The panic, and ensuing stampede, that followed Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in his presidential debate with Donald Trump on June 27 of this year ought to have put the final nail in the coffin of the “Post-Truth” charade that has been so central to the Left’s “resistance” and “saving democracy” narratives since 2015. Like the credulous onlookers in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 retelling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the entirety of the mainstream media, the Democratic party, and leftist activists and onlookers swore to the vigor and vitality of the president of the United States—until they didn’t. Back in March 2024, Biden’s disjointed State of the Union address—filled with partisan howlers, grossly unpresidential jabs at an allegedly unpatriotic opposition, and a tendentious account of his success in revving up the economy and fighting the enemies of democracy, shouted as if by someone demented or even mad—was celebrated by most of the press and the left-liberal political class as a rhetorical achievement of Churchillian proportions. Truth, or even truthiness, were nowhere in evidence. The naked emperor was given one of his endless free passes worthy of subjects and not discerning citizens.

For weeks and months before Biden’s disastrous debate performance ordinary Americans saw a president who was often disoriented, incoherent, and frighteningly inarticulate. He wandered off at public events or even at summits in front of foreign heads of state. He shook hands with people who were not there. Yet with alarming uniformity, our political elites insisted all was well. Joe Scarborough, the conservative Republican congressman from Florida turned reliable MSNBC left-liberal hack, assured us that “Joe” had never been in better form. Karine Jean-Pierre, the president’s hapless press secretary, blamed the hundreds of media clips that confirmed Biden’s steep cognitive decline as “cheap fakes” put forward by Fox News and “right-wing media.” This was a lie worthy of Saddam Hussein’s laughable propagandist “Baghdad Bob” or the party hacks at Pravda. Never mind. The Big Lie held—with a few dissenters here and there in the press and the Democratic elite—until the very same people unanimously noticed what much of the country had discerned long before, and without any difficulty. The sheer uniformity of the old and new consensuses gives the game way.

The Left was never the party of Truth. Its intellectuals, academics, and activists had been mocking the idea of truth for a half century now. Its denizens “deconstruct” rather than interpret texts and mock the idea of a normative and unchanging human nature and obligatory moral law like the Ten Commandments. Their atheism or agnosticism is dogmatic and doctrinaire, that is an unthinking fundamentalism all its own. Truth for them is “subjective”—my truth rather than a reference to an enduring objective reality. The only truth they uphold is that of a spurious ideological narrative from which no fundamental dissent is allowed: The West is an essentially culpable civilization, America is fundamentally a racist country, gender is socially constructed (or a product of subjective whim) and the distinction between men and women is thus arbitrary. Communism was not so bad, and “setter colonialism” (tendentiously defined) is the evil of evils. Abortion up through birth is a sacred rite. Hamas stands for freedom and not fanaticism and terror.

This maximalist version of the Leftist narrative is shamelessly deferred to by supposed moderates. Vigorous dissent from these claims embodies “disinformation” that must be combatted by censorship and surveillance. And defending democracy abroad means introducing wokery and LGBTQ+ ideology to countries such as Hungary that hitherto have resisted them. That, alas, is part of Ukraine’s future if this deeply wounded Orthodox country survives as a sovereign state.

“The Biden Big Lie,” as Matthew Hennessy recently called it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, must be understood in this larger context. The left-of-center elites and their media allies knew they were lying since the distinction between truth and falsehood had been aggressively instrumentalized to protect the regnant ideological narrative and to “save democracy” so understood.  

As Hennessy says, they did not mind playing the American people “for suckers.” The media “fact checks” the satirical Babylon Bee and even remarks by Donald Trump that are obviously jokes. They get splenetic over his exaggerations and hyperbolic asides, but about the Big Lie that is the reigning ideological narrative, no dissent is tolerated. The First Amendment used to be precious to American liberals to the point that they confused the defense of free speech, so integral to the exercise of republican self-government, with the right to unlimited “expression,” no matter how disruptive, pornographic, and obscene. That was then.

In a revealing 2018 book from MIT Press called Post-Truth, the academic philosopher Lee McIntyre could only imagine “disinformation” coming from the Right, from the allies of Donald Trump. He exaggerated the authority of science and scientists (much harder to do after the American experience with Covid and the Covid regime, the “biomedical state” of which Aaron Kheriaty has written so well). McIntyre worried about presenting two sides of a contested issue since the other side, i.e. the Right, tends to deal in fabrications and the denial of “facts.” And this academic, who is not particularly radical (his book also takes pointed aim at the postmodern origins of the subversion of truth), proclaims with great self-assurance that “in an era of post-truth, we must challenge each and every attempt to obfuscate a factual matter and challenge falsehoods before they are allowed to fester.”

Following this line of thinking, recent polling (as reported by Power Line) suggests that 50 percent of Americans still believe the “Russian hoax”—the lie that Donald Trump was in “collusion” with the Russians and that Russian “electoral interference” was responsible for his election to the presidency in 2016. This “foundational lie” is at the heart of the “saving democracy” narrative and all the efforts after 2016 to drive Donald Trump from office. If you rely exclusively on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, or the New York Times for your information you might be excused for not knowing the most elementary truths about the country you live in and its recent past. As ominously, snap polls show that one-third of Democrats believe that Donald Trump orchestrated his own assassination attempt. Here we are drifting into fevered swamps.

For some hours after the assassination attempt against the former president, some Democrats moderated their rhetoric long enough to say that violence has no place in American political life. That seemed like a decent gesture. But within twenty-four hours, Trump was once again widely denounced as a “a threat to the nation” and a “threat to democracy.” After Trump selected J. D. Vance as his running mate, Bill Kristol, the doyen of Trump Derangement Syndrome, co-published a piece at the Bulwark calling Vance, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel “wanabee leaders of an American-style fascism.” Has he no shame?  Musk’s purchase of Twitter opened up vigorous free speech in America again, and Thiel is a gay libertarian and a disciple of the thoroughly humane French social theorist René Girard. Last but not least, Anne Applebaum said on a recent radio podcast that Elon Musk and David Sacks must be supporting Trump because they have business interests in Russia. This is a remark worthy of the paranoid accusations of the John Birch Society in the bad old days.

The post-truth charade has amply been exposed for what it has always been—a form of the ideological Lie. We must expose it each time it rears its ugly head. That charade is nothing less than a vehicle for intellectual and political despotism.