Just the Facts

Or: Freedom of speech is not freedom from reality.

We have a serious problem with facing facts in this country. Spoiler alert: objective reality still exists. But it's been buried beneath an avalanche of competing subjective “truths,” to the point that provable facts can’t even get a foothold in public discourse.

Case in point: Just two days ago, the President of the United States insisted—on camera, to ABC’s Terry Moran—that Kilmar “First They Came For” Abrego Garcia has the letters “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles. Trump even offered to show Moran the photo he posted on social media to prove it. You know, the one obviously altered by an amateur using—wait for it—Calibri, Microsoft’s default font until early last year. The kind of font still favored by organizations that take 18 months to update their tech. Big, slow organizations—like the federal government.

Never mind that this photo has been debunked more times than there are words in this sentence. Let’s even lower the bar by conceding that we’ll never know what the original tattoos mean—because meaning is inherently subjective. But somewhere in El Salvador, there is a man with a hand, with ink, on fingers. That is verifiable. This is water-is-wet level fact-checking. Comparing the real photo to the doctored one takes two clicks and two functioning eyes. No specialist knowledge required.

So what’s going on here? Is Trump experiencing cognitive decline? Is he a pathological liar, unable to resist his own improvisational delusions? Or is he just another con artist politician denying objective reality to cover his ass?

We may never know. But that’s not really the point of this piece.

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Trump is just the most theatrical example of a deeper, older crisis: a society that has gradually decoupled belief from evidence. We’re not arguing over interpretation anymore—we’re arguing over whether the sky is blue. And that didn’t happen overnight.

So how did we get here? When I wrote The Arms Race for Truth back in January, a friend brought up something in the comments that I haven’t stopped thinking about: postmodernism—the academic export that started as a critique of dominant narratives and ended up dissolving the very idea of truth. It taught us to ask: Whose perspective is being centered? Whose values are being normalized? Whose story is being told? That was useful. Liberating, even.

But we took that hammer and smashed the foundation. If everything is subjective, then nothing is real. If truth is just an opinion with a college degree, then who’s to say what’s true at all? That’s great for a late-night philosophy seminar. It’s catastrophic for building a justice system, writing public health policy, or landing a 747.

Next, throw in a toxic mix of earned distrust and unexamined instincts. We’ve been lied to—by the media, by the government, by corporations. And not just once. Over and over. So we stopped trusting anyone except ourselves—and maybe a YouTuber or Substack author who vibes with our politics. That’s understandable. But it’s also how you end up with millions of people believing a photoshopped image is real because it feels true.

And we’re wired for this mess. Our brains evolved to survive in tribal groups, not to parse peer-reviewed studies. So we default to gut feeling, seek out information that confirms our worldview, and treat disagreement like a threat. We mistake familiarity for truth and charisma for credibility. That’s not a glitch. It’s the baseline human OS.

To sum up: we no longer believe in facts because we’ve conflated objective events with reasons and meanings into a slushy conception of truth—and we’ve been lied to so often that we’re simultaneously willing to believe anything and nothing.

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So what do you get when you cross a stainless steel skepticism, hardwired gullibility, and the absolute right to freedom of speech? America, circa 2025!

Which brings us to the real question this piece is wrestling with: what do we do when the freedom to speak becomes the freedom to deceive? We’re taught to treat free speech as sacred—and rightly so. But even sacred rights come with boundaries, whether we like to admit it or not. And we’re long overdue for a serious conversation about what happens when a right is abused.

I recently came across Balancing Rights by Eudoxia, an insightful piece that offers a clear framework for how rights exist not in isolation, but in tension with one another. As one of my old professors used to say, “My right to extend my fist ends at the tip of your nose.” In this case, one person’s right to speak collides with another’s right to safety, dignity, or participation in a reality-based democracy.

When speech becomes a tool of manipulation or harm, Eudoxia argues, that’s not an exercise of freedom—it’s an abuse of it. This is the logic behind laws in countries like Germany, where Holocaust denial isn’t just wrong—it’s illegal. Not because Germans can’t handle debate, but because they’ve already had the debate, and they’ve seen the consequences of letting genocidal lies circulate unchallenged.

But here’s the trap: once we start policing speech, we risk becoming the thing we fear. Censor too much, and you create martyrs out of frauds. Let everything fly, and you flood the zone with so much garbage that truth can’t breathe.

