There is no easily determined end tothe amusement of Kellyanne Conway's new catch-phrase, “AlternativeFacts.” While Chuck Todd was afraid to call a “falsehood” what it truly is (a “lie”), Donald Trump's star spinster went on national television and declared that the President's PressSecretary, Sean Spicer, was telling what one could only presume was an “alternative truth” when he praised Trump's inaugural address as the largest in American history. It wasn't, and we know it wasn't, yet he's repeated the claim to the extent that the Chicago Tribune published a headline echoing the nickname of “Baghdad Sean,” in honor of our much beloved Iraqi friend and alternative-fact provider “Baghdad Bob.” You remember! The one who claimed America's second invasion of Iraq was failing? That guy!
Whether you call it “Post-Fact” or whatever else you have in mind, the truth is that the truth doesn't stick to the Trump Administration, and the American people are now plunged into a new war of ideas about authenticity that Liberal Democrats are unfamiliar with fighting. It's bad enough that Trump's Whitehouse.org wiped the White House webpage clean of mentions of gay rights as well as military hiring programs;that's Trump's right, as abhorable as it might be, seeing as he's our Constitutionally-mandated President.
However,we used the term “Constitutionally-mandated” President in this discussion as a segue into the main thrust of it's message. Trump lost the democratically-measured “Popular Vote” by about 2.8 million American citizens, winning the Presidency via Electoral votes in a manner which none other than Donald Trump, himself, advocated a “revolution” against in 2012 when he feared President Obama had won the same way. I kid you not; he advocated for shoes-in-the-streets at the thought that Obama could lose the popular vote. Is it any wonder that Trump boasts that – if it weren't for those nasty illegal immigrants! - he would have won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton? This is another “Alternative Fact,” one so evident that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham politely begged Trump to openly disavow,one which still-Pseudo-Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders more accurately dubbed as a “delusional statement.” Notwithstanding the President's own stated belief in his illegitimacy (a fear fittingly often explored by the "liberal media" and congressmen alike),this disconnect between outright lies and observable fact dogged Trump throughout his campaign and has finally come home to roost in his Administration.
The Democrats are out of depth because they do not understand how to tie these inflated claims down to basic realities which are measurable by any objective observer. In other words, they need to learn how to quantify what they say and, perhaps more importantly, how they say it.
For example, sales of George Orwell's NineteenEighty-Four have skyrocketed since Mrs. Conway's statement; books sales have quantifiable numbers, such as the fact that you can check its Amazon sales page and see, at least as of 8:54 on 1/24/2017, that it is indeed the #1 selling book on the largest online book retailer. I'm quite familiar with the book, having once compared Oceania to North Korea. Unfortunately, I find Orwellian analogues within the Twitterverse and the internet all too easily. Famous fact-checker Snopes recently had to bust an outrageous lie that George Soros was once in Hitler's SS. All someone did was take a picture of a seemingly random SS member named – if I'm reading this right –Oskar Groening, and slap a five-second-fiction about this really being Soros. Say what you will about the alleged mastermind, but in his youth he was a Jew growing up under a Nazi heel and performing acts of resistance like warning those facing deportation. That's theofficial story as per a probably-well-edited Wikipedia entry, and whether you love him or hate him you have to give credit where itis due. It all reminds me of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, an invention of Winston Smith who, as you've probably read Orwell's opus by now, you know was an “alternative fact” for the life of a “Comrade” who had fallen out of favor with Oceania's overlords. It's something about the black-and-white photograph of a soldier from a dead era, in uniform, that makes it so appealing to the Memory Hole.
Perhaps that is the quintessential core of how Richard Spencer transformed American White-Supremacy into the “Alt-Right.”
So we come back to the Democrats – the oft-smeared “Liberals.” So we come back to this madness. So we come back to a war on truth. Their only weapon is the truth, a weapon they have, at a merciful best, completely mishandled in the recent election. Duplicity invites distrust, and just as we shouldn't forgive Russia for invading its neighbors with “little green men,” it's too easy to dredge up memories of dishonesty during the primary campaign. The Democratic claim on objective truth is a tough one to make, and it's one they will struggle to convince independents and lay citizens (about 47% of Americans didn't bother to vote in 2016).
Quantification– loud, vicious quantification - is the key to reclaiming a sane, objective-measurement-based media narrative. Bernie Sanders claims an Obamacare repeal without an adequate replacement would lead to 36,000 Americans dying per year; Washington Post declared that completely inaccurate with a margin of four pinnochios,only to turn around and later publish an article suggesting thatnumber tobe even higher, at 43,000. The lay citizen looks at these ridiculous conflicts and says, “These headlines are sensationalized, these numbers don't look like they add up, I don't think I believe any of it. What's new on Netflix? Nothing political, please.”
The Women's March on January 21st was, without question, a tremendous first step for them. The truth,bitter and distorted as ever, is that it will be downplayed as unimportant or as small. A planned April 15th protest (A success, as well as a way to date when this article was first drafted!) will be sensationalized by the media and then compared immediately to Trump's “numbers,” whatever they are, as well as the Women's March itself. It's only natural – these type of events are relatively easy to measure, quantify, and report on as a signal of apolitical movement's strength. Surely the Democrats will do everything in their power to make those protests as large as possible.
The best way for them to do that will be to hammer on with the truth, and the best way to do that is to make sure they have their numbers right. The media will of course create its own, but with seasoned experts leading the way in that perfect world where the Democrats indulge in this advice, they will be able to assert one objective, measurable,quantifiable fact that will draw the American citizen's eyes and ears, be reinforced by independent observers, and lead them to conclude, “Huh, I guess two plus two does equal four, and not the five this Alternative Fact says it does.”
JessePohlman is a writer and educator from Long Island, New York. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook for random musings and bits of entertainment, or check out his Amazon Authors page,where he conjures everything from fantasy to futurism.