There’s some interesting data on the current state of the culture wars coming out this week from Scott Rasmussen. I realize that by now most of our regular readers are quite familiar with mainstream media narratives describing virtually every challenge facing society in divisive terms that are boiled down to race, gender, sexual orientation or whichever pet cause of the week seems to be the best fit. But race is clearly the most common, go-to target. We’ve seen many examples, including people blaming racism on the lower rates of vaccination among Black and Hispanic communities, usually absent any mention of higher rates of hesitancy among those groups. Gun violence and shootings are frequently blamed on racism when a white person shoots someone, while the vast majority of shootings perpetrated by suspects of color engaging in gang violence are reported with no mention of the perpetrator’s race if they are reported at all. But people can’t be blaming everything on racism, can they? Well, not everyone is doing it, but according to Scott Rasmussen’s latest survey, the percentage who do is disturbingly high.
Twenty-eight percent (28%) of voters nationwide believe that just about every major problem in America results from racial discrimination. A Scott Rasmussen national survey found that 56% disagree and 16% are not sure.
Fifty-six percent (56%) of Hispanic voters see racism as the core issue in just about every major problem. Sixty-five percent (65%) of White voters disagree. Black voters are evenly divided–42% see racial discrimination underlying the nation’s problems while 38% do not…
While a relatively small number see racial discrimination as the root cause of America’s problems, data released earlier showed that 93% recognize that racism has played a major role in America’s history. However, just 20% believe we should recognize that America was founded on racism and start over with something new.
There’s a lot more data in the granular details so I encourage you to follow the link and dig through it. A few of the notable excerpts include the generational gap seen in these results.
For example, among voters under the age of 25, nearly half see racism at the root of “just about all” problems in society. Those numbers tail off a bit (35%) among voters ages 25 to 44, but that’s still a significant percentage, coming in at more than one-third. When you get to all voters ages 45 and older, the percentage who agree with that theory plummets to 20%, and that includes voters in that age bracket of all races. 66% disagree.
Let’s take those numbers and place them within the context of when we saw the major shift in mainstream media coverage toward a complete, socialist, far-left narrative. It’s been around for a while now (or so it probably seems to younger readers) but not forever. In fact, you still saw some fairly balanced coverage in the 90’s. It was really the arrival of George W. Bush and the development of the Bush Derangement Syndrome pandemic when things seemed to go seriously off the beam. So how old are the people who came into adulthood and presumably began paying more attention to media coverage of all of these issues in the 90s? They are now 38 to 48.
Not for nothing, but that tracks pretty closely to Scott Rasmussen’s breakdown by age groups. Schools have followed similar patterns thanks to the teachers’ unions. Any children who were starting public schools in the 2000s were being increasingly more indoctrinated in socialist rhetoric. And today, as young adults, if you ask them what is the cause of all the world’s problems, they are giving the woke answer demanded by the media and (probably) many of their considerably younger parents.
That leaves the “older generation” that somehow survived the sixties through the eighties scratching their heads. How do so many people simply ignore personal responsibility when examing how bad things happen? How can all of these people just lump everything they disagree with or find problematic under a single tent and slap a label on it? The answer should be obvious. They were trained from an early age in our schools and their initial perceptions were continually reinforced later in life by the talking heads on their television screens repeating what they were hypnotized into believing initially.
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