On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. Leading up to the event, Trump boasted about the enormous crowds he was certain his inauguration would draw. This led many in the media to point out, after the inauguration, that it had in fact not drawn as large a crowd as either of Barack Obama's inaugurations.
The next day, at White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's first press briefing in his new job, he attacked the media and falsely claimed that Trump's inauguration had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe."
Later, high-ranking Trump staff member Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer's lie by claiming that Spicer was merely giving "alternative facts," and I feel like this infamous statement was a preview of so much that has happened in the five-plus years since. I feel like we are living in a country where more and more, everyone has their own alternative facts and it's getting increasingly difficult to bridge the divides they create.
I wrote a post last year in which I outlined the reasons that I characterize the modern Republican Party as akin to a cult. The reasons I focused on were two very prominent false beliefs around which the Republican Party had come to organize itself - one, that COVID vaccines are bad, and two, that Trump won the 2020 election. The first of those false beliefs has led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. The second of those false beliefs led to a violent mob assault on the US Capitol and continues to threaten to tear apart our democracy.
These are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to alternative facts popular on the right. The epidemic of mass shootings and gun violence in this country gets worse and worse and nothing gets done because one of our two major political parties has concluded against all evidence that the solution is more "good guys with guns." Abortion bans are now going into effect in many states, the proponents of which ignore many inconvenient facts such as (to name just one) that ectopic pregnancies are never viable and the only safe course of action is abortion. Laws targeting LGBT people or targeting the accurate teaching of the role of racism in American history continue to be pushed forward based on total fantasies about non-existent harm to children, and instead cause very real harm to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives.
I recently attended a birthday party for a relative and saw a number of other relatives who I hadn't seen in quite some time. I was reminded of how nice and enjoyable it can be to just spend time with people in person. But also of how there are certain topics that you just can't talk about because you're inhabiting two different worlds. Avoid those topics, and it's a perfectly lovely day with perfectly lovely people. Get into those topics, and you'll just get a headache as the alternative facts fly.
I've written a lot about the falsehoods that are popular on the American right. I'm also becoming more and more aware that different sets of alternative facts are becoming increasingly popular among many on the left. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the two are equivalent to each other - the American right is waging an active campaign to end democracy based on lies, and no one in a position of real power or influence on the left is doing the same. Nonetheless, it's all bad and I feel it's all contributing to the fracturing of society.
With the recent disastrous rulings by the Supreme Court, a lot of people have pointed out that these things wouldn't be happening if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as a way of highlighting the importance of voting. Other people, many of whom in 2016 were diminishing the importance of voting for the Democratic nominee, have gotten angry at these statements.
Look, I get their frustration at the many failures of the Democratic Party, but that doesn't make it less true that the Supreme Court would not be making these rulings if not for Donald Trump, rather than Hillary Clinton, getting to appoint three new justices. That's a fact. The idea that voting doesn't matter is an alternative fact.
(I think we should take a "yes, and" approach in discussions of who is to blame for the current fiasco instead of a "no, but" approach. So if someone says that more people should have voted for Hillary, you can respond, "This is true, and at the same time, the Democratic Party should have done x, y, and z," instead of saying, "No, the Democratic Party should have done x, y, and z, so it's their fault, not people who didn't vote." There are so many things that could have been done differently to avert this nightmare, and I'm not pinning all the blame on not enough people turning out to vote for Hillary Clinton, just using that as an example.)
One issue where I'm becoming increasingly aware of alternative facts becoming popular in some circles on the left is COVID. Obviously, as I've written about before, COVID misinformation on the right has taken a horrible toll. I don't want to minimize that at all. But I also see a lot of people on the side who say we should "follow the science" who... aren't following the science.
For a couple of specific examples, here are things I've seen people say on Twitter recently that were racking up huge numbers of likes and that I think represent pretty common sentiments among certain groups of people. Yes, I'm sure these views are over-represented on Twitter compared to society as a whole, but I'm also pretty sure there are a lot of people out there who think similarly.
One was a person posting the weekly case averages for the state of Virginia at this time in 2020 (608 cases/week), 2021 (200 cases/week), and 2022 (2,695 cases/week). "The biggest changes? No more mask requirements and a governor who refuses to acknowledge this multi-organ damaging virus is an issue," they wrote.
No. The biggest change, or at least by far the most important, is that the version of COVID circulating today spreads much more easily and is much more immune evasive than the versions circulating in 2020 and 2021. To an absolutely ridiculous extent. These numbers say literally nothing about the effectiveness of mask requirements or guidance from the government. Yet many people out there very confidently hold the incorrect belief that the much higher case numbers now vs. one year ago are because of mask mandates going away.
My other example is someone who said this:
Every time I tell a friend their in-person social activities prolong the pandemic & prolong my isolation, 9 times out of 10 they say, "I need SOMETHING to give me release/a break."
And I say, "So do I, but your actions mean it'll be longer until I can."
Many of them are still friends because we have conversations about why their actions are ableist & they change their behavior.
The ones who don't are no longer friends.
