The Liberty to Lie: Descending Into a Post-Truth World
We don't value truth as we once did, and the implications for society are frightening.
It kind of got lost in the news cycle but it was recently, quietly, confirmed that the Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, which outlined the case for the 2020 political election having been rigged by the Democratic party to oust Trump, was completely fabricated. D’Souza just made that shit up, and nobody involved in the production or distribution of the film did their due diligence to question its central claims.
Did they simply trust this convicted felon who is literally famous for, uhh, lying? Thought maybe this time he’d straighten up and fly right?
More likely they just didn’t think it would matter. Until one of the guys they were trying to pin for voter fraud sued them to clear his name, it didn’t matter. They probably never gave a second thought to whether it was true. The important thing is whether it was convincing. Whether the story it told, and the way it was told, elicited the right emotions from the right people.
D’Souza’s film getting vanquished is actually an unusual turn for this type of aggressive disinformation. There was no such comeuppance for Vaxxed, the anti-vaccine documentary directed by Andrew Wakefield, already proven beyond a doubt years ago to be an aggressive con artist.
This is the exact same tactic that’s been done for years by Project Veritas, the guerilla journalists, if you can give them even that, whose name in true doublespeak fashion is Latin for “truth” and whose whole jam is basically faking their way into the hives of their enemies (Democrat conventions, abortion clinics, school boards, groups of real journalists, etc.), by pretending to be other people, tricking them into saying stuff that can be twisted in some way, and then releasing deceptively edited videos to produce the desired narrative.
An incredibly brazen example of this dropped onto social media as I was putting this piece together for publication: The New York Post ran a video they claimed showed Joe Biden wandering away from a group and talking to imaginary people. They deliberately cropped the video to hide the people he was actually talking to. This isn’t even massaging the truth, it was a flat out lie, and the Post is hardly InfoWars or Weekly World News. They lied and they didn’t care.
I used to work a job that involved fact-checking. I don’t think it would be possible for me to have a job like that anymore. The rarely spoken about downstream effects of the Trump era, the world that is being deliberately shaped by strategists and ideologues like Trump and Elon Musk, is fiercely hostile to attempts to validate information. Snopes is despised for what it is and what it tries to do. The risk of being corrected is seen as an intolerable violation of the right to free expression.
Through the systematic and deliberate shaming and dismantling of media, research, and education, it’s hard to find a sense in which the concepts of truth or lies or proof or evidence feel like they have any real impact on the way the world now operates. The media often doesn’t behave as though anything has changed, instead carrying on with increasing frustration and bewilderment, tallying Donald Trump’s lies as though there’s some magic number that will eventually make it important.
“By this day, he’d made 503 false claims! Now, he’s up to 30,573!” As though that number didn’t turn into a complete meaningless blur after, like, 12. Every number after that is the same number, every digit, every decimal place you add. It’s kind of astounding to me that we’re still counting. Trying to sort his lies from his truths is like trying to pick every speck of coriander out of a bowl of soup.
If I can pick just one: A couple of months ago in an interview for Time he sweepingly discounted all official crime statistics across the country, from the FBI down to the Esmerelda County Precinct, as being fake numbers if they showed a decrease in crime under Biden. Just as a flat-out holy decree. Even if this were the truth he would have no way of knowing the secret real numbers, but he claims that knowledge nonetheless, beamed telepathically from the mothership. His followers don’t care because it’s what they want to be true and that makes it feel true and that’s the same as being true. It’s better than being true.
Thinking about what Trump and people like him do as individual truths or falsehoods isn’t even the correct mindset. Their presentation of reality to you is entirely outcome based. Whenever you hear a politician or an ideologue speak, you need to keep that in mind, and treat every word of their communication to you as fabricated in its entirety, even when some parts of it are true.
Because you need to consider, primarily, what the purpose of this communication is. This speech, or this documentary, or this opinion piece, or even this tweet. What does this person want you to feel and what do they want you to do?
Persuasive speech, rhetoric, and sophistry are arts as old as civilization. Educating you is not the aim of it—the aim is persuasion. This is why formal adjudicated debate is treated as a team sport. If there are any actual facts in a Donald Trump speech or a Dinesh D’Souza documentary or a Tucker Carlson monologue then they are only there incidentally because facts are persuasive in and of themselves. They’re not there because these people want to inform you or educate you or ensure you have the correct information. Why would that even matter to them?
