In a September 12, 2026 opinion piece for American Thinker, columnist Kevin Finn argues that the American political divide has grown so wide that conservatives and leftists no longer share a common factual universe. He describes the two camps as “a Venn diagram with two circles that barely overlap” — a split, in his telling, that has eroded institutional trust, warped public decision-making, and produced what he calls real-world harm.
Finn’s essay, titled “Leftists live in a different universe,” is less a reporting exercise than a catalog of grievances. He cites President Reagan’s old line that liberals “know so much that isn’t so,” and contends that today’s leftist pronouncements — delivered with what he calls absolute conviction — are increasingly disinformation rather than mere misinformation: deliberately false claims meant to cause harm.
A roster of examples
The column’s central method is accumulation. Finn lists statements and headlines he considers evidence of a detached political culture, moving from political rhetoric to media coverage to climate commentary to celebrity commentary.
He points to Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s claim that the Trump administration seeks to return America “not even just to Jim Crow … but even to pre-Reconstruction,” adding his own aside that this would refer to an era when, as he writes, Democrats owned the slaves. He cites Florida Democrat Angie Nixon’s assertion that Republicans are trying to kill black people, and Rosie O’Donnell’s claim that ICE agents run “concentration camps” where they impregnate migrant children. Climate change also draws a mention: Finn notes Art Garfunkel’s threat to leave the country over the issue, then jokes about how the nation would cope if Garfunkel joined Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, and James Cameron in departing.
Finn argues that these kinds of statements frequently contradict themselves within a single breath. His example is actress Sophie Turner, who explained her move back to the United Kingdom by saying she couldn’t fathom being a mother of a child killed in Uvalde, and that America “would rather have rights to guns than give kids a right to life” — then, in the same vein, complained that women are being “stripped of their rights” to abortion. “Do they not hear themselves?” Finn asks.
One of the more curious data points in the piece is a headline Finn calls self-refuting: a KTSP-News in Minnesota post reading, “Minnesota has now served 450 million free school meals as the program’s cost continues to rise beyond early projections.” His only comment is a deadpan “Make it make sense.”
Silence, selective and otherwise
Beyond what he sees as overstatement, Finn identifies a second tactic: selective silence — letting inconvenient stories “die on the vine.” His example is the Great Barrier Reef, where he says environmental alarmists have largely stopped discussing the issue because years of dire predictions have been contradicted by data showing coral cover rebounding to near-record levels. The essay closes with a nudge in that direction: “Meanwhile, someone should tell Art Garfunkel the Great Barrier Reef is doing just fine.”
Finn acknowledges that this sounds like a familiar complaint about media bias, but he pushes it further. Legacy outlets, he argues, routinely downplay or ignore the consequences of open borders and crimes committed by illegal aliens, and rarely acknowledge what he describes as the slow-motion collapse of cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. His stated rule of thumb: if a story highlights Democrat failures, it is ignored; if it showcases Republican successes, it disappears. As proof, he notes he has yet to see a legacy outlet congratulate Tom Homan and his team for rescuing over a hundred thousand migrant children trafficked into the country under the Biden administration.
The consequences, in Finn’s view, go beyond bad coverage. He argues that crying wolf with exaggerated threats drives expensive, ineffective, or panic-driven policies, desensitizes the public when predictions fail, and diverts attention from measurable problems. Accusations that President Trump is a pedophile or “literally Hitler,” he writes, dehumanize him and by extension all conservatives — inflaming tensions, discouraging compromise, and encouraging hostility. When mainstream outlets offer little pushback, he says, such claims gain legitimacy and deepen the fracture.
The accountability question
Finn’s diagnosis is bleak. He says Republicans and Democrats have little in common beyond occupying the same patch of ground. He invokes the idea that “not long ago, everyone agreed that killing children is evil,” then argues that mothers who kill their unborn children are now celebrated, that people like Lindsay Clancy get fan clubs, and that governors sign bills legalizing abortion up to the moment of birth while surrounded by cheering supporters. Squatters are protected by law, illegal aliens receive government-issued driver’s licenses, and some may soon be eligible for jobs in the Danbury, Connecticut police department, he adds.
He poses a challenge to readers: can they name anything a prominent leftist has said or done in the last 25 years that has made America safer, stronger, more prosperous, and more united?
Yet the column does not end in despair. Finn acknowledges some accountability already exists — fraudsters are being prosecuted and violent illegal aliens are being apprehended. Conservatives, he says, are becoming more informed and more vocal in countering leftist narratives, to the point that they no longer care what the left says or believe anything leftists say. “In fact, when they speak, we usually assume the opposite is true,” he writes.
More remedies are needed, he argues: media and public figures should face consequences when they push disinformation, viewpoint diversity should expand, fact-checking should be consistent regardless of ideology, and cultural norms should reward evidence over emotional hyperbole.
Crucially, Finn draws a line at censorship. “Let leftists talk — they reveal how dangerously unmoored from reality they are,” he writes. A society that loses its fear of being wrong, or its capacity to correct falsehoods, invites the very lunacy that emerges when disinformation faces no scrutiny, he concludes. Truth-seeking, not narrative protection, is in his view the only sustainable defense.
The piece is an argument about epistemic asymmetry — the claim that one side of the political spectrum argues in bad faith while the other is simply outmatched in volume. Readers will bring their own priors to that question. What Finn makes explicit is his preferred remedy: not suppression, but exposure.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/leftists-live-in-a-different-universe/