Facts STILL Don't Care About Your Feelings

 

My god—Google Search for “what is a tariff” sudden spikes the DAY AFTER ELECTION DAY. 🤦🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/erds7pCqdG

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) November 9, 2024

I bet there are a lot of small-business people who feel like following Trump makes them more like big-business people. His policies are really going to fuck them up. And the effects of his "promises" are already coming to fruition. Their businesses don't have reserve capital enough to float them through additional costs that they can't calculate yet. I am not sure why so many people didn't check out what they were in for, but I'm still dealing with the thing I completely underrated--

There are a lot of people who simply don't know shit. Like:

TWGB: Rumbles in TrumpWorld

 

So, what if it seems like Trump's lawyers are "dropping like flies?"  What does it mean if Trump's kids are getting stripped from a lawsuit so that the law can focus on the former president himself? What are we looking at when Allen Weisselberg, recently released from his sentence, is faced with going back in on a perjury charge for protecting you know who? 

I know what Trump himself would call it--"Rigged!"  But maybe the problem is with the client himself. He's just, how do I delicately put this? Probably guilty of so, so much? 

See, let's talk about the exit of Tim Parletore. He says it's because one of Trump's other lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, was interfering with searches for government documents--I guess like he thought there was  good reason for some docs to remain unfound, which would be some very serious obstruction, right?  I mean, he would know what stuff he wanted to remain buried as a longtime Trump associate? (I don't trust this MF as far as I could throw him). 

But what am I going to do, pretend Parlatore isn't also a big lying Trump apologist kook here? He's the guy who pretended Trump using a former classified docs folder as a coverup for the little light on his bedside phone was a reasonable thing. That's nuts. You could use duct tape, a Post-It note, a sock. Why a classified docs folder?  

This is the kind of crazy out where the buses don't run kind of logic you employ when you know your client doesn't have any excuse. This is why the lawyers are rumbling--

They are running out of tables to pound. Eventually, someone is going to look at the bare facts of, say, what Trump even did in office, and maybe connect the dots to what docs were taken and understand why.

Alternative Facts and Real Propaganda

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway tried to cover up for Sean Spicer's peculiarly lying and hostile beration of the assembled media for reporting a verifiable thing--that the crowd for Donald Trump's inauguration was a bit thin--by asserting that he was providing "alternative facts."

"Alternative facts", Chuck Todd was forced to explain, would be "falsehoods". Because facts are things that are true. The alternative to them is things that are not. He did not use the more accusatory term "lie", although if Trump spin keeps trying to soulcycle their way through reality, they might discover that indoor and outdoor spinning ain't the same animal and that no matter how tough an artificial regime is, it isn't the dirt bike trail of actual politics--lying might still be, new political climate or not, an "eat-dirt" wipe-out event where policy rubber meets the human road. (Damn. That extended metaphor. Fuck it. I'm keeping it. Tom Friedman eat your heart out.)

So give it another day, and WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer is back out here "disagreeing with facts".

Yep. Still on about crowd size for some bizarre reason. Which sort of makes me wonder--how is this the thing this poor meaty bloke is forced to make his stand on? Why the insistence on crowd size? It's fucked up! Let's face it--I watched a video after the fact of the inauguration speech because I was at work that day. That was not an endorsement. It was being an interested citizen. Watching the inauguration via any means other than getting your ass down there was the "RT doesn't equal endorsement" of political activity.

But here's another thing that came up--there seems to have been a cadre of Trump staff that applauded at Trump's Saturday showing at Langley. The ones that applauded were his peeps.  This shouldn't surprise--he had staffers applaud at his many file-foldered folderol a couple weeks back. Hell, we know via FEC disclosures that Trump paid (well actually he didn't...) for part of his 2015 presidential announcement audience.

What if Facts were True?

So, it happens that a Trump surrogate made an interesting statement regarding "facts"--they don't matter anymore. Things are true if people believe in them. So, maybe Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim--who knows? Maybe aspirin is a good birth control pill. Maybe climate change can be dumb because your dumb face, right?

Of course this is an appalling thing to say. There needs to be common ground for people to be able to get together and discuss their wants and needs. If facts--the concrete understandings that are the underpinning for our shared reality--don't matter, then how can we ever deal with the subjective responses people have in reaction to those facts? It seems like a casual way of dismissing groups one doesn't want to listen to--"I reject your reality and replace it with my own."

It seems to me that the problem is one of "epistemic closure"--a fraught subject in right/left relations in these here United States. The mainstream media makes a game of false equivalence regarding traditional conservative and liberal discourse, but there does seem to be a higher propensity amongst conservatives for believing sheer bullshit. That's not to say liberals don't ever believe in bullshit--it's just that your bullshit has to be pretty immaculate to get us to the table.

I've considered "epistemic closure" to be part of the right/left communications failure for a while, starting with the rise of the Tea Parties, and noted it as being a particular reason why "outsider" candidates were winning the 2016 primaries. But the electoral wave that made Trump possible has lead to disturbing notions like a "post truth world".

That should not be a thing. Facts have to matter. Things like how climate change happens and how other countries feel about their borders and their economies matter. A leader has to be aware of facts because those are your handles, the grips, the ways of understanding what needs to get done.

This post is, in part, a riff on Big Bad Bald Bastard's post, about which I'm copacetic. Where two separate and barely overlapping cultural, mental, emotional, realities occur, it is hard to find common ground. We don't share the same folklore or necessarily appreciate the same ideas about what constitutes "values".

But if I have to find a place to plant my spear and stand like Horatius Cocles, and admit facts matter? Ok. Here goes--facts matter. Reality and government need facts. No matter what corner tells me different. I will stand on the facts.