My wife and I saw "Denial" a few weekends ago. The film is the story of American historian Deborah Lipstadt's legal battle with rogue British historian David Irving about his efforts to deny the Holocaust through speeches, articles and books.
The events played out from 1996 to 2000, and it was amazing to discover what an eager audience Irving had. He was able to convince followers that this horrific episode in history could be explained away by blaming it on the exaggerations and faulty memories of survivors, or a Zionist plot to legitimize the state of Israel. This was despite the legions of victims with tattoos on their arms, the grisly footage shot by the U.S. Army Signal Corps of bodies stacked like firewood, and the eyewitness testimony of the officers and soldiers who liberated the camps — not to mention the existence of the camps themselves, complete with ovens.
The film got me to thinking of how easy it is to pull a big lie over the eyes of people eager to accept it. Each year the temperature of the Earth grows warmer, but some still discount the existence of man-made climate change.
This skepticism about scientific data even applies to something as cut and dried as economics. In an October Marketplace-Edison Research Poll, four in 10 Americans were found to somewhat or completely distrust the economic data reported by the federal government. This includes unemployment rates, inflation numbers, health insurance coverage rates, household spending figures, gross domestic product growth, etc. The figure surged to 68 percent among Trump supporters, and almost half of these said they have no trust "at all" in government economic data. Trump's bashing of the economic recovery since 2008 surely contributed to this skepticism.
The willingness to discount experts, facts, math, and data is reckless on the face of it and really dangerous when it comes to the American people's trust in government. How can our civil servants and elected leaders, who now include Mr. Trump, hope to implement much-needed policies if people are cynical about the data benchmarks used to develop them? Plus, believing that the economy is worse than it is dampens both consumer demand and business hiring, and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The libertarian Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh is concerned about the alternate reality that right-wing media creates and any honest attempts to address it. He's coined a term for those who remind people that President Obama has deported 2.5 million immigrants here illegally, more than any other president, or who cite statistics proving that waves of undocumented immigrants are not pouring across the border. Actually, the number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. illegally has declined by 1 million since 2007. Nowrasteh says these truth-tellers are not considered "patriotically correct" and are told to get with the program. Sadly, today facts have become partisan, and fact-checking is now dismissed as a way to spread the liberal agenda.
Lies are rampant in social media, especially Facebook, and often take the form of fake news. During the recent election, an anti-Hillary Clinton story screamed: "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide." It was shared over 568,000 times and earned more than 15.5 million impressions. Other faux Facebook news stories claimed the Amish, the pope and even Denzel Washington endorsed Trump.
The man behind many such hoaxes is Paul Horner, the self-made king of fake news. He cynically told the media, "Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it."
This spring at Rutgers University's commencement, Obama said we live in a time when "opinions masquerade as facts, and the wildest conspiracy theories are taken as gospel." A relevant case in point: In May, Public Policy Polling found that 59 percent of Trump supporters said Obama wasn't born here, despite his having a birth certificate and birth notices in two Hawaiian newspapers, and two-thirds of them believed Obama was a Muslim.
This has to stop. There is no room for Goebbels' big lie or even Trump's "truthful hyperbole" in our society. If we are to aspire to become that city on a hill, it can't be built on a foundation of lies.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
