There Was Truth, and There Was Untruth

The Trump Administration isn't Debating the Facts, They're Erasing Them

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Orwell, 1984

They never kick down the door first.

That’s the mistake we always make in the stories we tell ourselves. That tyranny will arrive in jackboots and bayonets, that we’ll hear it coming, that we’ll know.

But it never starts with force. It starts with forgetting.

A footnote disappears from a museum wall. A statistic vanishes behind a firing. A historian is told to revise. A reporter is told to soften. A professor is told to omit. A memory gets redacted. And then another. And another. Until the ground beneath your feet—the very texture of what is real—has been scrubbed and repainted until you can’t tell which way is forward.

This is the shape of what’s happening now.

Today, Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she told the truth. Not a dramatic truth. Not a political hit piece. A jobs report. A set of numbers. A neutral analysis of labor conditions that—unfortunately for him—made his presidency look like the economic sludge pit it is.

So he destroyed the messenger. Just like that. No evidence of wrongdoing. No violation of protocol. Just the president of the United States, snapping his fingers like a bored king, removing a data scientist because her numbers bruised his ego.

The emperor is buck naked. And everyone knows it. But if you say it out loud, he’ll take your head.

Erika McEntarfer was not a campaign rival. Not a left-wing activist. Not a firebrand on cable news. She’s a labor economist. A career civil servant. A public servant. And now, a cautionary tale.

And that should terrify you.

It sure as hell terrifies me.

Because when data becomes dangerous, truth becomes treason.

We are not living in a difference of opinion. We are living in a deletion.

And it’s not just this. It never is. This is one stitch in a vast unraveling. The Smithsonian quietly removed Trump’s impeachments from a presidential exhibit. Not because they were false. But because they were true, and the truth has become politically inconvenient. Because the second impeachment—inciting an insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power—must now be blurred, downplayed, refiled. Lest the fragile narrative collapse.

He even issued an executive order titled, in some grotesque parody of irony, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” As if history is a window display he can rearrange. As if truth is a decal you can scrape off with a razor blade and replace with something shinier.

In 1984, Orwell warned: “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture.”

We are watching that reach unfold before our eyes. The past is being rewritten in real time—by the victors.

They control the White House. Congress. The courts. The statehouses. The boards of education. The broadcast licenses. The textbooks. The redaction pens. The silence.

Steve Bannon once said it outright: “History is written by the victors.” It was never a threat.

It was a promise.

And here we are.

Trump has gone further still—turning his attention to universities. Accusing them of “indoctrination” for teaching America’s actual history. Threatening their funding if they do not comply. Demanding that they conform to a curriculum molded by his own mythology: a nation with no blood on its hands, no bones beneath its floorboards, no injustices still echoing in the present. Only glory. Only greatness. Only the story he prefers.

This is not education. It is erasure.

At CBS, he installed a “bias ombudsman” as a condition of merger approval—a man whose job is not to uphold “integrity” but to police it. To make sure the media isn’t too mean to him. That coverage is neutralized. Defanged. Rounded at the edges.

You may think this is petty. Small. A man child demanding gentler headlines.

But it is more than that. It is a noose tightening.

Because when you can silence the data, and reshape the history, and rewrite the curriculum, and muzzle the press, and punish the truth-tellers—what you are doing is not politics. It is preparation.

It is the groundwork for a future where reality no longer resists you.

Orwell wrote, “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

We feel it.

All of us.

It’s in the breath we hold without realizing. In our shoulders, tight for months. In the fog behind our eyes and the ache we can’t quite name. That quiet sense that something essential is slipping, pixel by pixel, beneath our feet. That creeping, constant disorientation—like the world is being rearranged while we’re looking right at it.

It’s not paranoia. It’s presence.

We know what this is.

We know what it means when a government fires a scientist for telling the truth. When a museum erases a crime because it implicates the powerful. When a university is forced to unteach the past. When newsrooms are bent into shape by loyalty tests. When justice is redacted. When facts become accusations. When memory becomes the battlefield.

We know, because we’re living it. We are standing in the middle of a coordinated, calculated unraveling. And even if we can’t always explain it, we feel its weight. We carry it with us.

And we must not let it harden into silence.

We now live under a regime where the President of the United States can wake up, see a jobs report he doesn’t like, and order the firing of the person who delivered it. Not because it was inaccurate. But because it was unflattering.

We now live under a regime where government exhibits about American presidents include Nixon and Clinton’s scandals—but not Trump’s. Where the record ends just short of accountability. Where truth is put on hold.

We now live under a regime that instructs the FBI to redact Donald Trump’s name from the Epstein files. That conceals the name of a man who wrote a birthday letter to a convicted sex trafficker ending in “another wonderful secret.” That shields the guilty in full daylight.

And still—still—this is being framed as normal. Bureaucratic. A “controversy,” not a crisis.

But this is not normal.

This is not a policy dispute.

This is not partisanship.

This is not business as usual.

This is the scaffolding of fascism.

And it is being built in plain sight.

There is no “slippery slope.” We are halfway down it, gaining speed. The slope is greased with cowardice—by CEOs who say nothing, by university presidents who acquiesce, by news anchors who dull their language, by politicians who trade spine for survival.

This is how it happens.

Not all at once. Not with a bang. But with a collective sigh. With a million tiny yeses. With an avalanche of “what can we do?” and “at least he’s not…” and “maybe it won’t be that bad.”

But it IS that bad.

Because this is the “president” who banned facts from the CDC website when COVID hit. Who altered hurricane maps with a Sharpie. Who once asked if we could nuke a hurricane. Who called rising inflation fake news. Who accused an actual election of being stolen because he couldn’t accept that the world had moved on.

This man does not adapt to the truth. He declares war on it.

And in a healthy democracy, that would be a liability. But in a hollowed-out democracy—one dulled by repetition, corroded by complicity—it is a weapon.

Because the fewer people who push back, the easier it becomes to rewrite everything. Not just labor reports. Not just museum exhibits. But every ledger of the real. Every measure of what is and what was. And eventually—if we let it—what will be.

We are standing in the threshold of that moment now.

This is not the future we imagined.

But it is the one we inherit if we do not fight.

And by fight, I do not mean violence. I mean resistance.

I mean truth spoken, relentlessly, even when it’s inconvenient. I mean refusing to revise the story just because it offends a tyrant’s vanity. I mean protecting journalists, funding public historians, demanding data transparency, calling lies what they are.

I mean clinging to reality with both fucking hands.

Because when the machinery of state becomes allergic to the truth, the only antidote is us.

Our memory. Our voices. Our refusal to forget.

Because if we forget this—if we normalize this—then it’s not just the past that’s gone. It’s the future that gets rewritten.

And it will not be kind.

So, let us cling to the truth. Together.

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

—Orwell

And with that, today’s song.

I love you guys!

Please stay safe, stay clear-eyed, and stay as fierce as you fucking already are.

💙 Jo

And a little bonus content tonight, here’s my Ruby girl, blissfully under a pillow fort her human brother made for her earlier today.