The person who said this has some sort of condition (I'm not sure what it is) that puts them at higher risk from COVID. I have a huge amount of sympathy for people like this. I hate that this is the new reality of the world. It has to be unbearably awful to feel that you have to isolate yourself for an unknown duration because even in spite of being vaccinated, your level of vulnerability to a COVID infection is still too high to risk getting infected. (I think there are some people who are correct in feeling this way and some people who are overestimating their risk, but I don't know which category this person falls into and I'm not criticizing their personal risk assessment.)
The harsh reality, though, is that the idea that people engaging in in-person social activities are "prolonging the pandemic" is not an idea grounded in evidence.
Imagine that somehow we could make everyone stop their in-person social activities for some amount of time. (We can't, without being a totalitarian state, but imagine we could.) The number of cases would go down, but the virus wouldn't be eradicated because it's too widespread (even in many non-human animals!) and a functional society requires some contact between people and other people. Also, lots of bad side effects would happen - people's mental health would suffer; businesses like restaurants and music venues would have to close, etc. Eventually, after whatever amount of time, social activities would resume... and the case numbers would go right back up. Stopping in-person social activities would have accomplished nothing toward the goal of ending the pandemic.
To be fair, I said similar things about people "prolonging the pandemic" in 2020 and early 2021, and I can see now that I was wrong. I now think that once the virus started to spread globally, it was essentially inevitable that we would eventually reach a situation like our current one. But in my past self's defense, back then, we didn't yet know that the virus would evolve to a form where reaching herd immunity would be impossible even with very good vaccines. Also, in 2020 there was a very clear goal - by limiting in-person social activities to reduce the number of people infected until vaccines were available, we could clearly save a lot of lives. And it was a goal with an end point. Now there's no clear goal and no end point.
I want to also say that there is a lot of very justified frustration about people pretending the pandemic is over and the government not doing more about it! There are a lot of things we should still be doing - namely, pouring huge amounts of funding into improving indoor air quality and into research on better vaccines, as well as mandating paid sick leave, and better accommodations such as remote options for vulnerable people. All of these would have huge benefits both in the near term and for the foreseeable future. But I don't think there's anything that anyone could realistically do right now that would change the reality of a virus still running rampant.
The people who think there is seem to also be ignoring that, with the much more easily transmissible and immune evasive omicron variants, case numbers continue to surge even in countries that had largely suppressed the virus through the pandemic's first year-plus. This is no longer a situation where America is screwing up and we can look to a lot of other countries that are doing a lot better. We can just all be grateful that the surges in case numbers are becoming decoupled from surges in deaths.
Why is this such a big problem? These alternative COVID facts on the left aren't directly causing a bunch of people to die the way the alternative COVID facts on the right have. So what's the harm?
Well, let's look at what the second person I quoted said. "Many of them are still friends because we have conversations... & they change their behavior. The ones who don't are no longer friends."
So what we have, really, is someone telling their friends to do something based on ideas that aren't well supported by evidence. And then cutting people out of their lives who don't do that. They certainly have a right to make that decision, yes. But it's pretty bad, I think, especially if it's happening on a large scale! I think people everywhere are building up a huge amount of resentment toward other people because they don't subscribe to the same alternative facts. And it's all contributing to the fracturing of society.
Specifically, regarding alternative facts on the left, I think that with the growing threat of fascism from the right, anything that leads to a fracturing of the different groups of people who should be united to oppose fascism is a big problem.
I realize as I write this that I might sound like I think I'm above all the other people with their alternative facts and I'm some ultimate arbiter of truth. I'm not. I'm sure there are things I believe that aren't true. I just try to be really careful about believing too strongly in things that aren't really well supported by evidence.
So a big question about all of this is, are things really different now from how they've been at various other times in human history? I mean, people everywhere have always believed things that aren't true.
I'm not sure of the answer to this question. But one thing I think might make this moment actually different is the Internet. In the pre-Internet days, everyone everywhere believed some things that weren't true, but they just had their own untrue beliefs, or the untrue beliefs shared by relatively small (at a societal or global level) groups. They didn't have the ability to instantly connect with lots of other people around the world who have similar untrue beliefs, leading to increasing reinforcement of those untrue beliefs. During the flu pandemic of a century ago, someone could tell their friends an alternative fact about the flu. But they couldn't send that alternative fact out into the world and instantly be rewarded with hundreds of little hearts and the resulting little dopamine hits.
People have always to some degree self-segregated themselves based on beliefs they hold. But it seems like the extent to which that is happening today, to which people are organizing their whole lives around certain sets of alternative facts and then organizing themselves into social groupings based on belief in those alternative facts, is unusual. Perhaps even unprecedented.
It feels like we've entered a post-truth America, a place and time where the truth largely just doesn't matter. Where different groups of people all live in their own alternate realities. From my perspective, it seems like the alternate reality that is shared by the most people, and that is the most threatening to society, is that inhabited by many on the right. And that it's imperative that everyone else recognize that threat and work to stop it, but instead different groups on the left and center are drifting off into their own alternate realities. But maybe that's just what it looks like from my perspective.
Anyway, it's all pretty scary!
I don't know what the answer is. I guess I'll keep trying to do my own little part to encourage people to look at the evidence on things and not just accept at face value whatever so-called facts are popular in their in-group. As well as to encourage people to regard other human beings and their life situations with empathy and decency. It often seems futile, but I'll try.
