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. 

THE GREAT PREVARICATOR

Although the Great Prevaricator has elevated disinformation to an art form, he did not invent it. Lies and Liars have always been with us. In the last century people would support their false statements by saying, “I read it in the newspaper,” making no distinction between such rags as The Enquirer and the New York Times.

With the internet, widespread misinformation has become more prevalent than ever. Professional liars such as Alex Jones spread their mendacity throughout the world. What can stop them? How can citizens know whom to believe?

Recently some steps have been taken to rein in some of the deception that runs rampart on the internet. Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify have removed Jones’s venom from their sites. However his garbage was not removed because it was false. It was removed because it violated their policies about hate speech.

Facebook has also deleted some accounts that were spreading falsehoods. These accounts are similar to the covert Russian accounts that are believed to have influenced the 2016 American election.

I am glad that something is being done about these fonts of poison, but two questions come to my mind. Are we playing whack-a-mole? If we chop off one toxic head, will two more arise someplace else? The second question concerns: who decides? Who determines whether a particular piece of information is harmless or a piece of trash that should be thrown out with the rest of the rubbish?

I certainly don’t want conservatives deciding what I can and cannot read. I don’t want liberals making the decisions either. Sometimes we need to be politically incorrect. We need to raise and discuss issues that some people find uncomfortable.

The decision about whether a bit of information is valid and worthy of consideration must be left in the hands of the people. Yet many of the people have shown themselves to be incapable of making informed decisions about the value of all the data that streams to them every day.

Therefore, it is our responsibility to give the people the skills they need to make knowledgeable decisions. From an early age children need to be taught to think scientifically. They need to learn to evaluate the fact statements that come to them. They need to be able to evaluate the evidence that is presented to them and to think critically.  

If we can open the minds of the new generation coming up, they will be less likely to fall for the toxic dishonesty of the Great Prevaricators of the future.