Last month, a fake news account claimed, based on no evidence at all, that Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine. This was Community Noted, which led Elon Musk to lash out and declare that the system was “being gamed” and in the process of being fixed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to see how real time factchecking could last on X when it was constantly making a fool of its owner, who has decided to take a very hands-on approach to using the platform to shape discourse in his preferred direction.
This happened a few weeks ago now, and I still see Musk getting Community Noted on a regular basis. It doesn’t happen as much as it should, since so many of the things he says about DOGE, government spending, and many other issues turn out to be lies. Most, if not all, of the recent Community Notes I see attached to Musk tweets are fact-checking a person he approvingly quotes, rather than him directly, so it seems likely he is putting his thumb on the scale, or engineers at the company have gotten the message to look the other way when faced with his constant stream of misleading statements.
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It’s possible that this is the most important piece you’ve ever written. Perfect.
Good essay, but I would take it a step further. The disturbing thing about what passes for the Conservative movement today is not that they have wrong headed ideas or moral judgments that I disagree with - it is that they have no ethical or intellectual philosophy at all. They have rejected the idea of truth or inquiry. They are not crazy, but something worse: they have replaced righteousness with degradation and falsehood. It’s not just an intellectual failure, it’s a profound abandonment of morality.
Progressives are baffled and unable to respond to this turn, as they have also abandoned liberal moral values for a sort of empathetic groupthink that relies on shame instead of reasoning from principles that provide an ethical framework for decision making and relating to each other.
It is this society wide crises of conscience that has led to my personal effort to dig deep into the foundations of Western religious and moral philosophy in an effort to avoid despair. Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, and The Sermon on The Mount are essential reading in these dark times. I have spent my entire life a rationalist - in the old sense of the term - but am drifting toward faith as a shield against evil.