Senator Jeff Flake's Anti-Trump Speech of January 17, 2018, Part 1

Senator Jeff Flake, official portrait

Earlier today, conservative Arizona Senator Jeff Flake spoke out on the Senate floor against what he described as President Donald Trump's assault on truth. Flake commented that "2017 was the year which saw the truth - objective, empirical, evidence-based truth - more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government."  Truth does indeed seem under attack. Does it have enough power to win?

The purpose of speech should be to call out for truth, and the powers of speech should only be used for good. Yet, to speak truth - as Flake did this morning - can require great courage, for the forces that speak for falsehood are powerful, angry, and very, very well-funded. One thinks of Senator Margaret Chase Smith speaking out in 1950 against her colleague Senator Joe McCarthy, when more senior Senators quaked in fear and said nothing about McCarthy's smears. We take a terrible risk if we underestimate falsehood's power. We take a terrible risk if we underestimate propaganda's great impact, or if we overestimate people's willingness to face reality.

Flake minced no words: "The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them."

Flake noted that Trump had adopted Josef Stalin's phrase by calling the free press "the enemy of the people." (Trump's exact phrase was "The FAKE NEWS media . . . it is the enemy of the American People!") Flake warned that "We are not in a 'fake news' era . . . We are, rather, in an era in which the authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to challenge free people and free societies, everywhere."

Flake continued that "2018 must be the year in which the truth takes a stand against power that would weaken it. In this effort, the choice is quite simple." He called the assault on truth "moral vandalism."

Yes, the powerful forces of falsehood are already lashing back. Writing in advance on Fox News' website, L. Brent Bozell III lashed out with a series of ad hominem attacks. Citing no evidence, he characterized Flake's speech "as an audition for the role of special 'contributor' to CNN or MSNBC." He accused Flake of "pushing this as hard as possible to the one constituency he knows supports him: the national news media. They have one thing in common: They hate Donald Trump." To people like Bozell, objective truth disappears in a flurry of loyalty oaths. Instead of addressing Mr. Trump's repeated falsehoods, Bozell instead complained about the media for reporting them: "how many hundreds of times have the media twisted events to savage President Trump? How many times have they admitted good old-fashioned falsehoods? Truly, I've lost count." Yet Bozell documents exactly zero instances to support his wild accusations. More attacks against Flake are to be expected.

Of course, many people lack interest in the truth. Instead, loyalty drives their opinions, and inconvenient truths become signs of disloyalty. The willingness to speak falsely twists into a sign of faithfulness.  In a horrifying 2018 survey, a Gallup/Knight Foundation poll found that 4 out of 10 Republicans felt that a news story that put political figures in a bad light always counts as "fake news" even if it is accurate. (See p. 27 of the link.) In other words, they call an accurate story "fake" if they don't like it. Is loyalty important? Often. Can loyalty replace truth? Never.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning website PolitiFact has rated hundreds of President Trump's statements, finding so far that  4% were true, 12% mostly true, 14% half true, 21% mostly false, 33% false, and 15% "pants on fire." This is an appalling record, and it is not because PolitiFact is biased; it is because the President is careless with the truth.

Flake will continue to face hostility, just as Senator Smith faced great hostility during her quest. It took more than four years after Smith's speech before the Senate finally censured McCarthy. Truth is powerful, but it can be slow, and angry falsehoods grip many people's souls.

Was Flake's credibility at issue here? Certainly. How so? That gets complicated. I'll write about that issue later today.

P.S.: See my post about an earlier Jeff Flake speech.