They will take whatever facts work for them and dismiss the rest.
I’m always a bit bewildered by how ingrained the idea seems to have become that the political right argues with facts and logic while the left argues with emotion. Everybody uses both to different degrees in different situations. Logos, Pathos, and Ethos are the three modes of persuasion known since antiquity, but we have convinced ourselves over time, maybe since the Scientific Revolution, that Logos—reasoning, logic, and fact—is either the only important one or at least it pulls rank over the others. The project now is to reverse that completely.
We are losing the perception of truth and honesty as virtues. It is being taken from us by people for whom it is inconvenient to understand how to sort fact from fiction and why it is important to do so. People whose feelings are hurt or feel greatly enraged by the distance between what they want to be true and what is verifiable are eagerly complicit in the dismantling of our capability to learn. But if for some reason you’re somebody who still values the ability to see the world as it is, if you won’t give it up willingly, they will take it from you by force.
Recently the Stanford Internet Observatory has announced it is shutting down due to being unable to survive the financial burden of constant legal assault by the GOP. It’s a research project that investigates the effect of technology on the spread of information, its abuse and weaponisation. The forbidden research. Frustratingly for the Republican party, it is not illegal to conduct research, but luckily, scientists aren’t very wealthy, so all they need to do is sue again and again and again.
For politicians and ideologues like Elon Musk and to their cronies like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger (the journalists Musk hired to help dismantle their own profession) this is a free speech issue. Identifying and labeling misinformation hinders one’s God given right to spread it. A Kafkaesque interpretation of the paramount importance of free expression.
Gradually, through all this destructive meddling by the so-called protectors of our right to express ourselves even with deception, it’s beginning to set in that trying to limit one’s claims to verifiable factual statements is for fools if there are zero consequences for being caught in a lie—or when the truth is so fluid that it’s hard to distinguish the lies or what being caught in a lie actually entails. Right wing politics is just a constant state of kayfabe now, where truthfulness isn’t even presumed. What is important is that whatever they are saying or doing is winning. The left is always on the ropes because it always either thinks it’s playing a different game or doesn’t even realise it’s playing one.
Take Christopher Rufo (or as I call him, Evil Mirror Universe Ryan Gosling, EMURG), the think tank operative who has become a powerful right wing bulldozer purely for the fact that he openly makes shit up and uses the fact that nobody cares as a weapon. His mission? Dismantle education, primarily higher education, and strip the human intellectual advancement project of any non-essential research or at the very least anything un-Biblical. A white nationalist and a eugenicist, he’s on the forefront of the war against social diversity in western society, and he is fighting it with weaponised disinformation.
EMURG isn’t particularly intelligent—a young Earth creationist who would probably give you some interesting feedback if you asked him about the shape of the planet—but then his relationship with esoteric alternative facts is what has made him valuable. A bullshit artist with emphasis on artist.
He’s unique in how brazen and open he is about his use of deliberately misleading information as a tool of persuasion. Open about it, evidently, as he hopes to train others and raise an army to gut academia of Blacks and Marxists. Why not? He’s flaunted his tactics out in the open for so long, it doesn’t matter how many pieces are written that run down what he’s doing in detail. The soft-handed centrists at the helm of our mainstream media are terrified of fighting this too strongly. As advocates for western liberal ideas of bipartisanship, ideas that one side protected by them rejects with increasing enthusiasm, we are scared that identifying the lies, in and of itself, violates the liberty to lie.
I’m not American, but I’m a citizen of the west, and thus downstream of the culture and politics that take shape in America. I have friends in America and my heart breaks for when things go downhill for them, but I also see it as a portent. My culture in Australia is fiercely resistant to Trumpism, but what happens Above, eventually so happens Below, or Under. We have our personalities trying desperately to import this truth hostile rhetoric. It’s hastened by the homogenizing effects of social media.
The coming election cycles in the USA and all over the western world are a referendum on our relationship with truth itself. I really hope we don’t blow it.
Great observations, but truthfully scary. Thanks for this post.
You article is spot on, but IMO even having a person in the frame with Biden he still appears to wonder from the group.