Trump is recruiting crackpot doctors to support reckless reopening

Not the least of the compromises conservatives have made in jumping aboard the Trump Train is buying into a lie that the cultural left has been pushing for a generation: that truth is relative.

President Trump and his fellow de facto allies of the coronavirus are in a tough position. Their desire to recklessly end restrictions aimed to slow the spread of COVID-19 regardless of the consequences, even ignoring the advice of the CDC and the President's COVID Task Force, runs directly counter to what the experts tell us is the safe and responsible thing to do, and that's a tough thing to conceal.

So they're doing what anti-vaxxers and other crackpots who argue for actions and positions which contradict the evidence and common sense generally do: muddy the waters. They're recruiting members of that small minority of the medical community who pretty much always dissent from the consensus and are willing to publicly say what the President wants them to say.

"Truth over Facts." Remember? Any lie can be passed off as the truth if the truth is only a matter of opinion. We on the cultural right have been insisting on that particular bit of common sense for decades, and a great deal of the ground we've lost in the "culture war" has been due to the degree that our society has come to confuse differing perspectives on the truth with the notion that truth itself is subjectiveThis seems to be the heyday of the flat-earthers, "truthers," COVID-deniers, and other conspiracy theorists. And why not? They have one of their own in the White House. Expect to be deluged in the coming weeks with people wearing tinfoil hats who have "M.D." after their names.

Human beings, in the last analysis, believe what they want to believe. That's especially true in TrumpWorld, where "truth" and facts are only distantly related and an artificial reality bearing no particular relation to what really is going on insulates folks from confronting the consequences of believing things that aren't true and espousing harebrained policy positions. If you disagree with them, that very fact makes you wrong. Evidence? In TrumpWorld, "evidence" is what fits The Narrative, and whatever doesn't is "fake news."

So from this point onward, expect that the opinions of Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and the Task Force (and how long it will be before its present members are fired and replaced with outliers willing to toe the President's line remains to be seen) will be countered by Mr. Trump's own set of "experts,"  handpicked like members of the administration generally not for their qualifications but for their willingness to mindlessly toe the President's line. "See?" we'll be told. "We have doctors who agree with us, too. The medical community is not all of one mind on this."

From there, it's only a short putt to the real experts being wrong, and the crackpots being right. Every scrap of evidence and every expert opinion will be dismissed as merely a matter of opinion. And of course, TrumpWorld will eat it all up.

One more way in which November's election will be a referendum on common sense, an acid test of whether the American people still have the perceptiveness, the discrimination, the intellectual integrity, and the will to distinguish between facts and propaganda, or whether we will join the ranks of the nations that have succumbed to the relativizing of truth and in so doing lost the capacity to govern themselves, and often even the opportunity to try.

ADDENDUM; Meanwhile, the CDC is being muzzled.