Welcome to the post-truth era!

Truth is sooooo last year. Speaking truth is now seen as unpatriotic and a sign of weakness. No longer something that people with integrity and high ethical standards are expected to do, truth is now seen as spoken only by fools, people with a professional death wish, and those too weak to accept the useful and politically expedient lie. Aotearoa/New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, Phil Goff, was fired yesterday, March 5, after “questioning Trump’s grasp of history”. In fact, Goff was right. Trump has little to no grasp of history and is proud of it. He misquotes historical figures and important historical facts on an almost daily basis. He has just, again, insulted and infuriated his once European allies by suggesting that, if the US came under attack, they would not come to its aid. In very recent historical fact, several NATO allies came to the defence of the US after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001. But let’s not worry about those ‘inconvenient’ truths. Goff spoke the truth, and therefore Goff is a liability to his Trump-appeasing government.

An equally egregious proof that truth is unacceptable came when 10 Democrats joined the unanimous Republican House vote to censure Al Green, the Democrat who heckled Trump on his lies at his lengthy address to the House on March 4. The vote to censure Green for ‘breach of proper conduct’ came just days after Trump and Vance shouted over President Zelenskyy of the Ukraine, then called his behaviour disrespectful. The ten Democrats want the House to remain polite (read deference here) despite the fact that neither the Republicans nor the current Administration see any reason to be polite in their turn. In today’s political climate in the US, deference and politeness are the real fool’s game, and ten democrats proved that they are complete fools for holding onto traditional values that have not only been swept away by the current Administration, but that are now actual liabilities in stopping the rampant dismantling of the government itself. Traditional values have their place under normal circumstances, but the circumstances the Democrats are now trying to navigate in the US government are not only not normal, they are unprecedented. Sticking to values that are good in themselves but no longer serviceable will only see the Democrats destroy any hope of opposing the destruction of their government and the degradation of the people in their constituencies they are supposed to represent. But Green threatened those out-dated values, and so they joined their Republican colleagues to bring him down.

It is not safe to speak the truth at political events or places like the House and the Senate in the US, in some churches, in many organizations and businesses in the US and, increasingly, as the firing of the Aotearoan ambassador shows, around the world. Truth, never popular with those who find facts inconvenient, is no longer acceptable coin in most places. And given that the whole world now waits to see what economically devastating decisions the newly minted, and notoriously thin-skinned, emperor of the world will visit upon them should they displease him in any way, truth no longer seems safe or acceptable currency to deal in. Flattery, appeasement, lying and fiddling the facts is the only way forward in our brave, new world.

Hats off to public figures like Goff and Green who refuse to be cowed, and governments like Canada which refuse to kiss the ring or bow the knee, who insist on speaking the truth despite the consequences to them as individuals, as professionals, as nations. While some traditional values may have to be conceded under the new reality, truth should not one of them.

(6 March 2025)