Truth is one of life’s most essential elements. It is often painful, but seldom futile. Of course, it is clarifying, but frequently confusing. It in no way guarantees success, but refusing to abide it makes failure a certainty. Truth hides in plain sight or can bury itself under many layers. Sometimes it smacks you in the face; other times it casually allows you to avoid it. Truth can demand to be heard or whisper softer still, even as we beg it to speak up. It’s all around us… like air, and just as necessary to our existence. Yet we can lie to ourselves far longer than we can hold our breath, even if the result is ultimately the same.
It’s easy to describe truth poetically, placing it on a lofty pedestal and ascribing it spiritual qualities that demand a deeper level of contemplation. But truth is like time, a constant we have no choice but to pursue and accept, basic to our understanding of the world and ability to organize our place within it. Coalescing around falsehoods at odds with actual events can only create futility. Those who prefer it as a means to their ends generally are shunned unless they are powerful enough to impose their deceit. Democratic government is synonymous with respect for truth. Authoritarianism is only about making lies more palatable. When a democracy exceeds a tipping point and loses control of its ability to be guided by facts, it passes on and gives way to despotism. These days America gets ever nearer to that cliff.
Republicans are no longer concerned with the value of truth past whatever momentary utility it can provide in the relentless imposition of their retrograde resentments. Almost three decades of ever increasing entrancement with Fox/AM messaging has obliterated their willingness to comprehend truth as a guiding ideal for American life, instead relegating it to a malleable prop meant to support a narrative that only services a totalitarian sensibility, one at odds with anything that diminishes its resonance with those who now completely rely on it to process the world they experience. On virtually every important issue our politics is obligated to confront, the GOP now assaults truth in service to fabrications Fox /AM has succeeded in convincing its base to believe.
Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post Fact Checker, determined Donald Trump publicly lied a then astounding 492 times within the first 100 days of his Presidential term. On election eve 2020 alone, bouncing from one super spreader rally to the next, Trump bellowed 503 falsehoods, according to Kessler’s team. Anyone who wants to try and lie more than 500 times in a single day… be my guest. It’s near impossible, not because one couldn’t actually come up with the lies, but because it’s certain they couldn’t find an audience that would allow it…unless of course it was composed of only MAGA faithful.
Read member biographies of the Loudoun County School Board and one is impressed by the breadth of civic participation. Many years of teaching and parent groups, non-profit activities and military service. Of course, resumes can always be padded, but this seems to be a panel made up of fairly accomplished people, who came honestly to their current positions based on both educational experience and dedication to their community.
Indeed, they seem the last group who deserve to be descended on by a know-nothing mob of right-wing zealots looking to tar and feather Fox/AM talking-point monsters of PC indoctrination crusades. But that’s exactly what they faced last week. The average yearly salary of $20,000 that comes with a board seat hardly seemed worth it as chaos enveloped a meeting ostensibly called to wrap up the pandemic-challenged academic year, but instead attracted a packed house of rabid Hannity-infused culture warriors out for the blood of any who would force “our children” to endure the evil du jour of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
At its base CRT holds that racial bias pervades American society and institutions despite specific laws and policies designed to eliminate it. However, it is a broad and complex paradigm that nobody who actually takes the few minutes necessary to gain a minimal understanding of it could possibly mistake for the basis of some radical new approach being rolled out to teach high school kids history.
Of course, the wretched core is never interested in even trace factual underpinnings, and the Loudoun County mob of MAGA’s finest was true blue to that indifference. It was Marxist this and indoctrination that as they lined up to personify a Fox News Facebook comments section. When the volume, the vitriol and the violent vibe reached a grotesque crescendo, the board did what they should have done at least thirty minutes earlier and adjourned. That turned the mob mad with righteous indignation and things got more ridiculous still, with the ugly spectacle resulting in two arrests.
Tucker Carlson spent a good part of his show the next evening demonstrating exactly how the mob was informed in the first place and why the hysterics are sure to continue. Carlson launched into a series of outright lies to introduce the segment, claiming falsely London County has banned To Kill a Mockingbird from its classrooms before going full unhinged. Loudoun County, howled Carlson, “has stopped teaching” and instead “indoctrinates” children with “poisonous and creepy… master race stuff…. assigning pornographic novels…” while teaching that America is an “evil racist place.”
As always Carlson had nothing whatsoever to back up his claims, but proof is one thing his audience has never demanded from him… or for that matter, any of his echo chamber compadres. He went on to interview one of the fiasco’s arrestees, who no doubt sees a path to his 15 minutes in all this and plans to milk every second. Carlson was glad to oblige. So is the entire Republican Party. It’s become a circular conveyer: outrageous lies stoking apocalyptic imaginings among the viewership, which in turn creates nihilist neophytes for the burgeoning MAGA political class, who then enjoy support from the far right’s dark financial and logistical shadows. Voila! A primary opponent.
In fact, now that Fox/AM nihilist absurdity fully forms the intellectual basis of the party’s messaging, “grass roots” leaders of these local uprisings – whether they be knuckle dragging against masks or now Covid vaccines, demanding the right to own a bazooka, or calling for yet another “people’s audit” to stop the steal – see politics in their future. After all, honestly, if Taylor-Greene and Boebert can do it, how hard can it really be? Tweeting sedition and getting interviewed on OAN and Newsmax… what’s not to like?!
To hear Trump lackey Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin tell it, the time has never been better to run for office, preferably local office, which will “take back our culture.” Shocked a US Senator would declare such a thing? Get over it. Dog whistles are for RINOs. This GOP leaves nothing to the imagination anymore when it comes to its core motivations. That’s one truth it embraces! BC