OUR DEMOCRACY CANNOT SERVIVE WITHOUT THE TRUTH

 

                                               …If only this was possible...

 

We need to restore the stigma about lying and liars, before it is too late.

 

Have you ever heard the old joke about Moses, after he came down from Mount Sinai after talking to God.

The story is about Moses giving his latest news about the Commandments to the anxious believers from Israel

Moses says: “ Believers of Israel, I have good news, and I have bad news. 

The good news is that after many hours I was able to bargain God down to only 10 Commandments. The bad news is that adultery is still one of them.”

The problem of this last historic four years of Donald Trump, the presidency is now down to nine Commandments.

Because of the president’s over 20,000 lies and his mis-information, the US presidency has erased the one Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

Yes, this was a historic four years to have erased one of the Ten Commandments.  Lying has been so normalized by the president, it’s on a scale we’ve never seen before.

I am not sure how we can reverse it, but it must be done with the new president.  And I’m sure he will do it easily.

People in a democracy, who do not share basic truths, they can’t defeat something like a pandemic.  They can’t defend the US Constitution and they can’t turn the page after having an incompetent leader.  The war for truth has now become the war to preserve our democracy.

It is impossible to maintain a free society when leaders and news purveyors feel at liberty to spread lies without any sanctions. Without the truth, there is no path forward, and without trust, there is no way to go down that path together.

The hole now is so deep, because the only commandment President Trump did believe in was his own Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not get caught.”

Lately, the president and many of those around him stopped believing, to the point that they don’t seem to care about being caught in a lie.

They know, as the saying goes, that their lies make it halfway around the world, before the truth can lace up its shoes.  But that’s all that they care about.  They don’t care if they pollute the world with falsehoods, so no one will know what is true, then they feel they are home free.

The truth binds us, but Trump never wanted to be bound to anything.  He really didn’t want to actually tell the truth about the coronavirus or about the integrity of his own re-election.

Unfortunately, it nearly worked. Trump had proved, over his initial campaign year, and then in his four years as president, that he could lie multiple times a day, actually multiple times a minute, and he would not just win his election, but he could also, almost win re-election.

We have to ensure that the likes of this president never again appears anywhere in American politics.

Because Trump not only liberated himself from the truth, he liberated others to tell their lies, or to spread his...while he personally reaped all the benefits.

His party’s elders did not care if he lied, as long as he kept his base energized and voting red.  Fox News didn’t care if he lied, as long as he kept its viewers glued to the channel and its ratings high.  Major social networks only barely cared, as long he kept their users online and their numbers growing.  Many of his voters, especially those evangelicals, they apparently did not care, as long as he appointed anti-abortion conservative judges. In reality, these religious Trump supporters, they are “pro-life," but they are not always “pro-truth.”

For all those reasons, lying is now such a growth industry that it deserves its own Gross Domestic Product (GDP) line.  That’s because the automobile sales and durables were each down 10% last quarter, but lying grew 30% and economists predict that: “the lying industry could double in 2021.”

To put this in perspective, Trump has amplified voting falsehoods in over his 300 tweets, just since election night.

Trump’s focus on lying was all started back when Trump was allowed to spread the “birther” lie for all those years.  That was his lie that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president.  When he realized he could get away with that lie, he could then get away with anything.

Sure, Trump eventually gave up on that one, but once he saw how easily he could steal the truth, he knew he could just keep doing it.  But I don’t think even he knew that he could steal the soul of the Republican Party.  And, if he had been re-elected, he would have stolen the soul of this nation.

He and his collaborators are now making one last bid to use the Big Lie to destroy our democracy by delegitimizing one of its greatest moments ever.  That was when the record number of citizens actually came out to vote.  And that their votes were legitimately counted, amid a deadly and growing pandemic.

It is so corrupt, what Trump and his allies are doing, and it is dangerous for our constitutional system.  But we should weep even more for how many of Trump’s followers have bought into it.

“Lies don’t work unless they’re believed, and nearly half the American public has proved remarkably gullible,” says David Shipler, who served in Moscow news bureau during the Cold War.  “I think of each of us as having our own alarm… and it’s as if half of their batteries have died.  Lots of Trump’s lies, and his retweets of conspiracy fabrications, are obviously absurd.  Why have so many people believed them?  I’m not sure that is fully understood.”

That is why it’s vital that every reputable news organization, especially: television, Facebook and Twitter, they adopt what’s becoming the “Trump Rule”. If any official utters an obvious falsehood or fact-free allegation, the interview should be immediately terminated, just as many networks did with Trump’s lie-infested, postelection, news conference.  If the critics scream “censorship,” they should just shout back “the truth.”

This must become the new normal. Politicians need to be terrified every time they go on TV, that the plug will be pulled on them if they lie.

At the same time, we need to require every K-12 school in America to include “digital civics”.  That is how to determine if something you read on the internet is true.  This should be included in their school curriculum. You should not be able to graduate high school without it.

We need to restore the stigma about lying and liars, before it is too late. We need to hunt for the truth, fight for the truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation.  It is the freedom battle of our generation.

I must say that as much as I do believe in what I am saying here, much of these ideas comes from the writer Thomas Friedman who is an author and a foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist, and he has won three Pulitzer Prizes while working for the New York Times.

I have added my own ideas along with his, but I wanted to give him the credit for heading me in this direction.

Copyright G. Ater 2020