Truth in lies
I have been unable to shake the twin images of Nekima Levy Armstrong. One is of what she actually is, a strong, confident African American woman speaking truth to power. The other is the AI doctored image from the White House portraying her as “hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”
The weaponizing of images against individuals and the black community in efforts to protect white power and privilege has a long and ugly history in this land. But this current iteration, in the context of a drive to create a white, distorted Christian nationalist state, raises critical questions about how we think about what is true and what is false. What is real and what is fake?
Dominant American culture is built on lies, distorting the truth to shield the powerful from reckoning with the violence required to protect their wealth and privilege. But in the drive toward fascism, reality is systematically being shifted to justify racial and gender hierarchies, solidify wealth, destroy democracy and decency, and pit people against one another.
It is no secret that Donald Trump lies. During his first campaign in 2016, the New York Times published an article entitled “A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump.”
The lead paragraph reads “Donald J. Trump has unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random—even compulsive.”
The Guardian concurred, saying, “Donald Trump lies like he tweets: erratically, at all hours, sometimes in malice and sometimes in self-contradiction, and sometimes without any apparent purpose at all.”
The Guardian went on to acknowledge that Trump's efforts to “degrade and destroy” have a long history.” Trump has described America and its leaders in apocalyptic terms,” and his “vision of the US has been, for decades, one of dystopia.”
Once elected, the lies continued, prompting the New York Times to chronicle the lies in his first hundred days. They observed:
There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president—of either party—has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.
The Times then took the unprecedented step of creating a full-scale display of “Trump’s Lies” as he attempted to govern. They warned that “The country should not allow itself to become numb to them.”
Now in the second reign of Trump, the lies are so fast and furious that no news media has the capacity to keep up with them. The Times offered this summary of our current experience.
In the first year of his second term, President Trump has cited an arsenal of falsehoods, baseless claims, and distortions to justify significant policy changes on the economy, immigration, and deployments of the military.
A critical question is “why the lies?” The Guardian offered the idea that “Trump gains three things. He fuels doubt and fear, leaving people vulnerable; he denigrates his opposition en masse, blaming the world on them; and he raises himself up above the nonexistent wreckage.” And his “scorched earth insults, like his attacks on other institutions, try to delegitimize authority and leave only himself in its place. “
Lying is central to Trump and to fascism. We know it is the key to stoking fear and violence against each other.
In the American context, these lies evoke racist, male-dominated, white fantasies of power. From the recruitment ads for ICE to the caricatures of neighborhood protectors, fear and hatred are being mobilized, especially among young, white people. Its effects of it reaches far beyond the stormtroopers of ICE, serving to justify and motivate violence on a scale we have not endured since the days of Jim Crow. And more will be coming as the lies and manipulation continue.
This is why the documentation by everyday people of the inhumanity of this government is so important in the fight against fascism. And why our capacity to preserve and share the images of what is happening around us matters. Not only do they show grounded truths, but they remind us of what is best in our humanity.
We have a long and difficult road ahead, but we can begin with the knowledge that people everywhere are holding on to one another and finding ways to encourage love and life. This is the truth behind the lies.