What do actor Jussie Smollett and Donald Trump have in common? They agree with President Biden. During the 2019 campaign, then-candidate Biden said at the Iowa State Fair, “We choose truth over facts.” It turns out he was onto something.
Smollett, who’s making a round of media appearances professing that he was wrongly convicted of reporting a fake hate crime, and former President Trump, who is protesting the hearings of the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol, are leading exemplars of the demise of late-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous comment, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.”
Turns out, like many insightful observations, a number of people have said similar things, some predating Moynihan, but the point is clear. Anyway, it’s now obsolete and that’s proving to be dangerous.
Smollett’s protestations about his December 2021 conviction and Trump’s continued citations of disproved allegations about a “stolen election” in 2020 stand out because of their boldness — because they are undeniably wrong and incredibly well publicized; because they put a stamp of approval on the concept of personal truth, no matter what the facts; and because their passionate believers cause tremendous dissension in the body politic.
Quickly recapping the claims: Smollett told police that two MAGA hat-wearing men jumped him at 2 a.m. on a sub-zero Chicago night in January 2019, threw a caustic liquid on him, put a rope around his neck, and yelled racist and homophobic slurs at him. After a wave of sympathetic media coverage, he was finally arrested, tried and convicted of lying when the two men, caught on surveillance cameras with him, testified he had paid them and staged the episode.
Trump has continued to claim that President Biden’s election was characterized by stolen, lost or fraudulently collected ballots, cyber-hacked voting machines, and corrupt officials. One can correctly criticize the House committee for its one-sided grandstanding, but it has provided to the public a series of sworn statements from people such as former Attorney General Bill Barr disputing the contention that the alleged problems were widespread enough to invalidate the election. News accounts have quoted Republican officials saying the former president or his representatives urged them to manufacture examples of fraud and promised “evidence” that was never provided. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the panel under oath that “the numbers don’t lie.”
Severing facts from “truth” is dangerous because it removes any way to arrive at a shared conclusion, and it’s contaminating our society. The damage to everyday life was highlighted for me by a 2018 incident at my alma mater, Smith College. A Black student working over the summer took her lunch into an unoccupied building that was supposed to be closed. College cafeteria and janitorial personnel saw someone going into the building and, as directed, alerted campus security. An unarmed security officer checked out the report and had a conversation with the student.
Later that day, the student posted an emotional tirade online, claiming she was targeted for “eating while Black.” A furor erupted. The cafeteria and janitorial staff were identified publicly, excoriated and put on leave. Smith’s president apologized to the student and mandated college-wide training. But wait, the story’s not over. Smith hired a law firm to investigate, and the resulting report exonerated the staff. The initial incident garnered national attention, but the key observation is from a New York Times report months later: “The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and the facts that are at odds with it.” This sentence presents the real story. The student, like Jussie Smollett and Donald Trump, was wedded to her version of the “truth,” which turned out to be wrong.
Some might protest that what we call “truth” is just our preferred conclusion based on the lens through which we see the world. One also can point to current examples of propagation of a narrative clearly designed to obfuscate and mislead, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim to have invaded Ukraine to go after Nazis.
Companies and individuals need to convey a narrative that satisfies both the demands of truth and facts, and we all should be concerned when a body of opinion gathers enough drama and strength to persist, despite “the facts that are at odds with it.”
The authors of the children’s series, The Berenstain Bears, have a character, Professor Actual Factual, whose job, predictably enough, is to teach small and large bears about the facts — particularly when their initial perceptions aren’t correct. Both Jussie Smollett and Donald Trump could make a major contribution to our country if they would just look more deeply inside themselves and engage Professor Factual.
Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas communications consultant, was President Reagan’s director of media relations. Follow her on Twitter @SpaethCom.