Is it more dangerous than treating every opinion as valid? You'd be enabling elitism anyway as you'd have to validate elitist positions.
I'm also talking stuff like Trump saying or tweeting something then him and his supporters claiming it's fake news. I don't think it's valid to claim he didn't say it when there's direct evidence he did.
I'm just increasingly wary of taking positions while under some pretense of universality.
Maybe its something like: all approaches to a given problem are valid, but some will prove more effective than others, by consensus/near-consensus.
But then again, if someone's opinion continues to be grounded on a narrow/parochial foundation, that tends to bar them from appreciating/understanding the effectiveness of an opinion that runs against theirs.
But I haven't worked out just how the closest-to-optimal of a given set of interpretations will reveal itself across the board, rather than just being partisan itself. Damned tricky, if I may say so.
But your point on Trump et co, the wish-washiness of it all, reconfiguring truth on a minute-by-minute basis (edit: in a blatantly self-serving fashion), I guess it depends on whether or not they actually believe in their protean opinions. I think I would ultimately argue that its in bad faith, that its less about believing in much of this stuff than it is about flipping off the libs.
I think its pathetic, in the etymological sense, of pathos overriding judgement, rather than their expressed judgement clearly representing what they believe. The common sense of pathetic, meaning pitiful or lame, can also be said to apply here, no? But that goes a bit farther into partisan waters.
Ultimately, I believe the closest-to-optimal opinion, or rather the net schizo meta-opinion, does look more like ours than it does theirs. But that doesn't necessarily mean ours is more valid than theirs. The net schizo meta-opinion needs all of its constituent sub-opinions, the regular opinions, in order to arrive at its value. This includes the outliers, however "deplorable".
Instead of some opinions being more valid than others, some opinions
happen to rest more closely to the net schizo meta-opinion. Beyond mere happenstance, I do think it is possible to willfully and dialectically steer a regular opinion not just to become a lower-order analog of the net schizo meta-opinion, but to actually raise itself to the higher order. I could be wrong there, but thats what it seems like.
That said, its damned near impossible to express the net schizo meta-opinion without reducing it to its lower order analog. That is, its tough to express the average of all opinions without sounding like you're just voicing another opinion.
edit edit: that is, it would be like expressing a tesseract, or some other higher-dimensional object, in three dimensions. It will just look like another three-dimensional shape to those who aren't privy. But not only that - you run the risk, yourself, of succumbing to your own ideological conditioning. That is part of the reason I'm so tentative about everything, about trying to treat every opinion with respect - again, however "deplorable" or hateful.