How do we know what’s true? Yesterday the son of the president of United States retweeted a call for violence against whites, supposedly written by black protesters and left-wing terrorists. Today we learn that the claim was fabricated by a former Ku Klux Klansman. Using an account on social media that was brand new. That had only a couple hundred of followers.
Yet somehow it reached the son of the President of the United States, and through him, millions of supporters and believers. Will Donald Trump Junior retract, clarify, denounce, explain? Or will he roll onward, building his own power base on lies?
The nature of truth is fundamental to democracies, and therefore must be a central point of attack for authoritarian leaders. In the Philippines, president Rodrigo Duterte has been responsible for tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings, mostly of poor drug addicts in the slums. who he labels as criminals, scum, and subhuman. But he does not lie simply to cover up his indirect role in sponsoring, endorsing, encouraging, and rewarding violence by vigilante squads of supporters. He lies about anything and everything. He recently lied about where he was on a Sunday afternoon (taking a nap). Why? He must have something to lie about. Because he needs to attack and belittle the free press and all forms of accountability, including academics, human rights activists, and experts. The lie can be tiny, but it still provides a daily opportunity to attack the media as biased, unreliable, liars, operating for financial game, themselves corrupt, and dangerous and threatenIng to the country, The natural enemy of any true patriot.
Reality is inverted, the crime itself used turned into the alibi. If no one knows who’s telling the truth about Sunday afternoon naptime, nothing else makes sense either. The consumer of these lies is the enthusiastic patriot, and lover of mankind in abstract, who must be occupied by venom and rage. Theodore Adorno proved by 1950 that many people—perhaps a third—have a high “F” score, for fascist tendencies. The authoritarian personality is alive and well today, predisposed to target out-groups with punishment, violence, and social exclusion. As the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum says in “Monarchy of Fear,” that fear, anger, and retribution become mortal enemies of a democratic system built on sharing power.
If an individual Klansman can fool the presidential family, and get millions of Americans to believe they are under attack from “thugs” and terrorists, the Klansman has won another skirmish in the war against reality. If many such people do it every day, democracy becomes weak.
Fabrication, denial, and blaming outsiders can happen on the left, as in the initial and false claims that 80% of vehicles at recent protests in Minneapolis were registered out of state. But the assault on truth is a fundamental quality of one side now, from climate science to civil rights, covid and crowd sizes. The authoritarian personality is being activated by a president who, according to The New York Times, has retweeted conspiracy-focussed accounts, including those about that sham QAnon, at least 145 times.
Constant, shameless lying may be the most powerful weapon in the autocrat’s arsenal, perhaps even more powerful than real weapons. Erdogan uses it in Turkey to blame absolutely everything on the original deep state, while in fact burrowing his supporters into the bureaucracy for two decades, hollowing out democracy from within, and rewarding oligarchs and thieves with vast fortunes from the national business. In Brazil, Bolsonaro has blamed deforestation on environmentalists and movie stars, part of the endless plots that justify his calls to replace democracy with a military government again.
Check claims, think critically, admit and correct mistakes, and rely on real journalism that is fact-checked and openly sourced. Don’t pass on rumors. Defend the free press, and with it, the country.