The Assault on Empiricism

Wilfred Reilly:

A remarkable aspect of today’s culture war debates, across a whole range of topics, is the fact that many massively popular positions bear no resemblance to measurable truth. Many core claims of Black Lives Matter (BLM), the “systemic racism” school of sociological thought, the Stop AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Hate movement, and, for that matter, QAnon and election fraud devotees on the political right, don’t gel at all with empirical facts. Often this is no accident. Many activists and a surprising number of academics and media figures seem to have returned to the ancient idea that truth is relative, and hard data of the Bureau of Justice Statistics variety are less valuable than individual “lived experience.” Others, so far as I can tell, simply lie to facilitate personal or political goals. The trend is a dangerous one: People who fear nonexistent demons are also likely to propose costly and unnecessary witch hunts. In the face of the new Hounds of God, empiricism must again be defended.

It is simply not debatable that the claims of many popular modern movements are far removed from reality. BLM’s contentions about a near-genocide of African Americans directed by police may be the best example of this. To give only two famous examples out of dozens, Black Trans Lives Matter activist Cherno Biko stated on prime-time television in 2015 that an innocent Black person is “murdered” by American police “every 28 hours,” while star attorney Benjamin Crump hinted at an even higher total in a 2019 book he titled Open Season: The Legalized Genocide of Colored People.

These sorts of claims have become conventional wisdom on the political left. A well-run and large-N study from the Skeptic Research Center in February 2021 found that 54% of Americans who “identify as very liberal” believe that the average number of unarmed Black men killed annually by U.S. police is somewhere between “about 1,000” and “more than 10,000.” A major empirical survey conducted by the political scientist Eric Kaufman in April 2021 found that 80% of African Americans and 60% of educated white liberals believethat more young Black men die annually at the hands of police than in car wrecks.