Imagine, for a moment, that you live in the Long Island congressional district that elected George Santos, and that you voted for him because he is a Republican and you are a Republican and you want to back a winner. A half-year later, he has been exposed as a liar and a con man, someone with a criminal past in Brazil. Also a criminal future in this country, if you believe the people who follow the intricacies of our election finance laws.
He is a winner. He’s been sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives. However, his grandparents didn’t flee the Holocaust, he’s not Ukrainian or Jewish, his mother didn’t die because she was working in the South Tower on 9/11, he wasn’t a championship-winning volleyball star or even a student at Baruch College, and he never worked for Goldman Sachs. He did allegedly forge checks, steal from his roommates, claim to be mugged on the way to delivering a rent check, and help himself to charitable funds donated to pay for a life-saving operation on a homeless veteran’s dog.
What do you do now? Do you go ahead and let this guy represent you in Congress, even when he got your vote and possibly your campaign donations by conning you?
It’s not like you have a choice. You’ve got some skin in this game—you don’t want to be seen as a sucker, for one thing—so it might be best to assume that these stories about him are lies made up by Democrats. You’ve been told that Democrats lie. Santos himself has said so.
Anyway, Santos isn’t going to resign just because he embellished his resume a bit.
If you’re really outraged at being played for a fool, you can make a stink about it, but you’ll damage Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who needs George Santos’s vote.
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party,” goes the old typing-class exercise. You didn’t question it then and it’s hard to question now. Santos may be a liar, but he’s your liar. He may lack a moral compass, but that means he’ll do what he’s told instead of standing awkwardly on principle. You’ll vote for him again.
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The people who will vote for George Santos again are more trusting than I would be if I found myself in a Long Island voting booth.
I won’t move to Long Island and if I did, I wouldn’t vote for George Santos. But suppose in some perverse universe I did both of those things: I’d be committing a supreme act of nihilism. My vote would contribute to the end of truth in my country, but that doesn’t matter because a country that isn’t based on the truth doesn’t really exist in the first place.
What exists is winning. The winners get to define what is a country and what isn’t.
The trouble with that scenario is that once truth becomes the property of the winners, everybody knows who the winners are, but nobody knows what the truth is. And once nobody knows what the truth is, nobody knows what right and wrong are.
Friedrich Nietzsche figured all this out years ago, while he was thinking about good and evil. He sensed, as many of us do, that there’s something deeply restrictive about having to be good all the time, and further, what your culture says is good isn’t necessarily so. A reflexive twitch of sophistry can make good and evil change places.
Nietzsche figured out how to transcend them both, but all his theorizing and pithy aphorisms and conviction evaporated when, late in life, he chanced upon a cart driver savagely beating an exhausted horse for not being able to pull a cart up a hill. In that moment he discovered the Philosopher’s Curse: reality is better as theory.
Watching the horse being beaten bloody caused him to go mad, and he stayed that way for the rest of his life.
His writings remained attractive, however. The Nazis liked his ideas. Vladimir Putin likes them, too. Lots of conservative political pundits decry him in theory and follow him in practice.
If George Santos reads Nietzsche, he will find a logical argument for his continued existence as the honored representative of a few hundred thousand American citizens. He will continue to demonstrate that his own self is his sole measure of good and evil.
The trouble is, Santos’s self has no idea of what’s good for it. If it did, it wouldn’t have fallen into what is clearly a self-referential prison. The trouble with being a dictator or congressman—or a brilliant philosopher, for that matter—is that if you destroy all argument against you, you end up in a bubble of admirers and sycophants, effectively insulated from the world. You wreck institutions and ruin lives—your own included—and nobody ever tells you that your world has shrunk to fit your understanding of it.
When reality does break through, usually in the form of old age, all defenses against it melt into thin air.
The final stage is one of profound, irredeemable loneliness. Kierkegaard, sensing Nietzsche slouching toward Western Civilization, warned that the solipsistic soul is not capable of knowing a world that contains the divine. Kierkegaard called that condition Sickness unto Death, and it’s not the shape you want to be in at death or any other time.
I suppose it depends on how much you’ve invested in your belief system, but if you’ve been a good Republican all your life, the sudden reality of a George Santos could have the same effect on you as the torture of a horse had on Nietzsche. You might want to cover your eyes rather than go crazy.
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I spent a portion of my life teaching journalism to college students. I taught them how to write lead paragraphs and structure the stories that followed those paragraphs. I taught them interview techniques. I told them that if their intuition told them they were being lied to, their intuition was right.
The most important thing I taught them was not to lie to themselves. “For one thing, if you lie to yourself, you lose your ability to detect when other people are lying to you. Magical thinking replaces critical thinking. Journalistic ethics go out the window.”
Hands would go up. “What is this thing called journalistic ethics?”
“Journalistic ethics,” I would say, “are simple commitments to telling the truth, and being kind as long as kindness doesn’t make you lie or back off a story. If you cannot tell the truth, you should become a minister of propaganda, or an advertising executive. You’ll make more money and won’t have to worry about kindness.”
I covered lies of omission, slothful lies, false assumptions, logical fallacies, and deliberate lies. “Don’t inflict these things on yourself or anybody else,” I said. “It will be the end of you as a journalist. It will corrode your character if not your soul. Decent people will turn their heads away when you walk into the newsroom. You’ll find applications to law school lying on your desk.”
Then I told them that it’s hard to arrive at the whole truth, but there are proven methods to get closer to it. One of them is being an eyewitness, which depends on luck and going to a lot of city council and county commission meetings and any executions held locally.
Another was finding two or more sources for a story, and using those sources to verify each other.
Yet another was plain old deep-background research in the library or on the Internet.
Finally, you could turn to the scientific method, but not if you were on deadline. It’s too slow.
“You can use the scientific method to identify when someone’s lying,” I said. “It’s good at that.”
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This bit of my career looms large in the face of the recent settlement between Dominion Systems, a voting machine company, against Fox News, the Fair and Balanced network. A fair balance, in this case, required that Fox News pay Dominion Systems $787.5 million for lying to their viewers about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Fox knew that Donald Trump had lost, but backed up Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen from him, because they were afraid they would lose viewers and advertisers if they didn’t. Fox indicated that Dominion voting machines had reported Trump votes as Biden votes, not realizing that this lie would allow Dominion to sue for damages.
If the case had happened while I was teaching journalism, I would have told my classes that once journalists start lying, they’re not journalists, they’re liars. There are 787,500,000 pieces of evidence that Fox respects the truth only when they’re about to go to trial.
The settlement doesn’t require an apology in English. But it is an apology, in what, for Fox, is the language of truth.
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Investigative journalists, faced with people behaving badly and then covering it up, rely on a simple axiom: follow the money. If you wonder why Fox settled instead of letting the trial proceed, consider that their annual profits are four to five times the amount of the settlement. Lies are a big and profitable business, especially when you’ve got a clientele that demands them with the ferocity of addicts gone too long without a fix. Fox isn’t going to stop lying and turn off the spigot of money, although they might get more nuanced about lies that might financially damage voting machine companies.
What Fox’s future “news” stories look like will depend on who is running for president, what wars are being conducted, which party is in control of Congress, and how many Supreme Court justices are in the court’s conservative bloc. But they won’t vary in one respect: they will be lies designed to nourish the self-contained emotional worlds of their viewers.
Fox News is the George Santos of journalism. Santos was and is willing to say and do anything to get elected. Fox anchors are willing to say whatever it takes to keep people dopamine-enraged and glued to the screen. Inside all of them, where truth, honor, dignity, ethics, kindness, and justice should reside, it’s nothing but ashes.