Yesterday, BrianParker14 wrote a diary that hit the recommended list and garnered a lot of views. Indeed, conversation is still active and vibrant there. He asks, “Why isn’t Lorie Smith being prosecuted for lying to the Supreme Court?”
(Smith, you’ll remember, brought the 303 Creative case which the Court used to rule that commercial activity can be viewed as expressive speech and therefore can be used in the furtherance of discriminatory acts.)
One of the diary’s earliest comments, made by Captain Frogbert, had this to say about our current state of play:
That’s the point, the complete delegitimization of the rule of law. People need to learn the oligarchy shall do what the oligarchy chooses to do. The whole of the law shall exist to punish you for dissent against the oligarchy. Truth, fact, justice, human decency, mean less than nothing. History shall be what the oligarchy decrees and if the oligarchy decrees yesterday’s history is no longer today’s history, so shall it be.
Get used to it. Society as a psychopath’s psyche for the rest of time. MAGA.
This is America™
This is absolutely true, but it leaves unsaid why truth is so endangered in this time, where fascism is ascendant.
The comment immediately called to mind this passage I’d just encountered given by Jason Stanley, expert on authoritarianism and author of How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works. He gave a lecture at Claremont McKenna College in 2018 on the topic of fascist politics, and there he told us the reason why the truth becomes hunted.
With regards to fascism, Stanley said:
Whether you’re a liberal democrat, like myself, or whether you’re Plato, who’s no fan of democracy, what you’re responding to is an ideology that’s just based on power, just based on winning. The idea is value comes from strength and winning.
And truth is in opposition to that, because no one of us has special access to truth. Truth is like—truth levels out power, right? Because if truth sets out the rules, then you might be much wealthier than I am, but I can point out that you’re wrong. And so truth is our weapon against power.
Now, my favorite system is liberal democracy, which has two values, liberty and equality. And both liberty and equality require truth. . . . Nobody thinks the citizens of North Korea are free. Why don’t we think the citizens of North Korea are free? Because they’ve been lied to. And since they’ve been lied to, what they’re doing is not under their control. When they do something, they don’t know why they’re doing it. They think that they’re doing it for certain reasons, because the Dear Leader is this or that. But that’s not why they’re doing it. They’ve been lied to. (The Dear Leader is not that; he’s not all that.)
So they’re not free. We don’t think of people who are operating on lies as free. Liberty requires freedom.
Similarly, equality requires freedom. In liberal democracy, equality is political equality. Liberal democracy tolerates differences in wealth, differences in material possessions. But it requires political equality. It requires that we’re all equal on the political stage, that each of us has a voice and can speak to each other and can refute each other in argument.
And political equality requires truth. It requires speaking truth to power.
So that is what political equality requires. Without truth, there is only power. The person with the best show wins. The person with the most money wins. But if you have a general respect for truth, then someone who’s lying—if you have a culture that respects truth, then you can point out to someone, you can point out that person is lying, and that person will be shamed.
So a general respect for truth is required in order for someone who is less powerful to shame someone who is more powerful.
So liberty democracy is a culture that requires, indeed centers, upon truth.
(cue to 17:23)
The assault on truth dovetails with the rise of conspiracy theories, the popularity of news as infotainment, and the legal incursions upon education. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, another renowned fascism expert and author of Strongmen, warns all of us that the first thing fascists dismantle is the education system:
A lot of [fascist] leaders have always gone after education immediately. When Mussolini came into power in 1922… his first two things that he did—and this is anybody who still thinks that, he used to be a leftist many, many years before he was a fascist—he privatized major industries in 1923 to please the conservative elites. Two, he reformed the education system. That was the first major thing he did.
And we see this—you know, why do you think Ron DeSantis, who—I call him the Florida Fascist—who is concentrating so much on education? [This is] why I’m talking about how we have to think about solving the crisis of democracy, not only now but with an eye to attract, [to] make it appealing to people in the future.
Because what the attacks on education are doing, and the banning of books, etc., around the world, are creating the conditions for new generations to want authoritarian and illiberal models of leadership and be attracted to those things.
And also, in the very horrible case of, you know, America, the whole idea that the rationale for not teaching about slavery and the history of racial discrimination—numerous U.S. states have these resolutions—that says they don’t want to teach anything that’s going to cause people “emotional distress.” That emotional distress is your conscience.
And so education is not just about creating silences . . . but it’s about retraining your emotions. And there’s a very concerted attempt to get people to lose their conscience, to not feel compassion for others, to feel that there’s a rationale for persecution. So education is at the center of everything, and that’s why it’s one of the first signs . . . one of the first things to be targeted.
(cue to 44:08)
It is bad enough that you have far-right spokespersons such as Ryan Helfenbein, senior VP of Liberty University, openly stating that their faction should embrace Hitlerian tactics because education is just like proselytizing:
Basically, this is an evangelistic movement on the left. And that’s what’s happening. It’s indoctrination. I mean, they are proselytizing to the next generation. And what we’re discovering as parents and conservatives is, wait a second. Education really is evangelism. So if you don’t control education, you cannot control the future. Stalin knew that, Mao knew that. Hitler knew that. We have to get that back for conservative values.
(cue to 3:37)
This is a rhetorical strike meant to equalize the efforts of education, which is to teach children how to learn, with what religious evangelism and education does, which is to tell people what to believe. If these two can be seen as equal, then education is no longer seen as a higher good but rather a competitor. it becomes part of the conservative mission of advancing social Darwinism, where the weaker doctrine limps off to die.
That is what the far right means to do with the vast infrastructure that is American education: they mean to capture it, scoop out its insides, and fill it back in, like ideological taxidermists, with actual evangelists.
Lest you think I am taking those words out of context, here is another right-wing spokesperson, Gene Bailey, host of Flashpoint on Kenneth Copeland’s broadcast network, speaking with megachurch pastor Hank Kunneman:
You know, when we look back at Hitler, Hitler went for the youth. The enemy always goes for the youth. We must take up arms and go for our youth.
(cue to 0:25)
As I explained in Walter Einenkel’s diary on Helfenbein’s remarks, this is a case of projective inversion:
Folklorist Alan Dundes coined the term “projective inversion” to describe the process going on when Helfenbein says that “the left" is “proselytizing” and “evangelizing.” Projective inversion is when a person (A) wants to do something to another person or group of people (B), so that A accuses B of doing that very thing. This then allows A to retaliate against B by engaging in just that desired act. (This is explained by Joseph Laycock, a religious studies scholar, here.)
This is not a defense mechanism. It’s an offense mechanism. It’s a signal to the intended audience that they themselves should engage in this conduct.
Truth must fall so that power has no check. Already, speaking truth to power is oftentimes asymmetrical, heavily weighted toward the person surrounded by institutional structures that support the establishment of their power. But the removal of truth enables a runaway process. If no one knows what the truth is, it becomes whatever the leader says it is. It’s no coincidence that education is one of the named pillars of society that Seven Mountains dominionism means to capture.
Education is one of the bastions that will protect us from this fascist onslaught. We need to dig our trenches now and defend it in every permissible way we can.
Truth, it’s said of contentious times, is slated to be the first casualty. The Supreme Court has already shown us this, with their transparent disregard for basic rules of jurisprudence. Make no mistake: far rightists are playing for all the marbles. Those rooting for fascism mean to shoot the moon.