In Absence of Truth: The Fascist Assault on Reality and Empirical Truth

The zone isn't just flooded. We're drowning in it.

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The announcement on Monday was an abomination. President Donald Trump took the podium with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Mehmet Oz, Administrator of for the Centers of for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and told the country an abhorrent and transparent lie. In an effort to combat the “crisis of autism,” Trump peddled the unfounded claim that pregnant women taking Tylenol had contributed to the “rise” of the condition. Surrounded by hucksters who have made fortunes and ascended to power through quackery, he boasted that “it’s turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it.”

Never mind that Trump couldn’t even pronounce acetaminophen, what followed was a disturbing performance that is becoming disturbingly more familiar. Trump repeatedly made claims that even his bullshit “studies” didn’t support. “So,” he said, “taking Tylenol is not good.” He told women to “fight like hell” to avoid taking it, painted one of the most basic and trusted drugs in the world as poison. And, before it was done, sold the drug Leucovorin as a “breakthrough” in the treatment of autism, which must have been great news for Oz, who is an investor in one of the essential compounds in the drug.

The day before, while speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Trump had promoted the press conference, claiming that Kirk would have been there had he been alive and that it was one of the issues he valued most. Of course, it is unlikely that Kirk would have attended anyway and who knows whether he cared about any of this, but the high-profile event couldn’t be wasted. Under the auspice of honoring Kirk, Trump promoted himself, his agenda, and made sure to soak up all the adoration he could before leaving the stage, seemingly regretful that there wasn’t more time or more attention to steal.

Kirk’s assassination, with all of its consequences, has remained an almost unknowable even. In the immediate aftermath social media was flooded with anger, calls for violence, and one conspiracy after another. Even now, with some passage of time, we still don’t know what happened, exactly why it happened, and every official statement drips with sloppiness and misleading energy. Hardly anyone believes what they hear for different reasons.

Then, this morning, the headlines were filled with the story of the Secret Service foiling…something. In a place that isn’t identified, agents supposedly found a cache of technology and equipment that they claim was meant to disrupt telecommunications in New York City. Read this article in the The New York Post. Actually read it and ask yourself: what is this? I walked away completely baffled. I went elsewhere and no other story has real information and it reeks of some kind of strange unknowable-ness. For such a “big story,” there’s almost nothing to it.

Speaking of Trump and New York City, the president addressed the United Nations this morning, claiming to have ended “seven unendable wars.” Who knows what wars he’s referring to. He then told the assembled nations their countries were “going to hell” as the United States became more great and stronger than ever.

For all the grotesquerie and outrage, there is a feeling that has started to settle in. It’s probably familiar to you. It’s becoming used to someone’s particular brand of bullshit or behaviors. You sit in a meeting, someone raises their hand and says something that is so uniquely them in terms of being annoying or frustrating, and you can almost predict what it’s going to be before it even happens. We watched the Tylenol press conference, or at least consumed clips from it, and we knew it would be an embarrassing disaster. We knew they would lie to us and lean on unfounded, unscientific claims, and put people in danger. Then, with the UN, Trump got up in front of the world and did Trump things. It’s cringe inducing. It’s demoralizing. It’s just another Tuesday.

That feeling is elsewhere. With the Democratic Party, we run across some statement or interview with Chuck Schumer and we get exactly what we expect. Another article in another newspaper or magazine, some Neoliberal think-tank or institute or strategist is telling the party they have to move away from trans people and “the groups,” meaning black and brown people and women, and embrace MAGA if they ever want to win another election. Ezra Klein, the soothsayer of the Moderate Liberal, uses his gigantic platform to canonize Right Wing extremists and tell the Dems to run pro-choice candidates in states that have overwhelmingly voted for reproductive care.

Over time, it all runs together.

There are reasons for all this. The Tylenol mess is undoubtedly part of a larger scam by Trump and his conspirators to make money off manipulating the market while gifting their allies. The UN thing and the memorial speech is just a narcissist being a narcissist. Klein is funded by Right Wing billionaires to turn the Democratic Party into a kinder, gentler GOP. Schumer and leadership would rather maintain control and their connections to corporate and billionaire donors than actually do anything that’s needed. The publications that continue to amplify this stuff are owned by the wealth class, communicate what the wealth class wants, and shift moderates and liberals the way the wealth class demands.

But the larger thing here is the feeling of living in an environment like this. Truth isn’t just endangered, it’s been killed. The murder wasn’t slow. It took decades for the wealth class, in line with its corporations, to create and execute this project. It was necessary should their work continue. They were polluting, giving customers cancer, worsening climate change, engaging in one evil and destructive action, including coups and enslavement, after another. The reality of what they were doing had to be properly obscured.

You have surely heard Steve Bannon call for “flooding the zone with shit,” and the zone is completely flooded. We cannot trust what our government says. We cannot trust what our supposed leaders say. We cannot trust what we read, what we hear, or even what we experience. This is essential for the rise of fascism: an all-out assault on the Enlightenment and the very concept of informed democracy. We are floating in the flooded zone and attempting not to drown. In that state, all that matters is making it to our next breath. There is no room or time or energy to plan for the future. In order for fascism to fully seize power, we must be reduced to surviving rather than living. We must be willing to give up on the idea of knowing anything and accept whatever warped propaganda is given to us.

There is panic in this, for sure, but also opportunity. We must first ground ourselves in the face of this onslaught. Truth does not belong to the powerful. They can twist and warp it, but by anchoring ourselves in what we know to be true we can resist these efforts. Stop reading this for a moment. Ask yourself what you know to be true. It can be as simple as the room you’re in. How you feel. What you know about your life and your experience. Really ask yourself. That’s a start.

In a way, it is good that we have arrived here. There will be suffering, for sure, but so many of these institutions never deserved your trust. They operated with the backing of the same wealth class and carried their intentions, but it was hidden behind a pleasing and comforting veneer. So many speeches. So many articles. So many segments on the news. All of it a front for some deeper truth that was threatening to fight through but somehow never managed to.

There’s no denying it now. We’ve been scammed. Lied to. Led astray. And every poll, every ratings report, every instance of anecdotal evidence tells us that the scam isn’t really working anymore. There is a bubble in which the political and commentary class lives in that exists in the media, and they are continually falling for their own lies and spin, but we are outside of it. We witness it and every fiber of our being tells us this isn’t true, this isn’t even remotely true, and it repels us. That is us finally hearing our own internal voice telling us we are being misled.

Of course there’s nothing to this autism claim. Of course Trump is lying. Of course these reactions and “solutions” being given to us by the guardians of the status quo have no basis in reality. It’s an obvious fake. Always has been. Now, when truth seems harder than ever to find, we might actually start finding some.