SUSAN MUGWE: How post-truth is weaponising 2022 politics

#Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 US presidential election cycle.

The conspiracy revolved around a pedophile ring linked to former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It all started when Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email was hacked and his messages published by Wikileaks.

According to the New York Times, one of the emails was with James Alefantis, the owner of a pizzeria restaurant in Washington D.C. In the email, they discussed hosting a possible fundraiser for Clinton.

Proponents of the conspiracy theory began maliciously massaging the facts in the email. They spread speculation that the emails contained coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and this restaurant.

By so doing, a dangerous and vile narrative began burbling to the surface. In the end, many people were convinced that the pizzeria restaurant was the headquarters of a child trafficking ring led by Clinton and Podesta.

In response, Edgar Maddison Welch from North Carolina travelled to Washington D.C. to investigate the conspiracy. He fired a rifle inside the restaurant to break the lock on a door to a storage room with the intention of confirming the unfounded internet rumors about Democrats harbouring child sex slaves there.

In his judgement, the judge said Welch forged ahead with an ill-conceived plot, despite being urged by others to abandon it. He reiterated that if Welch believed children were being harmed, he ought to have notified law enforcement. Welch was sentenced to four years in a federal prison.

This pizzagate conspiracy theory has since been debunked, but not without real-world consequences for Welch.

This type of conspiracy theory is called post-truth.

The word post-truth was dubbed word of the year in 2016, after being nominated by the Oxford English Dictionaries.

Post-truth means that objective facts become less and less influential in shaping public opinion that appeals to emotion and personal belief; and subjective opinions become more and more important to the point that fact and fiction becomes harder to separate.

In the political space, this is called post-factual politics and post-reality politics. This is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion that is disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points, to which factual rebuttals are ignored.

Coming back home, we have roughly 300 days to the 2022 General Election. And with it, peddlers of post-truths are readily available, a dime a dozen. Subsequently, the social media, funerals and church gatherings are awash with post-truths.

These post-truths have been many and diverse ranging from how today’s millionaires started their garbage collection businesses without a penny, and others as chicken sellers; while others have been on the alleged ill intentions of using BBI to perpetuate the incumbency of the presidency; to the alleged misconduct of several High Court judges who were due for a promotion to the Court of Appeal. Others are on the alleged associations of money launderers aka washwash guys, with certain high-ranking politicos. Others similar to pizzagate, have treaded on dangerous grounds where speculation of assassination plots of the deputy president by a neighbouring president have been peddled.

However, the latest, and most intriguing was the reported downgrading of Deputy President William Ruto’s security, which culminated into a public broadcasting of a list of properties and businesses he allegedly owns, and the commensurate number of security personnel guarding them.

To counter this, a similar list was publicised, only this time it targeted President Uhuru Kenyatta. The contents of both lists were vehemently disputed by each politico’s post-truth proponents.

Begs the question, does truth matter anymore? Or are we simply content to live in an era of willful irrationality? Are we too afraid of calling out the post-truths peddled as gospel truth, or are we more concerned about protecting our pay checks that are paid by our post-truth masters? Are we courting real-world diabolical consequences from our belief in these post-truths?

We have often been told there are always two sides to a story. But this is not factual. There cannot be two sides to a story when one or both of those sides is a lie. Instead, there are three sides to any story; your side, my side, and the truth.

When cornered, the default fallback position of post-truth peddlers is that everyone is entitled to their own opinions. While this is not in dispute, you cannot be entitled to your own facts. And lies are an absence of facts, and in many cases, a direct contradiction of them. Regrettably, we have accommodated a culture that is unable, or unwilling to know what constitutes evidence and how to evaluate it. And this should be worthy of our outrage.

For instance, was it impossible to research on the origins of presidential aspirants’ source of wealth and confront them with factual evidence? Or to table the alleged wrong doings of the judges before the Judicial Service Commission? Or to provide proof of ownership of the alleged business and properties of both the President and his deputy? Or even to investigate the reason behind the change of security personnel guarding the Deputy President?

Belief in lies can be harmless eg belief in Simon Makonde or Santa Claus. However, what weaponizes the lie is the intensity of that belief, and the unquestioning overconfidence that it is true.

What landed Welch four years in a federal prison was his inability to take a step back, critically think, and evaluate facts to form evidence-based conclusions. He could not fathom that the view he held due to his political inclination, might just be wrong.

The dangerousness of post-truths is that their reach is overwhelming because while education and facts move slowly, technology doesn’t. Resultantly, post-truths have become promiscuous. They consort with a diverse group of people, and quickly propagate as they are forwarded, retweeted or shared in various fora. They take hold and become the cardinal truth depending on one’s political allegiances. Sadly, they have become the weapons of choice with which to stir up social, class, political and tribal conflicts.

Like Welch, most of us lack the most important aspect of critical thinking. That is humility. It is a simple yet profound notion. Critical thinking doesn’t mean that we disparage everything we hear or read. It means that we try to make a distinction between claims with irrefutable evidence and those without.

And when we accept that we don’t know everything, then we can begin the journey of unlearning, re-learning and learning. And in time, we will be able to disarm the plethora of weaponized post-truths and restore civility in our discourse and our democracy.

I submit that reliable and factual information is to civic health what proper sanitation and potable water are to public health. A polluted information supply imperils our nation’s civic health. To guarantee the vitality of our democracy and peaceful political engagements, we need a higher level of civic reasoning that is backed by critical thinking, not political euphoria.

Finally, my unsolicited advice is to Wanjiku. A fact is information minus emotion; an opinion is information plus experience; ignorance is an opinion lacking information; and stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.

A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right and evil doesn’t become good, just because it is accepted by a majority – Booker T. Washington