This year had the usual list of political winners and losers. However, collectively, we lost something more important than any race for any office. 2024 was the year in which the truth stopped mattering altogether.
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At the end of any year, the popular thing for columnists to do is compile lists of winners and losers (which always seems a bit silly a few weeks after an election that answered that question). But not us, and not this year, because, in 2024, we all lost something much more important than any single election. We lost the truth… and that determined all of the winners and losers.
Sadly, this loss wasn’t sudden or unexpected.
Politics and the truth have never mixed all that well. It’s simply easier to lie about stuff than to give it to Americans straight.
After all, “Guys, there is no way that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but, heck, let’s invade Iraq anyway and see what happens” would no more have been a winning message than “Listen, Joe Biden just referred to Nancy Pelosi as ‘Norman Podoodle’ and then ate the bill he was supposed to sign, but let’s still make him our nominee next year and keep non-senile candidates out of the primary.”
However, in these cases, things kind of worked out the way they are supposed to whenever the American people are intentionally deceived. Ultimately, reality became too difficult to ignore, and the lie fell apart.
Sure, those perpetuating the lies didn’t pay enough of a price for the damage they did, but at least the deception was revealed as such.
And that is what’s different in 2024.
Donald Trump’s election has shown that lying to voters on a massive scale no longer comes with consequences. In fact, this time it was rewarded.
It would be easy to exclusively blame Donald Trump for all of this, and he obviously plays a starring role in the death of the truth.
When he arrived on the scene and began lying with reckless abandon every time the media handed him a bull(shit)horn, it was the beginning of the end.
Throughout his campaign (and during Trump’s first term), the truth was placed on life support, i.e., his lies kept piling up by the thousands, but it remained to be seen whether the American people would hold him to account.
And, in the 2020 election, it seemed as though they did.
But then he came up with the Big Lie, and, from that point on, the truth was at death’s doorstep.
Finally, this year, Trump finished the job.
Still, he couldn’t have done it alone, so let’s look at his accomplices.
First, there is Fox News, which spent more than 25 years undermining the truth and presenting its audience with an alternate version of reality that appealed to conservatives.
Just as importantly, Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda network taught others that there was good money in this line of business.
Together, Fox and other emerging right-wing organizations laid the groundwork for someone like Trump.
Still, that probably would not have been enough. Sure, Bill O’Reilly, who first broadcast his show on the day Fox News went on the air, attracted an audience of a handful million viewers, and right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh reached even more on the radio, but their impact was still limited.
Nevertheless, it would probably be fair to say that they initiated the process of systematically brainwashing half of the US population.
The internet took right-wing propaganda to a whole new level. All of a sudden, conservative voices were able to reach different audiences.
However, that’s not all.
The internet also made it really easy to spread misinformation and disinformation. At least for media outlets, there are some guardrails — as demonstrated by the $787 million settlement Fox News reached with Dominion Voting Systems.
In other words, there are limits to the lies that even a pure propaganda outlet can spread.
But that’s not the only harmful impact the internet had.
The emergence of social media companies went hand-in-hand with the radicalization of users in the US (and around the globe). With algorithms designed to maximize engagement, Facebook et al. helped tens of millions of Americans create their own news bubbles in which they kept being presented with content that they wanted to see — instead of information they probably should have.
That was the fertile ground someone like Trump needed to thrive.
And then came Elon Musk.
It is possible that Trump’s endless lying and gaslighting on its own might not have been enough to win the election. Of course, it would have helped if the Democrats in the know had been more honest about Biden’s cognitive decline. Their lie benefitted the former president tremendously.
However, once Trump teamed up with the right-wing billionaire, the truth didn’t stand a chance.
The combination of a compulsive (and passionate) liar and a prolific (and passionate) spreader of misinformation was lethal considering the platforms they enjoyed.
One led a cult of tens of millions of people, and the other purchased himself the biggest social media platform ever controlled by one individual.
And both of them had an incentive to lie and spread misinformation. Trump wanted to return to the White House, and Musk wanted to push a far-right agenda and remake the Western world (ideally by deregulating it so that he can do whatever he wants).
Neither was going to get there with honesty.
“I really want to be in the White House so I can stay out of jail, go after my enemies, and enrich myself and my family” is not a great campaign slogan, and “I spent $44 billion so you have to pay attention to me” is also not a convincing message.
What’s most grating about it is that they both pretended to be champions of the truth while they were destroying it — and that they got away with it.
Whether it’s Trump accusing anybody else of lying (like pretending there was a “Russia hoax”) or Musk insisting that his brand of misinformation is “the media now,” it feels especially wicked and odious.
It’s not just them, of course. Each is backed by an army of shameless sycophants — both in positions of power and/or with smaller platforms of their own, but each eager to repeat any lie or any piece of misinformation because they learned from their respective leaders that doing so would be beneficial for them.
However, even that is not the whole story of how the truth died in the US this year.
Because there were also tens of millions of Americans who, at a minimum, never bothered to do the little research necessary to find out what is true and what is not.
Sadly, most of them were probably happily deceived, and that made things easy for the likes of Trump and Musk.
As a result, the truth didn’t pass away quietly in 2024; it was mauled beyond recognition.
The only question now is whether there is any chance it can be resurrected when enough Americans realize that they have been deceived.
The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Donald Trump caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED), Elon Musk caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0 DEED), bricks (ShonEjai / Pexels), logo (Sawyer Merritt / Wikimedia – PD), and bg (Scott Webb / Pexels).
