All of the following are facts that well informed, reasonable people cannot honestly dispute.

Rand Paul is racist.

Joseph Ratzinger is guilty of deliberately protecting child rapists.

Dick Cheney and other Bush regime officials deliberately sabotaged our nation's response mechanisms to terrorism until after the 911 attacks succeeded.

Legalized gun ownership kills almost 30,000 Americans every year.

All human beings have common ancestors that were apes, monkeys, and reptiles, though those ancestors were different than the apes, monkeys, and reptiles present today.

We have been losing the Afghanistan war at least starting in 2006.

Oil spills are predictable and inevitable consequences of offshore drilling.

The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen.

Yet, all of these are either forbidden or demonized in our dominant political discourse and the corporate media. For instance, openly discussing Rand Paul's racism is treated as out of bounds, not just by conservative media figures, but by liberal pundits who have been so beaten down that they are afraid to say anything that offends corporate interests and the rightist sheep who are fooled by corporate propaganda.

What happens to a society and its discourse when easily observable facts are attacked, spun at, suppressed in relentless campaigns to make reality taboo? It isn't even shocking that the facts about Global Warming, something that will do enormous damage to our country and our planet, have been so thoroughly attacked by media and politicians here.

When the prejudiced, the wealthy, and the powerful discover an inconvenient fact, they employ a wide variety of strategies to suppress it. Often, they demonize people who state it and use their power over the media to keep it from being heard by the majority of the population.

When that doesn't work, they often create a bogus opinion which contradicts the actual fact, claim that the fact is merely an opinion, then insist that both "opinions" be given equal weight or that their phony opinion be given overwhelming weight in media they own and control. When people limit their news consumption to corporate propaganda, they get left with this constant barrage of deliberately constructed bullshit.

A society that cannot face facts will eventually be doomed. If we continue to allow visceral prejudices, corporate power, and pure laziness to completely separate political discourse from reality, our society will not be able to deal with any of the problems it faces, and we face a bunch of enormous challenges.