Fact. From the Latin, facta – an act, or thing that was done. In its modern usage, a fact is something objectively established, a meaning that emerged in the 16th Century as science moved beyond natural philosophy.
One scientific fact that everybody knows: all bodies fall at the same rate, regardless of weight. Yet for centuries, Aristotelian physics insisted that heavier objects must fall faster, because the argument for it was rhetorically superior. Then Galileo proved otherwise. But changing minds took time. The scientific revolution replaced subjective truth with empirical fact – at least, in science…with a few notable exceptions.
When facts become inconvenient
But what if scientific fact is economically or ideologically inconvenient to you?
The answer: ‘alternative facts’ – a term coined by a Trump staffer to defend outright falsehoods. In this landscape, facts are no longer enough or even desirable; instead, carefully crafted ‘truths’ are deployed to serve political and economic agendas. The aim is to sow doubt. This shift has transformed how we perceive reality itself. So how did we get here?
The tobacco industry playbook
Consider the tobacco industry. In the post-war era, when science was in the ascendant, the field of public health was firmly established as a core government function. And public health scientists had noticed an alarming correlation between formerly rare cancers of the lungs, and smoking. The tobacco industry faced calls for regulation, even bans. So they hired tame scientists to manufacture spurious doubt, and paid PR companies to promote this doubt and demand equal time on television and in the press for their competing truth.
This became known as the tobacco industry playbook, but you may know it better from its greatest hit: climate change denial.
Denying climate change: a blueprint for deception
The tobacco industry’s strategy became a blueprint for other industries and movements facing inconvenient facts. Nowhere was this clearer than in the battle over climate change – where oil companies used the same tactics, often even the same PR firms, to manufacture doubt.
Oil companies, finding that evidence of anthropogenic climate-change was mounting, used similar tactics – and in some cases even the same people – to manufacture fear, uncertainty and doubt, over climate-change and the need for action. It was stunningly successful.
Today, there are virtually no scientists with any relevant qualification who dispute climate change. It’s happening. But to hear the rhetoric in the largely right-wing press around net-zero and wind farms, you could be forgiven for thinking that climate change is a fringe belief, despite a large majority of people understanding it as an existential threat. A ‘truth’ that is not true is accorded parity with a fact that is by now incontrovertible.
Weaponising faith against science
The success of these tactics was not lost on ideologues. If scientific fact could be undermined for profit, why not for religion?
In the United States, also in the 1950s, efforts to improve the education of ordinary Americans led to increasing numbers attending college. Colleges taught biology, and biology includes evolution by natural selection, because nothing in biology makes sense without it. The religious right found their children challenging the Biblical creation myth and Ussher’s 6,000-year-old Earth.
Creationists invented a new “scientific theory” that they demanded be taught alongside – or even instead of – evolution. They called it intelligent design. But it was still religious creationism (one draft of an intelligent design textbook included the words “cdesign proponentsists” after a botched cut and paste), and courts saw it as such, and banned it from science classes.
The attack on reality-based education
Creationists accepted their defeat with good grace and abandoned their incorrect claims of a young Earth. Ha ha! Just kidding. They mounted an all-out assault on reality-based education, hanging on the coattails of segregation to create a parallel ecosystem of religious schools that the Supreme Court has increasingly mandated must be funded at the expense of secular education.
Three quarters of Americans do not believe that humans evolved without supernatural input. Over a third believe that their God created humanity in its current form. This is a truth established by set–piece debate, like Aristotle’s heavy objects falling faster. And, just like Aristotle’s truth about heavy bodies, it is controverted absolutely by fact.
Covid-19 and the war on truth
Covid-19 was the greatest health crisis to hit the world in a century. The right-wing media preyed on fear and resentment of the consequences of acknowledging reality – lockdowns, masking, and eventually vaccine promotion – to further undermine science. They latched on to anti-vaccinationists and other contrarians to push truths about masks causing suffocation, deadly vaccines and quack cures.
A right-wing think-tank created a press release they called The Great Barrington Declaration, echoing creationists’ lists of scientists rejecting evolution and the oil lobby’s list of scientists rejecting climate change. The fallacious appeal to consequences becomes the engine of truth and when empirical fact collides with ideological truth, the engine that fuels right-wing ideology will always discard fact.
The rise of ideological truth
It is not a coincidence that Trump’s Project 2025 was drawn up by a Christian Nationalist group. Science denial, misogyny, racism and every other form of bigotry are baked in, because their truth is that white men are inherently superior. Specifically, they are inherently superior. And their media will amplify this shared truth, even though reality has a well–known liberal bias. And the same shady groups with their oceans of dark money back the Tufton Street think tanks that in turn promote far-right ideology here in the UK.
They want you to be terrified of brown people, women, trans people, the poor and the desperate – because otherwise you might notice the kleptocracy. And so facts must die, and truth must be weaponised. That is the purpose of ‘alternative facts’: not to persuade, but to disorient. To make people doubt not just the media or politicians, but reality itself. Because in a world where nothing can be trusted, those who control the narrative control everything.
More from East Anglia Bylines
