On race, liberals think 'personal truths' top facts. Republicans pull the same stunt with Trump.

I read a gripping story in the New York Times the other day that contained the following passage:

The journalist, Michael Powell, did a superb job of detailing a chilling tale wherein two staff members at Smith College in New York had their lives ruined over allegations of racism by a Black student.

The university hired a law firm to conduct a thorough investigation and found the student’s accusations of racism were unsupported by the facts. Nonetheless, the student did find her “personal truth” supported by other students on campus who “walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity” and whispered, “there goes the racist” when the falsely accused cafeteria worker walked by.

The story, at its core, is of a person constructing an alternate reality inside an ecosystem that nurtures “personal truth” over, well, actual truth.

This is becoming all too common in the education space, where indisputable truths are discarded in the pursuit of alternate realities that solve perceived injustice.

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In Oregon, the state’s department of education recently promoted training for teachers in the field of “ethnomathematics," which argues that “white supremacy culture” has infiltrated math classrooms by forcing students to focus on getting “the right answer” and on showing their work.

Fox News obtained a toolkit associated with this training that encouraged teachers to "come up with at least two” different answers for various math problems.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," the document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads.

I was but moderately proficient at math during my school days, but even I recall that if I have two apples and you hand me two more, I now have four apples. There aren’t multiple answers, just apples and counting.

What little education our children are getting these days, thanks to the unnecessary and corrosive school lockdowns, is further polluted by this thinking. Would you feel good about sending your kid to a school that teaches math problems have different answers depending on the race of the person working them?

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Conservatives are buzzing about these stories because they highlight the insanity of the American liberal mindset, and the excesses of people who believe racism explains virtually every negative feeling, perceived slight or missed math problem.

Does racism exist? Certainly, it does. Are these stories examples of how to move America in a better direction on that front? Heck no.

But at the same time the American right plots a return to power by presenting itself as the cure to this galaxy brain thinking, it has largely succumbed to a “personal truth” narrative of its own.

'My personal truth' is bunk

Enter Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who spent copious amounts of time in a recent committee hearing on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot regaling us with wild tales that fly in the face of what we all saw on our television screens.

Johnson read into the record portions of an op-ed that claimed “agents-provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters” were responsible. This, even though videos and court filings clearly show plenty of authentic Trump supporters ransacking the seat of our government.

What is the difference between what Johnson and other conservatives are doing regarding Jan. 6, versus the Smith student or the crazy racial math people?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

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Johnson, just like the others, has constructed a “personal truth” (or, if you’d rather, is pushing Trump’s personal truth) to explain a perceived injustice — in this case, the erroneous view that the election was stolen from Trump. The former president himself bolstered the false narrative at his weekend speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Unfortunately, partisans who inhabit both ideological extremes fully buy into these “personal truths” without looking into the facts or bothering to even wonder if these stories might possibly be false. If your tribe tells you it is true, you blindly believe it and hate anyone who challenges it.

For liberals, claims of racism against undeserved targets are rarely recanted or reconsidered. For conservatives, GOP apostates who refuse to follow Trump’s election lies are never forgiven. Both sides seem perfectly fine with mob rule, so long as the mob is partial to their point of view.

Conservatives are hoping the overreaches of the left will propel them in the 2022 midterms and beyond, absolving them of having to — gasp — write an actual policy platform. Returning to the electoral winner circle depends on voters perceiving Democrats as too indulgent or supportive of a massive leftward shift in our culture. This happened in 2016 after President Barack Obama’s eight years.

But for that strategy to work, your own house must be clean. If liberals are insisting that two plus two does not equal four, conservatives can’t beat them by claiming that three plus three does not equal six.

Scott Jennings is a Republican adviser, CNN political contributor and partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. This column was originally published in the Louisville Courier Journal. Follow him on Twitter: @ScottJenningsKY.

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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Conservatives must forget Trump's election 'truths' and deal in facts.