When Opinions Stand in for Facts    
       
   Self-censoring and willfully ignoring time-tested common sense abound in America, writes Megan Basham in WORLD magazine.
                                             
     Ms. Basham begins with a review of HBO's miniseries Chernobyl. "The (meltdown) occurred in a culture of fear, and a coercive consensus of opinion ruled." When some nuclear engineers balked at orders that almost guaranteed their own destruction, an overseer counsels, "Our faith in Soviet socialism will always be rewarded." 

   They faced threats to their lives and livelihoods.

   Basham recalls an American school teacher who lost his job because he refused to call his female student by a male pronoun. Researchers are drummed out of academia for daring to see merit in intelligent design. And a pro-life activist saw her Twitter ads banned unless she agreed to stop posting images of ultrasounds. 

   In Soviet days, confrontation was unthinkable. In the United States, Basham says corporations, public figures and private figures made public by media agendas regularly apologize for politically-incorrect sins. 

   Basham says the New York Times, Slate and other outlets are worried that Chernobyl viewers might get the "wrong" lessons and lose confidence in socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. 

   In the miniseries, an actor says, "When truth offends us we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid." 

   Basham concludes, "Socialism remains an ideology that parades counterfeit virtue and shouts twisted logic in defiance of evidence. Pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God leads its people into death." 

   The heart is deceitful above all else. Jeremiah 17:9.

       Jimmy