In 2021, journalist Terry Glavin wrote the truth about the Great Indigenous Mass Graves Hoax in Canada. There were none and Glavin said so. For that he was widely condemned as an apologist for Canadian racism despite having spent much of his journalistic career battling exactly that. For daring to contradict a woke narrative, “CANCELED” was permanently stamped on his forehead.
So it’s no wonder that Glavin later told Bari Weiss that not only does the truth not matter, but that it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter. Doubtless, his experience of his own cancelation was deeply traumatic for him as it has been for countless members of the burgeoning community of the canceled.
But the truth does matter, and every member of that community knows it. That’s why we see the canceled doggedly continuing to report it. For now, their words may accomplish little that’s tangible, but the long history of the truth is that it has a way of prevailing even as those who assail it, deny it, revile it, ignore it, pass into oblivion.
In, 1600 CE, the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition burned philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and all-purpose gadfly Giordano Bruno at the stake for questioning Catholic dogmas like the trinity and transubstantiation, and asserting the Copernican description of the solar system. Perhaps recalling Bruno’s fate, Galileo, 33 years later, recanted his astronomical findings when the same Inquisition made its intentions toward him known. The Italian astronomer and physicist, rated by many as the greatest mind of his time, died a broken man. And yet, his writings were devoured all across Europe by minds ravenous for the truth, and it wasn’t long before acceptance of them far outstripped the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church that had, for 13 centuries, been the most powerful force in Europe. Massive, entrenched political power fought a war against a single man who’d been terrified into silence… and lost.
Did I just compare today’s national security state to the Inquisition? Yes, I believe I did and with good reason.
Then as now, the politically powerful awarded themselves the right to decide what is and isn’t truth. Then as now, they did so in order to protect and enhance their power. (The Church understood full well the threat to its power of admitting the truth of Galileo’s revelations.) And, then as now, they used “cancellation” to do so. (The Inquisition didn’t just send people to the stake, it banned their writings, too. For centuries it maintained the Index Librorum Prohibitorum that banned works by Galileo, Kepler and Kant among thousands of others.) Then as now, narratives – then of the Roman Church, now of governments, corporations and academia – battled against factual truth. Then as now, those narratives “won” – for a time. But in the end, power elites proved unequal to the power of the truth and of our unquenchable thirst for it.
Nowadays, what began on campus as the cancelation of those holding views uncongenial to current orthodoxy has morphed into the tactic – utilized by those in government, the MSM, the administrative state, the national security state, various businesses, etc. – of simply ignoring the truth. The reception given the Twitter Files’ revelations about the partnership between the national security state and Big Tech to quash legitimate speech in favor of pre-determined, self-serving and often flat-wrong narratives has been “nothing to see here; move along.” The theory seems to be that, if we just ignore the truth, it will, like an unwanted and possibly dangerous stray animal, go away.
But, it doesn’t. And, particularly in this Internet Age, it won’t. Most of us value the truth, want to know it and spread it. So those like Terry Glavin, Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk, Bari Weiss and numberless others are determined to push the truth into the public domain, whatever the short-term costs. And every attempt to ignore what they say, slander them as apologists for Vladimir Putin, denigrate them as hacks, marginalize them in the job market, only makes them more determined.
Amazingly, those who think they can ignore the truth fail entirely to notice the obvious – that those who value factual accuracy and scrupulous opinion-making garner huge and growing followings. Joe Rogan gets something like 190 million views every month. By 2018, Jordan Peterson’s books had sold over 30 million copies and that didn’t include the 5 million + copies of his most popular book, 12 Rules for Life. Bari Weiss’ publication The Free Press has 300,000 subscribers and growing. And those are individuals, not corporations with legions of employees and the deep pockets with which to advertise their wares. No, those individuals get their readers by doing what most people want – report accurately, think clearly and draw fact-based conclusions. They also respectfully open their forums to alternative voices.
All of this is a struggle for power. When the Inquisition banned Galileo’s writings, it did two things: it asserted its own “truth” as superior to that of science and claimed for itself the authority to say what is and isn’t truth. The latter was a claim of power; the former the exercise of it. And, as ever with power elites, its version of truth promoted its power.
And so it is today. We’ve been told that the FBI’s promotion of the Steele Dossier was a non-event, that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, that lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve” of COVID transmission, etc., ad infinitum. None of that was true, but all of it served specific political powers that claimed for themselves the authority to decide the “truth.”
The question of what is and isn’t truth will always be with us and the lynchpin of the answer depends entirely on who decides. In the 17th century, the Church had no doubt about who should decide – it should – and today’s power elites are similarly certain. Governmental operatives who daily urged social media platforms to quash legitimate speech evinced not the slightest doubt about the legitimacy of using governmental power to violate constitutional rights and promote their preferred narratives, regardless of how flawed.
Those constitutional rights, of course, exist to limit the reach of power elites. Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, et al knew well the history of the Roman Church and that of secular authorities who’d always claimed the power to dictate what is and isn’t truth. To the end of thwarting those invariable tendencies of the powerful, they wrote the First Amendment that gives a very different answer to the question “Who decides?” from that of governments of every stripe from the dawn of civilization. According to that Amendment, who decides what is and isn’t truth is the open marketplace of ideas. Who doesn’t decide is entrenched power.
Entrenched power of course bridles at the notion and nothing demonstrates the matter quite like what the federal government under Joe Biden has been doing. That should be seen for what it is – a direct assault on the very essence and promise of this country and one that seeks to return us to times when naked power dictated truth and cowed all into submission.
This was originally posted at The Word of Damocles.
