I Really Hate Dishonesty. Do You?
You should, because dishonesty ruins the marketplace of ideas and makes rationality impossible
There’s a common thread throughout my political evolution: I really, really hate dishonesty. It all started with the Iraq War, and the lies about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. There were also blatantly dishonest narratives about how Iraq could be harboring Osama Bin Laden, something that anyone who knew basic Middle Eastern geography would know was impossible. There was a really desperate attempt to manufacture consent for a totally needless war. I guess this was when I first realized how dishonest politicians and the media could be.
Later on, it was the left’s turn to be dishonest. The cultural-orientated faction of the far-left, in particular, tried to paint everything as oppressive, often when people were just trying to have a good faith debate. This shut down the marketplace of ideas and polarized society along ‘oppressor’ vs ‘oppressed’ tribalist lines. Also, during the Trump era, the far-left tried to convince people that America and the West were somehow in a similar situation to Germany during the 1930s, in order to pre-emptively reject any talk of the Democrats nominating a ‘back to normal’ candidate like Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg on the grounds of electability against Trump, because a radical candidate was needed to ‘combat fascism’. This kind of totally dishonest propaganda talk was not limited to America either. In the UK, Brexit was painted as a victory of the racists (as if 52% of Britain was racist), and Boris Johnson, a relatively moderate Conservative, was painted as the ‘British Trump’. Meanwhile, the far-left in Labour floated a scheme of ‘mandatory reselection’ that could basically see all moderate MPs replaced with far-leftists, pretending this was somehow democratic. To this day, the far-left still won’t take responsibility for British Labour’s historical 2019 loss, and won’t give Keir Starmer any credit for repairing the party and putting it in a winning position for this year’s election.
At the same time, the ‘New Right’ also has its own, equally appalling, version of dishonesty. It began with all the fake news and conspiracy theories floating around during the 2020 US Elections and the COVID pandemic, which was sometimes connected to the even crazier conspiracy theories of QAnon. I used to think it was an overreaction to the conditions of the pandemic and a divisive election campaign, and therefore a temporary thing, but it clearly didn’t go away post-election and post-pandemic. Instead, it turned into new forms, including a generalized anti-medical science attitude, and an all-out moral panic against all things LGBT. Fake news was once again involved, for example in the campaign to boycott Target over their Pride Month collection last year. There’s also this conspiracy theory that the trans community is full of activists who are out to ‘trans the kids’ for ideological purposes, when most of us just want to get on with our lives, and want nothing to do with the ideological queer theory radicals (who are mostly radical feminists rather than trans people). As a reasonable trans person who wishes everyone could sit down and negotiate compromise solutions to trans accommodation, I felt like we were making some progress before the pandemic, despite the radical activists making things difficult at times. However, with the post-pandemic LGBT moral panic, I feel like we have regressed, and the attitude of people like Michael Knowles (who wants to eradicate transgenderism from public life) have become an even bigger problem than postmodern trans activists for those of us who want rationality and compromise. Most days nowadays, we feel hopelessly sandwiched between two very unreasonable extremes, both largely built on irrationality and falsehoods.
The reason why I hate dishonesty so much is that it ruins the marketplace of ideas. You can’t sit down and have a rational discussion of things if people keep on believing things which are blatantly not true. Moreover, the volume of fake news out there is almost drowning out what’s true. We really need things to change, if we are to save the marketplace of ideas. We really need a circuit breaker, now.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
