We Are in a Battle for Truth
The Trump regime's goal is to untether us from factual reality. We can't let them succeed.
Let’s be clear: Climate change is real and an existential threat. Supporting diversity, equity and inclusion is a sign of a healthy society. Vaccines save lives. A functioning democracy depends on the public possessing facts and knowledge to make informed decisions.
We need to remember these things as the Trump regime works aggressively to strip away access to reliable information and dispose evidence of what’s true and what’s false.
Yesterday, Senate Republicans confirmed anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Alarmingly, this man who traffics in conspiracy theories will now be in charge of a sprawling agency that includes the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 10 other divisions.
A day earlier, these same Republicans rubber-stamped Tulsi Gabbard, who has exactly zero experience in intelligence, to be the Director of National Intelligence. This is a person who repeats Kremlin propaganda and who a Russian TV host called “our girlfriend.” The Republicans were not deterred, even while knowing the former Hawaiian congressman secretly visited Syria’s mass murderer, Bashar al-Assad, for whom she has been a stalwart apologist.
In a sane world, one where the will of the people and the truth still mattered, people like this would not ascend to a presidential cabinet. But the Republican Party has been transformed into a Trump-appeasing parade of obedience, in which nominees are ushered into the highest rungs of our government, not in spite of their hostility toward democracy and factual reality, but because of it.
We know that now. The key for each of us is to continue to know that tomorrow, the next day and the next four years. Because the Trump regime is working to deny us the capacity to know what’s true and to gain the knowledge we need to make informed decisions.
Broadly speaking, this is not new. The Republicans’ attack on “woke” programs and policies has been underway for years already—a hateful culture war they’ve concocted that includes banning books, rejecting university programs focused on gender and race, denying America’s history of racism and demanding that white people must not be made to feel “guilt, anguish or psychological stress” in the classroom.
This was most energetically played out in Florida by its governor, Ron DeSantis, whose Churchillian speechifying about the evils of “woke” will never lose its desperate hilarity, albeit the underlying nastiness. “We must fight the woke in our schools,” he said in 2022, copying the British prime minister’s cadence. “We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology.”
But what’s different now is that the Republicans possess the levers of power at the highest levels, carrying out Trump executive orders. Since Trump’s Jan. 20 takeover, they are exploiting their positions to comb through the webpages and databases of government agencies and block or delete the information they don’t want you to know. This includes discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change and transgender issues. They are also stripping away video evidence of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, as if we will not remember what we saw and heard that day with our own eyes and ears.
Information concerning HIV, LGBTQ people and youth health behaviors—including risk of suicide, school safety and health disparities—has been removed from various websites and databases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So have treatment guidelines for sexually transmitted infections, as well as datasets and national surveys of affected populations. “Regardless of your comfort with the idea of trans people,” one health official told CNN, “you should be terrified that the government is purging truth and science to fit an ideology, because what’s next?”
This removal of reality also includes taking down portals and webpages referencing climate change and the climate crisis on the websites of the White House; the Departments of Defense, Transportation and Energy; and the Environmental Protection Agency. As The Guardian noted, scientists are bracing '“for the worst.”
But this widespread scrubbing won’t alter the fact that temperatures are rising, extreme weather events are increasing and people around the world are dealing with the perils of these changes. There’s not an Angeleno who needs to check a government website to know that catastrophic wildfires are an intensifying danger. But the Trump regime is determined to protect its cronies in the fossil fuel industry by making it harder for Americans to quantify and understand these dangers and to identify which polluters are exacerbating them.
Added to this is the hostile push by Texas Sen. and Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz to block the research work at colleges and universities across the country that is funded by the National Science Foundation. He proudly released a list of over 3,400 grants totaling $2 billion that he claims promote diversity, equity and inclusion or—ridiculously—advance “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
Get a load of the hostile arrogance fueling his actions flaunted in his statement this week: “Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been taking a sledgehammer to the radical left’s woke nonsense. DEI initiatives have poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans.”
