America Has Lost the Plot on Freedom
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” — President Abraham Lincoln in an 1862 Address to Congress
On Good Friday in 1963, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for marching in support of desegregation. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail he proclaimed, “We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.’’
“The goal of America is freedom.” It is “the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God.”
Freedom is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and our U.S. Constitution and its inviolable Bill of Rights. We fought to form the United States to secure our “unalienable Rights” and “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The Enlightenment thinkers of the 1600s and 1700s gave birth to the American and French Revolutions and new, more democratic forms of government founded on the principles of individual freedom, pluralism, equality, separation of church and state, and an outright rejection of the monarchy. America was far from perfect at the start, as it didn’t abolish slavery nor did it give equal rights to women, African-Americans, or Native Americans, but its formation was a giant leap forward for human progress. While we have had many setbacks on the long journey to freedom, our trajectory has continued toward “liberty and justice for all.” Well, until recently…
Fellow-citizens — our constitutional federal republic (yes, that is the form of government we have) and our sacred rights are under attack by “enemies, foreign and domestic.” The gravest threat to our freedom is not China, Russia, Iran, or any number of other authoritarian regimes or terrorist organizations who seek absolute power in perpetuity and to severely limit our human rights. The gravest threat to our freedom and system of government is the willingness of a growing number of Americans to put tribalism above the truth, rolling out the red carpet for totalitarianism to march in and take hold, here at home.
This is not hyperbole. Too many of us prefer to cling tightly to our opinions and beliefs, spoon fed to us by our favorite tribal leaders in our social media echo chambers, than to think critically and figure out the truth for ourselves. When the facts don’t square with the propaganda and disinformation our leaders have been using to brainwash us, then we “double down” even more on the lies. The lies reinforce our identities. The lies transform us from being losers to winners. Therefore, the lies become our “truth.” While we are all entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own set of facts, no matter how inconvenient the truth may be. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
Both extreme ends of the political spectrum are guilty of putting their side’s beliefs and “winning” at all costs above the shared values of the United States and reality itself. One despicable example comes from a December 2023 poll by The Economist that showed 1 out of every 5 American adults between age 18 — 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth. The fact that one of the most documented genocides in all of human existence registers as fake history amongst 20% of young American adults is shocking. Another alarming insight comes from The Washington Post — University of Maryland poll, also conducted in December 2023, that showed 25% of Americans (1 in 4) say it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. What?!
While these results are troublesome, they aren’t as dangerous as the disinformation many Americans have accepted as truth about the security and fairness of our national elections. There is indisputable evidence from multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice investigation, and the Bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigations that Russia systematically and extensively interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — in a more direct, intentional, and sweeping way than Russia had ever done before. These important findings were muddied and eventually overshadowed by the sideshow debate as to whether or not there was collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. Our inability to see clearly, to parse the issues, and be united as a nation against foreign government and intelligence interference in the exercise of our most fundamental right, our right to vote, is terrifying.
In our 2020 presidential elections, multiple U.S. intelligence agencies found that Russia tried to interfere again, but to a much lesser extent than 2016. Also, the intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, the DOJ, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) all found zero evidence to support claims that a foreign government manipulated any election results or successfully hacked or controlled any election infrastructure in 2020. Yet, many Americans were lied to and deceived by the losing candidate to believe that foreign and domestic fraud had been committed on a scale that it unfairly changed the election outcome. The real fraud was manufacturing a fraud that didn’t occur to dishonestly cling to power, undermine our freedoms, discredit our sacred insitutions, and raise millions of dollars off of angry true believers.
How can this happen in America? Hannah Arendt described the human conditions that make a deception like this possible: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
If you care about freedom, America, it is high time to fight for the truth.
