When the Truth Doesn't Exist, Democracy Is in Trouble

I testified on Feb. 12 before the House Judiciary Committee about the free-speech emergency in our country. The culprits: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, the country’s most powerful media billionaires, and members of Congress too consumed with old tweets (and, well, eggs) to respond to a constitutional crisis.

One thing about testifying before Congress is that once you’re finished, you’re flooded with all the things you wished you’d said, the questions you wished you’d been asked, the quips you didn’t get to deliver.

But Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Maryland) captured a lot of what I was thinking when he made his closing remarks at the marathon hearing — and said it better, too.

He said:

“One thing that struck me was the fundamental agnosticism I hear from a lot of my colleagues about whether something called ‘the truth’ even exists anymore. We are the products of an Enlightenment Constitution by people who really believed in the idea of facts and empirical investigation. In fact, our entire judicial system is based on that idea. When people go and testify in court they swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth .… Our judicial system is based on the idea that there is the truth .… Our democratic system is based on the idea that there is the truth.”

What occurred to me sitting there as the Republicans avoided me and talked to the other witnesses was just how eager they all were to establish the right to tell lies. Committee Chairman Jim Jordan made a big point of asking journalist Matt Taibbi whether the First Amendment protected the right to lie. He replied yes — though I think the more accurate answer would be “sometimes,” since the First Amendment doesn’t excuse false advertising, fraud, hoaxes, perjury or plagiarism.

But the Republican majority was determined to drive home that free speech allows you to lie. It seems its whole defense of free speech is just about lying: small lies, the Big Lie, so many lies.

“The inability to accept facts, and the idea that there are truths, is a very dangerous thing for American democracy or any other democracy,” Raskin concluded. “We don't have democracy if we don't have a concept of truth.”

DOGE mind virus

This full embrace of falsehoods goes hand in hand with the efforts to simply erase history, whether distant — like the realities of slavery or Jim Crow — or more current events. As you fall into the far right’s vortex, suddenly the pandemic that killed more than a million people in the United States becomes less important than a kid not wanting to wear a mask. In this bizarro world, Hunter Biden’s laptop excuses a far-right insurrection, and being called a racist is worse than actual white-nationalist violence.

There’s an insistence that everyone should accept being barraged with racist and misogynist posts for simply going online, that rape threats and deadnaming that put lives in danger are no big deal, that disinformation and propaganda are just a matter of opinion. Free speech should be about ensuring the government doesn’t interfere with people’s freedom and opportunities to speak. But they’re trying to use it to force people to listen to those the media billionaires choose to amplify or who can troll the loudest.

Along the way, longstanding government efforts to promote independent journalism internationally, protect election integrity or fund academic research get twisted into a web of acronym-filled subterfuge and elaborate conspiracy theories. But once you start investigating, the critics’ claims fall apart and you’re left with a bunch of people who are just really enthusiastic about authoritarianism and cruelty.

Honestly, I never thought I’d see members of Congress and their chosen witnesses so eager to defend Nazis, both the neo-variety and the original recipe. Committee witness Michael Shellenberger made several references to Supreme Court rulings protecting hate speech, but there was something far more insidious underneath his rhetoric than the classic ACLU defense of those who marched with swastikas through Skokie in 1977. Instead of just insisting that giving soapboxes to the worst speakers is the cost of having a free society, the arguments being made at the hearing and online were more like a shrugging question of “were Nazis really that bad?”

Yes, they were. And yes, they are. And a politics that elides or evades that question is one where fascism takes root, where it is literally taking root in the form of would-be dictator Donald Trump and his goose-stepping “special government employee” Elon Musk.

When did it get so hard for members of the Republican majority to simply say: Praising Nazis is bad. Nazi salutes are bad. Selling swastika T-shirts is bad. You may have “the right” to do all these things, but when you do them you should expect to be shunned, disqualified from politics and, yes, shouted down.

Free speech has consequences

Our descent into autocracy is given intellectual cover by a group of self-styled heterodox thinkers — including many at the Substack publication that unfortunately decided to use the same name as my organization. These are people who shrug off book bans, Musk’s cyberattacks and data breaches, and a shakedown on media companies being run out of the Oval Office. And this is all seemingly because these elite journalists maybe felt uncomfortable once at a cocktail party or a diversity training.

They, too, want speech without consequences. So they don’t hesitate to align themselves with vaccine deniers, segregationists, cop-beating insurrectionists, pro-Putin propagandists and the greedy billionaires trying to destroy basic environmental protections, bring back bribery, gut basic consumer and financial protections, slash taxes on the rich, and cut spending to kill cancer research and withhold life-saving medicines, mosquito nets and water treatments from children in areas where HIV/AIDS, malaria and typhoid have killed millions.

But they’re cool with all that — not to mention shredding the Constitution and ignoring the rule of law — so long as nobody asks them their pronouns. While basking in the adoration of Trump, Musk and the Republican Congress, they’re refusing to recognize the unfolding crisis for free speech and press freedom — and ignoring inconvenient truths.

They say democracy dies in darkness. But maybe it just happens when too many people who could do something about it refuse to open their eyes. 

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