Philosophers like Peter Singer caution that suppression can backfire. He pointed to the 2006 case of David Irving, who was sentenced to prison in Austria for Holocaust denial, while elsewhere terrorists’ speech was defended as a matter of principle. Singer’s argument is that criminalizing falsehoods may amplify them, giving them a kind of subversive glamour they don’t deserve. The antidote to bad speech, he insists, is more speech—not less.

That’s an elegant idea. But in an age where truth is outgunned by engagement, and trust is six feet under, does it still hold up?

Let’s be honest: the kind of rights-balancing Eudoxia describes isn’t going to happen here. Not in a country where the President can spread a demonstrably fake photo on social media and face zero consequence. The United States adopting that level of legal nuance is about as likely as us embracing the other advancements common in the rest of the free world, like universal healthcare or proportional representation.

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If constraining free speech is off the table, we’ll have to combat the national skepticism and gullibility combo. I have a couple of ideas that I think are appropriate to our historical moment of constitutional crisis. Maybe it’s time to make lies illegal—and enshrine facts into law.

Proposal 1: Make Lying Illegal

Let’s start with the spicy one.

We already have laws against lying—just not the kind that would stop a president from tweeting a doctored photo to 80 million people. Perjury is illegal. Fraud is illegal. False advertising is illegal. But those are narrowly defined contexts, where the lie has to cause quantifiable, immediate harm.

But what about the slow, corrosive harm of political lies? What about the kind of lies that erode trust in elections, in science, in public health—lies that deform reality at scale?

We could treat public deception the way we treat defamation: as a civil or even criminal offense when it causes material harm. We could create statutory definitions for public figures, platforms, and institutions—holding them to a higher standard of accuracy when the stakes are national. If a lie can be proven false through clear, verifiable evidence, then the speaker could face meaningful consequences. We don't need to look for demonstrable public harm in this case. We're already living it.

This wouldn’t criminalize being wrong. It would criminalize knowing deception. The kind where you post a photoshopped gang tattoo and call it evidence. The kind where you falsely claim an election was stolen, and then fundraise off the lie. The kind where you use the appearance of authority to inject falsehood into public discourse, on purpose, for personal or political gain.

We already prosecute financial crimes that depend on false statements. Why should political speech be immune?

Proposal 2: Enshrine Facts into Law

This one sounds dystopian at first. But stay with me.

What if we created a legal mechanism to designate certain facts as public truths—not beliefs, not ideologies, not interpretations, but verifiable, falsifiable, evidence-based facts? Not “Columbus discovered America” or “the Civil War was about states’ rights,” but things like “In 1492, Columbus landed in the Bahamas” and “Eleven Southern states seceded from the Union in 1860–61.”

No one's going to jail for having an opinion. But there would be a legally recognized register of facts—a civic baseline of reality. A shared ledger we can point to when someone insists that 2+2 equals 5 because it polls well.

We already enshrine factual standards in other domains. Scientific agencies have official climate data. Courts rely on standards of evidence. The IRS has numbers you are not allowed to "feel differently" about. This proposal just extends the principle to the civic arena: elections, public health, major historical events.

The bar would have to be astronomically high. These wouldn’t be updated by press release or political whim. Think of something like the IPCC process—slow, transparent, and consensus-driven. Facts could be submitted, challenged, revised—but only with overwhelming, cross-institutional verification.

This isn’t about declaring a Ministry of Truth. It’s about building a firewall against coordinated unreality. About saying: This happened. This didn’t. We can disagree on what it means, but we cannot disagree that it occurred.

Some will say this is impossible. Too messy. Too dangerous. But we’re already living in the danger of not doing it. Maybe it’s time to try anchoring public discourse in something heavier than vibes.

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Let’s test-drive this whole registry of facts idea with a humble proposal:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia does not have “MS13” tattooed on his hand in fucking Calibri.

That’s not ideology. That’s not interpretation. That’s not partisan. That’s a fact. It can be established through photographs, timestamps, forensic analysis, and the expert consensus of people who don’t get their talking points from ragebait influencers.

Assuming that clears the high bar for inclusion in the public record—and really, if this doesn’t, then why bother—we can begin to contemplate the consequences of lying.

Because if a private citizen used a fake image like that to destroy someone’s reputation, it would be defamation. If a business did it to sell something, it would be fraud. If a lawyer did it in court, it would be perjury. And if a president does it on national television?

Well. I hear El Salvador is lovely this time of year.