No innovation of America’s recently elected baboons astonishes more than their mutilation of truth. New needn’t mean better. In this case, it means much worse.

The catalogue of the President-elect’s whoppers extends to mind-boggling absurdity – and his followers don’t care. “Haitians eating cats? Oh, he’s just talking.” No one can believe a word he says, because any truth he utters is inadvertent, convenient to his purposes. A truth that could as easily be its opposite is no truth. Truth is not a chameleon, shifting its color to fit in.

There are three sorts of truth – Verifiable (or Scientific); Authoritative (or Religious); and Personal (or Poetic). A thing is so either because I prove it, salute it, or feel it. These sorts have been at odds since the emergence of human consciousness. Dogs, Henry assures me, know no such doubt: what is is, duh; why all this yammering?

Malign deception owes no allegiance to any of these three sorts of truth, though it may pledge it. Those who claimed America’s 2020 election was stolen insisted they could prove it, but only their dopey dupes were fooled.

The primacy of Verifiable Truth has been so absolute during my lifetime, to cast aspersions on its conclusions seemed hare-brained, even hilarious. “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts,” harrumphed Senator Moynihan. Goebbels knew better; so do America’s new leaders: you make up your facts to achieve your goals – duh! “If a man wants a blue suit, turn on a blue light.”

How does sanity survive in a world so upside down? If climate change is a hoax and Covid a conspiracy and elections are stolen and women want to be raped and made-up Haitians snack on made-up cats, how not to be blown overboard into the asphyxiating ocean of limitless ignorance? How to make reasonable decisions about anything?  Garbage in, garbage out. And in our wired world misinformation’s viral. “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” quipped Mark Twain, even before Goebbels or AI.

The objective of all tyrants is to flummox their flocks, so bewilderment surrenders to their scurrilities. Truth is what they say it is; consequently, their infantilized citizenry should do as they’re told. Tyrants shut down Verifiable Truth fast as they can, lest it prove them liars. “Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy,” said Hazlitt – thus disrespectful, disloyal, treasonous, punishable by gagging, flogging, death. “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” wrote Orwell in 1984.

I’m willing to die for my right to truth – not because I’m courageous but because a “post-truth” world doesn’t seem worth bothering with. Liars are worse than troublemakers, they’re bores. Why waste a moment on blather? The boy who cried wolf deserved to be devoured (like a cat!). Good riddance.

“But it won’t be that bad,” friends console. Maybe not – but did you ever dream it would be this bad? Appoint as supervisor for our nation’s scientists someone who denies scientific fact? – that could never happen, silly! I mistake the thud of a branch for a knock on my door.

“Why does truth engender hatred?” asked Saint Augustine. Because it explodes complacencies and corrodes communities of true believers. News that doesn’t please (meaning most) gets branded “fake.”  “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened,” growled Winston Churchill.