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Thankful for news, now more than ever

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.” — Brandon Sanderson, “Words of Radiance”

I have whiplash.

The waning days of Joe Biden’s term and the opening salvos of Donald Trump’s second term have left the nation reeling, seasick from sways and swings.

First came Biden’s preemptive pardons of his family members and members of Congress’s bipartisan commission that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Not exactly unprecedented — remember Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned Richard Nixon — but unprecedented in their scope and for the reasons Biden did it (to protect those individuals from what he feared would be political acts of retribution by Trump).

Then, shortly after taking his oath of office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for everyone involved in the Capitol attack. Again, not exactly unprecedented — Andrew Johnson pardoned thousands of former Confederate soldiers and leaders after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — but unprecedented for its swiftness and the fact that the pardons were unconditional (pardoned Confederates had to free slaves and swear an oath to the United States).

Since then, Trump has issued executive order after executive order to reshape the entirety of the nation, from mass deportations to undoing diversity initiatives to trying to buy out almost the entirety of the federal workforce to a short-lived effort to freeze federal spending to ordering new oil drilling to pulling America out of the Paris climate accords to going after prosecutors who investigated him to renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and more.

Nearly 40 orders and proclamations in his first week, all of them consequential.

Oh, and, along the way, Trump flirted with taking over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, refusing to rule out military intervention.

Love it or hate it, that’s a lot to digest in a week.

All that happened as news continued to flow outside the White House.

Democrats lost control of Michigan’s state House in the November election and then Republicans and one Democrat walked out of the Legislature to derail the Democrats’ lame duck agenda.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced he’ll run for Michigan governor as an independent, all but guaranteeing Democrats won’t return to the governor’s mansion in 2026.

The Detroit Lions, in their most-likely-to-make-it-to-the-Super-Bowl season, blew up a No. 1 seed in a humiliating divisional round loss to the Washington Commanders.

Newly in control Republicans in the state House failed to send the few bills Democrats did pass in lame duck to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desk, so Democrats threatened a lawsuit.

Michigan Democrat Gary Peters announced he’ll retire from the U.S. Senate after just two terms, giving Republicans a chance to pick up another Senate seat.

That’s not a comprehensive list.

As I ruminate on all that, I find myself grateful for reliable newspapers and other news organizations that have not only kept me and the rest of the nation abreast of all those goings-on but also parsed out the meaning of every action, detailed the potential consequences, and brought me both sides of the argument so I could decide for myself whether I support what happened or not.

That’s more important than ever as we trudge ever-deeper into a world that devalues facts in favor of conspiracy theories.

That’s not an ideological malady.

People on both sides of the aisle have been afflicted with an aversion to truth. Hardcore rightists and hardcore leftists I know — people I respect and even admire in arenas outside politics — engage in flights of fancy and truth-stretching to make the world support their ideas, rather than reshaping their ideas to support what’s really happening around them.

Newspapers and other reliable news organizations break through all that and offer sense in a senseless world.

By reporting the facts — including the facts of the fallout from every action — such organizations help us better understand what’s happening around us and how what’s happening affects us.

They help us better arm ourselves to respond.

That old adage “knowledge is power” has proven itself true time and time again in my life, but there’s another side to that coin: “false knowledge is outright dangerous.”

If you believe a lake is deep enough to dive in when it’s not, you’ll crack your head when you leap.

The same is true of politics and everything else. If you act on false notions, you’ll eventually get burned, because the truth never goes away, no matter how badly you want it to.

So empower yourself with real knowledge.

Read a newspaper.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@TheAlpenaNews.com. Follow him on X @JustinHinkley.

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