Got Reality?

Lisa Needham at Public Notice discusses something that I’m increasingly worried about: We’re a month into President Donald Trump’s increasingly disastrous Iran war, and we have no idea what’s really going on. In part, that’s because Trump is now nothing but a creature of pure id surrounded by enablers, running the country like an enormous out-of-control toddler. But it’s also because the administration is not at all interested in providing the American people with objective, reliable information. That erasure of truth leaves us unmoored. It is very difficult to get through the day now without being stunned by just how overwhelmingly dishonest virtually everything that comes out of the U.S. Government really is. Needham suggests that it’s partly the strategy — chaos and cacophony makes it easier for them to get away with the extreme, nefarious agenda they’l determined to enact as quickly as possible. And she rightly notes that a whole lot of money is being made in the process. But there’s an even bigger problem:the war on objective truth and data makes it impossible for politics and government to function. The MAGA people and others for whom their salaries on it, choose to believe Trump while the rest of us scramble to find out the truth. And everything is up for debate. The whole society is affected by this. We’re not operating on a shared reality anymore and it’s getting worse every day. Since there is simply no penalty for lying it means that it’s basically a free-for-all