal government, the mainstream media, and our failed – and increasingly Progressive – educational system.

There is no better evidence of this mass delusion than a recent poll that showed that only 57% of Americans believe that a person’s gender is assigned at birth.  The other 43% have drank enough liberal Kool-Aid to think that gender is fluid or, as NBC’s Chuck Todd hilariously and erroneously stated on Meet the Press, “There is a lot of scientific research that says gender is a spectrum.”  Todd then doubled down on his ridiculous misinformation campaign by claiming that sex is not binary.

Fortunately, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy refuted Todd’s Progressive propaganda with something the liberal left purportedly loves, but really hates: F-A-C-T-S.

“Well, there’s two X chromosomes if you’re a woman, and an X and a Y that means you’re a man,” Ramaswamy said.  “Gender dysphoria, for most of our history… has been categorized as a mental health disorder, and I don’t think it’s compassionate to affirm that.  I think it’s cruelty when a kid is crying out for help.”

Then, of course, there is the environment. Climate change alarmists, who refuse to acknowledge that climate has been changing since time immemorial, insist that we are on the verge of an environmental Armageddon.  To stop the surging sea levels, which even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration admits have only risen a whopping 8-9 inches since 1880, we are told that we must cast off fossil fuels – and by default, energy independence and national security – and content ourselves with becoming a third-world nation.

The only problem with that position is that, once again, troublesome facts get in the way.

Environmental extremists, when they aren’t too busy circumnavigating the globe to attend climate conferences in their private jets and luxury yachts, conveniently ignore the fact that windmills – which are made of steel, transported by tankers, and kill birds – are very energy inefficient.  Don’t take my word for it; take the informed opinions of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Nick Garrison in “Carbon Shift,” published in 2009…

“The concept of net energy must also be applied to renewable sources of energy, such as windmills and photovoltaics.  A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tons of steel requiring 170 tons of coking coal and 300 tons of iron ore, all mined, transported, and produced by hydrocarbons.  The question is: how long must a windmill generate energy before it creates more energy than it took to build it?  At a good wind site, the energy payback day could be in three years or less; in a poor location, energy payback may be never.  That is, a windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it.”

What about electric cars?  You mean the ones powered by batteries that contain lithium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and other elements that are strip-mined using diesel equipment – and reportedly, child and slave labor – in unsafe working conditions?  And then there’s the inconvenient truth that lithium batteries are extremely volatile and have already caused catastrophic fires at recycling plants in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and France… not the mention the growing problem of how to dispose of them.

Once again, don’t take my word for it.  Just ask an expert…

“Like any mining process, it is invasive, it scars the landscape, it destroys the water table, and it pollutes the earth and the local wells,” said Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile, in a 2009 interview. “This isn’t a green solution – it’s not a solution at all.”

The bottom line is this: Americans are apparently losing the ability to discern between truth and propaganda.  Instead, we are demonstrating an alarming willingness to accept whatever Progressive pablum is spoon-fed us by the Washington elitists and their co-conspirators in academia and the mainstream media.

Folks, it’s time to take a giant step back and realize that we are being played “big time” by the Progressive powerbrokers who live by one set of rules and seek to govern by another.

Dale Glading
About Dale Glading 95 Articles
Dale Glading is an ordained minister and former N.J. Republican candidate for Congress.