You can't make this stuff up!

The Trump campaign has announced a new "investigative" (read: spin and propaganda) website called, apparently with an absolute lack of self-awareness or irony...

"TRUTH OVER FACTS."

Let that sink in for a moment.

It's hard for me not to gather from this title a conscious desire on the part of the Trump campaign to cultivate the notion that truth and facts are not closely related to one another; that the facts will lead you astray unless they are presented in the context of the proper narrative. As I recall, the Party in Orwell's 1984 put great stock in a similar concept, something called "Doublethink." It was defined as "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Charlie Sykes has an interesting meditation on the concept as employed by the Trump people here.


I'm reminded of Kellyanne Conway's concept of "alternative facts."




I understand that an awful lot of folks these days seem not to know what the word "facts" means. We encounter unconscious oxymorons like "untrue facts" far more often these days than we did when people's basic educations were sounder and their vocabularies more precise, in what seems like a golden age when words meant things and had specific definitions and you could tell what somebody meant by the words they used. But as Kellyanne's double talk in the conversation above is rather typical of a tendency in TrumpWorld to avoid the question and change the subject when it comes down to whether something is true or not. Given a president whose relationship with the truth is more adversarial than that of any political figure in memory, that's hardly surprising. Making "facts" up as he goes along is one of Mr. Trump's favorite hobbies. He's even admitted doing it in a conversation with at least one foreign leader.

Facts and the truth are closely related concepts. But this administration doesn't seem to understand that. Neither is this administration terribly fond of facts. So I suppose it stands to reason that placing "facts" and "the truth" in opposition to one another would come naturally to TrumpWorld.

But the title of the Trump campaign's new spin page is so open about it that once again I'm forced to shake my head at this administration's lack of self-awareness. Do the Trump people really not see that the web page's title is self-parody? Do they really not see the downside to suggesting a disconnect between uncomfortable and inconvenient facts and the "truth?"

Or perhaps they're smart enough to realize how close the notion of such a disconnect is to their entire cause. Arguing with Trump supporters is typically useless because facts often don't matter to them. Trumpism, at its core, is the affirmation of the prejudices and preferences of the people who support Donald Trump because what he tells them is what they want to hear. When presented with an inconvenient fact, they will change the subject, as Kellyanne Conway did, or attack the source (nothing that doesn't come from Fox News, the One America Network, Breitbart, or some other pro-Trump source is admissible because any other source is said to be "biased," as if there were such a thing as a source that is not and- more importantly- as if nothing that doesn't come from a source whose biases support their own could possibly be true).

It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that a particular source may be unreliable. But when only sources one agrees with can be reliable, the agreement of a source with one's own prejudices becomes to all intents and purposes the criterion by which truth or falsehood is to be judged. Facts have nothing to do with it.

Only a kind of Nietzschean truth remains. It's a relative kind of "truth," which is a means rather than an end in itself.  And for that kind of "truth," facts don't matter. What matters is whether or not something conforms to and serves the narrative.

I doubt whether the people who named the new website thought this through, and I doubt that they would express it in those terms. But I believe that to be the significance of placing "truth" and "facts" in opposition to one another.

But it's so damned transparent. Yes, it takes a remarkable lack of self-awareness to call what at least will present itself as a fact-checking resource "Truth over Facts." And it also takes remarkable blindness to how obvious it makes that website's actual agenda, even though I doubt that those who named the website realize that.