Truth and Its Discontents
A Note on Blatant, Brazen Lies
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. —George Santayana
Politics is not a parlor game with politeness and powdered wigs, but rather a struggle over power. The more powerful the government, the fiercer the battle. No government in world history has been more powerful. —Don Surber
Above: It’s masks all the way down.
Something is rotten in the State of Denmark United States.
We seem to live in a Potemkin media environment in which the most basic, ordinary form of factual truth is relentlessly buried, distorted, or—terrifyingly—erased.
If you aren’t bewildered, you aren’t thinking.
I don’t know much, but where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire and Lord knows my eyes are starting to water in light of the lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Take the bifurcation between perception and reality:
This is bad enough, however, worse is when objective reality is rebranded as fiction.
It’s unnerving when the funhouse mirrors that are The Onion and The Babylon Bee reflect reality more accurately than their legacy counterparts.
I do not pretend to be arbiter, just umpire.
I call it like I see it: balls are balls and strikes are strikes.
The below is presented without comment. You decide.
2021
2024
I have never seen this before. Axios is amending their reporting from three years ago to fit today's narrative.
So too is GovTrack:
This is downright Orwellian. Outlets, in fact the same reporter (Axios’ Stef W. Kight), are “correcting” their reporting from three years ago because it’s no longer helpful.
In a serious society, truth cannot be relative. It should be like gravity, a law that doesn’t change, even if it sometimes leads to bad breaks and falls.
A quote comes to mind from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who suffered imprisonment and torture when Soviet Union lackeys morphed lies into truth:
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.
If truth is Fort Sumter, it’s way past April 12, 1861.
We’ve surrendered and lost it.
Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, truth has to be truth and lie has to be lie.
A heart painted red is not a spade. Nor is a diamond painted black a club.
Whitewashing history does nothing more than create a blank slate on which more blood, sweat, and tears will be foolishly spilt repeating mistakes we should’ve learned from long ago.
As my friend Renee DiResta quipped in her terrific Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality: If you make it trend, you make it true.
Worse still, this strategy comes straight out of the playbook used by one of the most horrific regimes the world has ever seen: Nazism.
Below are three direct quotes from Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945:
A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.
If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be "the man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
With enough continuous, repeated pressure water can erode even the strongest stone.
As with stone, so too institutions and values. Everything tends towards entropy, after all.
Only good men and women with great principles can serve as bulwark beating back the waves and reinforcing the bulkhead.
In my experience, decent human beings don't run from the truth, they seek it out.
We must protect reality from insanity so that humanity doesn’t ruin its future through falsehood.
Revisionist history is no history at all. It’s a craven fabrication that comes from an inability or unwillingness to look in the mirror and make eye contact with past failures.
If we’re not careful, George Orwell’s fiction will become our reality: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
You’re the last line of defense, dear reader.
Use your eyes, ears, and brain to beat any and all brazen, blatant lies back.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
And they wonder how they lost the public trust, and why there are so many conspiracy theories, and why people are fed up and voting for Trump. This sort of thing is so insane, and yet they seem to do it without even a second thought...