But I really think that if we don’t start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it’s going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching a reasonable political discourse. Politicians have always shaded the truth. But if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can’t have a real debate about anything.

I’ve always believed that it’s possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it’s critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don’t. It’s a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way. That’s

I know I’m sort of farting into the wind on this. But I hope you’ll fart along with me. I’ve always believed that it’s possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it’s critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don’t. It’s a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way.

Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language. This is reprehensible. We are not in a "fake news" era, as Bashar Assad says. We are, rather, in an era in which the authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to challenge free people and free societies, everywhere. In our own country, from the trivial to the truly dangerous, it is the range and regularity of the untruths we see that should be cause for profound alarm, and spur to action. Add to that the by-now predictable habit of calling true things false, and false things true, and we have a recipe for disaster. As George Orwell warned, "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."

What I worry about is that the truth doesn't matter, and I think this is something that has changed from 20 years ago, it's not just that the truth doesn't matter anymore, it's that it doesn't matter that the truth doesn't matter anymore. [...] I also think that people really do want some kind of an honest assessment of things that are important. Of something grounded in fact. I think that is something that is actually necessary for a liberal democracy to function.

Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.

In the wacky new world of fake news, conspiracy theories, es — and social media’s unthinking participation in spreading all of that — facts and truth get lost in the noise. A responsible media needs to be especially careful not to unwittingly spread lies by amplifying them. Some early coverage of Trump’s recent unwarranted, evidence-free blasts about the illegality of some of the popular vote fell into that trap. It’s depressing but a fact of life that a lot of people don’t know the difference between fake news and conspiracy bilge and verified fact. Nor do they seem to care.

It is a fact increasingly manifest that presentation of real news has sharpened the minds and the judgment of men and women everywhere in these days of real public discussion. We Americans begin to know the difference between the truth on the one side and the falsehood on the other, no matter how often the falsehood is iterated and reiterated. Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

There’s a hidden danger to authoritarian leaders in all this. When they discover their followers will believe anything they say, even things that contradict something they said earlier, they get sloppy with their lies. Maybe Donald Trump always was careless with the truth. But it seems that over the past two years he has become downright reckless. His base will swallow anything, he has learned, so he just says the first thing that comes to mind. The trouble is, for him and the future of his presidency, Truth happens. Constantly. It may be seen differently by various folks, but things did happen as they happened, not something else. You can only ignore the truth so long, and then reality will inevitably catch up with you. It will destroy you if you have been massively denying it.

It was not a question of the ineptitude that might be revealed by the truth, or the possible damage that the whole program of negotiation for peace may have suffered … and it was not a question of whether with foresight that particular crisis could have been avoided. The issue was this: Does an American, when he represents all Americans, have to tell the truth at any cost? The answer is yes, and the consequence of the answer is that our techniques for influencing the rest of the world cannot be rich and flexible like the techniques of our competitors. We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.

Honestly,” Paul Horner, one of the creators of fake news, told the Washington Post after the election, “people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it.

We need to be truthful with the American people. Americans deserve the truth. The truth must be based on science. We have the world's greatest scientists. Let us lead. Let us speak without fear of retribution. We must listen. Each of us can and must do our part now.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

“We must say the truth”.