Written by E. D. Parish
Facts are only true when the right people acknowledge them.
A few days ago, the New York Times published an article pushing back against the unconditional affirmation of transgender youth. I could hardly care less about challenging or defending the claims made in the piece. What I find noteworthy is that the article, if you at all follow conservative political discourse, has absolutely nothing new to say. And yet, were Fox News to have run this exact same story, sharing the Fox version with a friend could have you labeled as a bigot and conspiracy theorist, whereas the NYT version falls within the realm of acceptable discourse.
This is but one instance in an ongoing pattern. Remember when the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop was acknowledged months after the 2020 election or when the Twitter Files unveiled that the government had been colluding with social media organizations to censor individuals online? (Again, like the New York Times article above, I don’t find either of these stories particularly intrinsically interesting; the interesting point is acknowledging which institutions have the power to cover and reveal the truth at will.)
How benevolent was it of our intellectual superiors to allow us to question whether school closures during Covid was a good idea… two years too late.
Acknowledging the truth late is a uniquely insidious form of deception. One can easily deflect all claims of lying (assuming they even come up in our amnesiac state) by pointing out that they eventually got things right “in light of new evidence”—new evidence which had actually been available for years. Dissent is not permitted when it matters most; the question is open only when it is too late.
Did people fail to learn their lesson from Iraq’s lack of weapons of mass destruction? Or Trump’s lack of collusion with Russia? Or Jussie Smollett, or Kyle Rittenhouse, or any other in the innumerable list of hoaxes, frauds, cover-ups, misdirection, distractions, and absurdities? How many more times do our hegemonic truth-making apparatuses need to be years late to the truth before they lose all credibility?
I eagerly await seeing which conspiracy theory is the next to be revealed as obviously true. Then again, will it even matter when the truth is revealed, or will the clock have been successfully waited out?