It’s hard to overestimate the chilling effect this will have not only the research work that Cruz and his operatives have targeted, but subsequent science-based projects that will never be pursued or never see the light of day because of this aggression. I’ve never had such a clear sense of how comfortable Ted Cruz would be in a Nazi brown shirt, complete with brown tie and swastika armband. In a fascist society, the weak man rises, barely able to contain his glee over the pain he causes others.
Trump’s laughable demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America took an ugly turn this week. An Associated Press reporter was denied access to an Oval Office event on Tuesday because the AP did not consent to the name change in its style guidelines. It could be easy to pass over one reporter’s credentials, but what does this say about the freedom of the press? Incident by incident, we’re witnessing a mad ruler stamping out dissent, trampling on the First Amendment and eroding a central pillar of democracy.
Nor should we gloss over what happened on Wednesday in the Oval Office. As Trump slumped behind the Resolute Desk, unelected oligarch Elon Musk held court with the gathered reporters and didn’t hesitate to claim that he is serving democracy. Never mind that his operatives have been busy hacking into government computer systems, accessing sensitive data and deciding which programs and contracts to stop—all without the constitutionally mandated approval of Congress.
In a grim display of gaslighting, casually clad with his “dark MAGA” hat and his rowdy four-year-old mouthing off, Musk slapped down criticism of his “Department of Government Efficiency” by insisting the cost-slashing actions fulfills the desires of Trump’s voters. “That’s what democracy is all about,” said the world’s richest man who spent over $250 million of his own money to get Trump elected.
While Musk’s henchmen continue working behind closed doors and evidence grows that the cuts are benefiting Musk’s businesses—many of which are under investigation—the unaccountable billionaire asserted in true Orwellian fashion, “Transparency is what builds trust, not simply somebody asserting trust.”
By the latest count, there are 30 investigations by 11 agencies underway of Musk companies. Yet Musk merrily contends, with barely any evidence, that DOGE is successfully increasing efficiency and eliminating waste and fraud.
Despite this onslaught of gaslighting, aggression and attacks on facts, don’t assume we are powerless to respond. Beyond the growing body of lawsuits that slow the constitutional violations, we need to seek reliable independent sources of information and knowledge. I also believe the Democrats need to gather together the best communicators to speak to the public on a regular basis, to hold daily press conferences much like some governors did during the terrible uncertainty and fear caused by COVID and an untethered president.
We must expect that federal government sources—including data that we count on to understand the state of the economy, public health and the climate—will be increasingly questionable. And we must seek organizations in each of these realms that are working to share facts and minimize the damage to our society. This is our duty to the future and the truth.
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I had to read through this well designed drum beat of warnings twice as it is packed with information defining the status of the attack on our Democracy.
I still have hope in my soul.
Excerpt from Steven’s words:
“Despite this onslaught of gaslighting, aggression and attacks on facts, don’t assume we are powerless to respond. Beyond the growing body of lawsuits that slow the constitutional violations, we need to seek reliable independent sources of information and knowledge. I also believe the Democrats need to gather together the best communicators to speak to the public on a regular basis, to hold daily press conferences much like some governors did during the terrible uncertainty and fear caused by COVID and an untethered president.”
Good piece, but there's more to it than that. Our collective "untethering from factual reality" began before Trump was elected the first time. In fact, it almost certainly contributed to Trump's being elected the first time. The rise of social media, the dwindling of the "free press," and the fragmentation of the TV/cable-viewing audience have all contributed to what we're up against now.
In his excellent 2023 book THE END OF REALITY, Jonathan Taplin notes that many more USians get their "news" from social media, where fact-checking is nearly non-existent (because the platforms are not liable for the consequences of lies spread by their users), than from news outlets that at least pay lip service to facts and fact-checking. Taplin's subtitle is long but worth repeating: "How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto."
USians are notorious for ignoring economic power. Now that it's bought or at least co-opted all three constitutional branches of government, we really need to start paying closer attention to it.