“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2011
“…upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisors. In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late night calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a ‘Trump bubble’ for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.” Christopher R. Browning, The Suffocation of Democracy, The New York Review of Books, October 25, 2018, p. 16.
“Jeff Flake, who is retiring at the end of the year, … made a telling comment … a few days earlier. Scott Kelley, of ’60 Minutes’ asked him if he would have been willing to call for the postponement of the vote [on Judge Kavanaugh] if he was running for reelection. ‘No, not a chance,’ he said. ‘There’s no value to reaching across the aisle. There is no currency for that anymore.’” Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
“Why did people think that a voting system was protection against totalitarianism?” Souad Mekhennet, I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad, 2018, p. 189.
As our Founders wrote below, democracy is fragile, and as is noted above if facts are abandoned freedom is lost. A free press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and of movement are the core of a democratic society. And they all rest on truth which itself rests on an agreed set of facts. As John Adams once said “facts are stubborn things” but they can be suppressed as in Nazi Germany or they can be swamped by lies and distortion as is the case in the Trump administration. In saying this the famous lines by George Orwell in 1984 comes to mind: “War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery.” But war is not peace and freedom is not slavery and even Fox News and Donald Trump cannot make it so. Some comments of our Founders on these issues follow.
“A lie stands on 1 leg, truth on 2.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1735
“Facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, 1770
“Let us neglect all party alliance and advert to facts. Let us believe no man to be infallible or impeccable in government, any more than in religion. Take no man’s word against evidence…”
John Adams, 1783
“But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness or care by the settlers of America than the press.”
John Adams, 1765
“The first of qualities for a great statesman is to be honest.”
John Adams, 1809
“I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned…”
George Washington, 1779
A lady asked Dr. Franklin, “Well Doctor, what have we got a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”
John Jay