When a friend sent me Bret Stephen’s recent opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal, she warned me to be careful of rage stroke. As I read, I could feel the tension building, so I decided the only rational course of action for avoiding the aforementioned stroke was to write about it.  And to start a blog to share my rant with the world.

Stephen argues that liberals make up crises to stay in business, using “evidence [that] tends to be anecdotal, subjective, invisible, tendentious and sometimes fabricated.” And yet every piece of evidence that Stephens cites in his piece fits the exact same description.  Let’s take them one by one.

“Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity.” Obesity is not the opposite of hunger. See the obesity-hunger paradox.

“If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school?” Just because something isn’t as bad as the Congo does not mean it’s not a problem that deserves our national attention.

“Somehow we’re supposed to believe that twice electing a black president is evidence of our racial incorrigibility.” A wonderful example of anecdotal evidence.  The success of one black man is not proof that racism is over.

And then he gets to the heart of his twisted logic – that liberals are trying to convince the public that climate change is worse than terrorism. “What is the central liberal project of the 21st century, if not to persuade people that climate change represents an infinitely greater threat to human civilization than the barbarians—sorry, violent extremists—of Mosul and Molenbeek?” I suppose the tenuous connection between climate and terrorism will be unavoidable in the media for the next few weeks, given the location of the COP21 conference. But does any serious person actually think that comparing the horribleness of these threats will provide any kind of policy insight?

It would be easy to dismiss the hyperbole that forms the basis of this entire piece as useless if it weren’t in the Wall Street Journal. But giving a credible platform to rhetoric that serves only to further polarize an already extreme public debate is dangerous for our democracy.