TRUTH

According to the Washington Post, after Donald Trump had been in office for three and a half years, he had told 20,000 lies or misleading statements. Twenty thousand! The President of the United States!

It is hard to believe. It would have been unbelievable before Trump. Never before have we had a President so unfit for office. He is unfit morally, intellectually, psychologically, and temperamentally. He has created irreparable damage to the United States in many ways, much of it through his prevarications. He has destroyed the credibility of his office and of the United States itself. Promises made in the name of the United States under previous administrations have meant nothing to him. The message he has created: The United States is not good for its word.

His misinformation about the Covid 19 virus has caused the death of tens of thousands of Americans. In his eagerness to reopen institutions that had had been closed to limit people’s exposure to the virus, he encouraged many states, mostly under Republican governors, to reopen prematurely, causing death rates from the virus to shoot up. He has ignored advice from experts, from scientists. He has minimized the effects of Covid 19, calling it little more than a cold. He has said it will be gone in little time. He has called it a hoax. 

While Donald Trump has been the Great Prevaricator of our times, he is not alone in spreading misinformation. Alex Jones spread the message that the shooting of twenty school children in Sandy Hook, CT, was a hoax. Can you imagine how the parents must feel? To lose a child in that terrible event and then have an unprincipled person like Jones tell people that it was a hoax?

Jones also promoted the false story that Hillary Clinton was involved a child porn ring located in a pizza restaurant in Washington. One man was so convinced on the truth of that story that he went to the restaurant armed with a rifle, determined to free the children from the basement where they were held. There was no basement in the restaurant. Or any children.

QAnon is another group that promotes false conspiracy stories and accuses prominent people of child pornography. We now have a woman from Georgia, Marjorie Greene, who espouses the QAnon message. She will probably be elected to Congress in November. Anyone who believes Fox News and personalities like Rush Limbaugh does so at their peril. Misinformation is spread freely through the social networks, and gullible people believe these propagators of falsehood. Some people believe that social networks are reliable sources of news.

There have always been liars of course. The difference is that today liars can spread their poison on the internet, and gullible people are taken in by the falsehoods. Then they spread the false stories through the social media. It is difficult sometimes to know what to believe. 

The purpose of free education is to enable people to make wise choices in electing candidates to public office. If people are fed disinformation, they will elect candidates like Donald Trump. Clearly something must be done to limit the dissemination of lies about public events. We cannot afford the election of another candidate as woefully unfit for office as Donald Trump.

Something must be done. We can’t rely on the government to do it. An administration like the present one cannot be allowed to declare what is fake news and what is not. The social media cannot be trusted to do it. Mark Zuckerberg refused to remove Holocaust denial statements from Face Book, saying it was a matter of opinion. Of course it is not a matter of opinion. The Holocaust was a fact. To deny that it existed is a lie.

The answer is in education. Teaching people to think and to evaluate information is as important as the three Rs. Two professors at the University of Washington have a class that does just that. The name of the class is Calling Bullshit https://www.callingbullshit.org/index.html . The course teaches students how to evaluate data and check sources. Even though this is a college course, it has been taught on the secondary level as well.

As the course description says, the world is awash in bullshit. People are posting misinformation online about the coronavirus. They are denying climate change. They are electing people like Marjorie Greene and Donald Trump. We must educate everyone on how to detect bullshit.