The War on Truth Heats Up (just in time for Constitution Day)
Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” It's not that we can't tell or don't care about the difference between truths and lies. It's that what we're offered is so often untrustworthy, from people who don't care about that distinction, mostly intended for people who aren't clear on the distinction. The rest of us are supposed to be trampled underfoot, swept aside, or scared into submission.
Arendt tells us we have to commit to the difference between the true and the false. But what do we do when the information we're offered obscures that distinction? I think it then becomes more important than ever to sort everything that comes at us as true, false, don't know, don't trust that source. And to find trustworthy sources, and to keep company with those who are committed to truth, those we trust. And to call things by their true names: to call cruelty and hate by no euphemism, to call lies lies and truth truth, to defend science and history, fact and reason.
Don't know is important--we're not only being offered overt lies but also a lot of stuff that might be true but might not be, in which case the verdict must be that we cannot render a final verdict. Eventually we're going to have a government that suffers from a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome: it won't be believed even when it does tell the truth. Or wait, maybe we have one now
Overall the blur and the din and the confusion serves them. Serves them as they seek to destroy democracy, truth, history, science, to shut down museum exhibits that show realities they don't like, to terrorize, incarcerate, and deport people who tell realities they don't like. To cancel shows and shut down classes they don't like.
Charlie Kirk launched campaigns against progressive professors, which led to threats and harassment of many of them. Now people are being fired and threatened for daring to speak ill of him, including Jimmy Kimmel, who joins Stephen Colbert as a mild-mannered moderate who told the truth too well and too loudly. Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post for similarly telling the truth about who Kirk was. Truthtellers are being punished, because liars are in charge.
A related situation, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out, is that all the information we're being offered about the alleged murderer of far-right demagogue Charlie Kirk is coming from right-wing sources.
He writes: In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.The top executive positions at the FBI are held by hyper-partisan podcasters. Credible reports say roughly a third of the senior career leadership has been purged. Certainly the people who remain are either politically aligned with the administration or know that any straying from the company line means immediate termination. So again, things they say could be true. There’s simply no reason to assume that or even believe it’s more likely to be true than not.In this post however I want to focus on how extremely little we actually know.Almost everything that is currently being treated as fact comes from the Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox. He’s earned some credibility for departing from the MAGA line of demanding vengeance against Democrats. But he’s not in charge of the FBI or even local law enforcement, which is the other primary investigative agency. I don’t know how robust a state police authority they have in Utah. But there’s really no logic to Cox being the primary source of information. All the information about left-wing ideology and Tyler Robinson’s roommate allegedly being a romantic partner and transitioning comes from him.
Governor Cox himself said, "For the last 33 hours, I had been praying that this person was from another country. That he was not one of us because we are not like that. But it was one of us." That's a really weird thing to pray: it's a wish that your own people--white or native-born or Mormon or Utah-raised or Republican or whatever--not be implicated. Which makes it seem like he himself has motives to try to portray the alleged shooter as alien, as outside mainstream Utah/Mormon culture.
(Meanwhile, the texts between the alleged shooter and his alleged lover are being widely criticized for being written in, essentially, semi-formal old-people English that doesn't seem like how 22-year-old gamers communicate. Too, that while trying to escape from the scene where he committed a very high public murder of a fairly famous person, the alleged killer paused to send a whole series of self-incriminating texts full of careful details about the crime also challenges credibility.)
We are governed by liars and crooks whose agenda is to demolish the rule of law and the rights of the rest of us, including our First Amendment right to free speech (Happy Constitution Day, by the way!). Each of us has to calculate her own risks, but the more of us who do not fall in with the big lies and the little ones, who are not hushed and silenced and coerced to go along with lies or just be silent, the better.
Resistance begins with our care with truth and language. Kirk's murder is being weaponized to corral us into a smaller and smaller arena of speech, and it is our job to refuse to be confined, to keep speaking out, to keep making irreverent jokes, supporting progressive voices, chastising the high-profile cowards, and talking among ourselves.
MAGA has long been those "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction" doesn't matter; that absolution and disinhibition are among of the main things Trump offers them. It's our job not just to oppose the administration and the those who support it and further its propaganda efforts, but to be the opposite of them in this crucial way. To tell the truth wherever and however we can, to sort through the information we're offered and to be careful about who and what we believe and repeat, to support the public truth tellers, to stand together and stand for what we believe in and what we can believe. And against what we can't.
I'll end with a bit of wordless truth-telling projected on Windsor Castle last night, where Trump was misrepresenting our country shamefully again. And a reminder that the Epstein files, speaking of truth and fact and justice and freedom of information, are not yet released. But should be.
