(3) I always get a chuckle when I read op-ed articles with titles like, "Why your conservative friends choose not to accept facts." The Left enjoys portraying itself this way, as the guardians of rigid and unshakable truth, but it engages in the exact same patterns of cognitive bias that it notes in the Right. Nothing serves as a better example than the charge of "racism." It never matters how many "facts" you can militate--"I have plenty of Black friends," "My parents hosted a Black wedding in an all-white town, and those are the values they passed down to me," "I supported Ben Carson in the primaries"--it's never good enough. It's like Sigmund Freud; if you told Freud that you had no secret sexual attraction to your mother, he took your insistent denial as evidence that you really did. It is okay to generalize from a handful of photos and anecdotes to the conclusion that a person or group is "racist," but for some reason, it is never okay to generalize from another handful of exhibits to the opposite conclusion. Sure, it might be prudent, given media coverage, for Orthodoxy to disavow white supremacy publicly. What is not prudent, though, is jumping to the conclusion that white supremacy is now a problem in American Orthodoxy. That would take a lot more evidence and documentation.
