Countering the Lies of the Post Truth GOP

For most of the Republican Party. the truth no longer matters and whatever lies and deceptions deemed to further the GOP quest for power - or in the case of Fox News, keeping ratings up and viewers happy - is deemed perfectly acceptable.  Some of those disseminating lies like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylore Greene, in my view, suffer from severe mental illness.  Others, however, like Tucker Carlson and his fellow "news" anchors know the truth as their internal emails and texts have revealed, yet lie with abandon anyways.  True, on occasion some Republicans will find the lies too much to take as in the case of the handful of Senate Republicans who on Tuesday pushed back on Tucker Carlson's insidious characterization of the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol as “mostly peaceful chaos,” with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis blasting those remarks as “bullshit.”  But these outbursts remain the exception to the rule that the truth simply no longer matters.   On a parallel track is the GOP effort to rewrite and sanitize history so that schools and colleges can no longer honestly teach facts and accurate history as laid out in a piece in the Washington Post captioned "Slavery Was Wrong’ and 5 Other Things Some Educators Won’t Teach Anymore."   While much of that piece focuses on Florida, a similar agenda is underway under the Youngkin regime in Virginia.   Here are highlights: 

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation. These fights, which have already generated at least 64 state laws reshaping what children can learn and do at school, are likely to intensify ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

A study published by the Rand Corp. in January found that nearly one-quarter of a nationally representative sample of 8,000 English, math and science teachers reported revising their instructional materials to limit or eliminate discussions of race and gender. Educators most commonly blamed parents and families for the shift, according to the Rand study.

Greg Wickenkamp began reevaluating how he teaches eighth-grade social studies in June 2021, when a new Iowa law barred educators from teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”. . . She continued: “To say ‘Is slavery wrong?’ — I really need to delve into it to see is that part of what we can or cannot say. And I don’t know that, Greg, because I just don’t have that. So I need to know more on that side.” . . . Wickenkamp left the Zoom call. At the close of the year, he left the teaching profession.

The piece is frightening and an eye opener as to the intensity of the effort to censor schools and colleges.   How does one counter the lies and censorship and intentional effort to dumb down students and the country?   Another column in the Washington Post looks at public attitudes and offers a suggestion:

President Biden’s speech on Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge commemorating “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., covered everything from voting rights to his economic plan. His most important remarks, however, did not concern a specific policy, but, rather, a critical message in the battle to defend the United States’ pluralistic democracy.

“The truth matters — notwithstanding what the other team is trying to hide. They’re trying to hide the truth,” Biden said. “No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should learn everything — the good, the bad, the truth — of who we are as a nation.”

He returned to that message later in his address: . . . “You can never know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been,” adding: “We know where we have been.” . . . In pushing back, Biden was channeling the views of the majority of Americans who overwhelmingly say that they want their kids to be taught about the complete story of America, including race.

According to a study by the group More in Common, “Most Americans (81%) regardless of demographics and political affiliation believe that the history of minority groups is an integral part of American history.” In addition, “8 in 10 Americans (84%), including Democrats (91%) and Republicans (77%), believe that it is important for students to learn the history of different racial groups.”

However, it is not “merely” that the Republican base wants to excise non-Whites from U.S. history and absolve the United States of racism. There is a full-court press to create a fact-free universe in which politicians — not scientists, educators, doctors and a free media — tell us what is true and what is not. . . . This is an attempt at information control, a dangerous tool in the hands of a movement that repudiates democracy.

Call it gaslighting or propaganda or “alternative facts,” but the concept is the same. If a government can control facts and obliterate objective measures of truth, leaders can no longer be held accountable.

Present-day defenders of democracy, therefore, would do well to get off defense when faced with a MAGA movement dependent on conspiracies and deception. Democrats and their allies should not be afraid explain that covid denial, book bans, teacher censorship and Fox News (be it the network’s election denial or “Great Replacement” propaganda) are all from the same authoritarian playbook.

In short, instead of scampering around to debunk each new outrageous claim or tactic, pro-democracy forces should return to an historically powerful message: A party that will tell you 2+2=5 is out to quash democracy itself.

Biden was on to something: Better to be on the side of truth.