The War on Knowing

The first step in erasing reality is destroying how we test it.

I was always a terrible student, but a voracious learner. Part of that came from being an only child of a single mother right outside Washington DC. I spent my summers for many years roaming around the Smithsonian Institution. I went so many times I can still see almost every exhibit in the Natural History Museum and Air & Space Museum in my mind.

I would never have learned the basic facts about the world that grounded me in objective reality for my entire life had it not been for the Smithsonian, and all the other museums around the Mall.

And so it’s fitting that the man who would be king is rewriting history in the Smithsonian to suit his alternate reality. I’m trying to imagine the 12-year-old me in the DC museums learning all about Donald Trump’s white-washed, self-aggrandizing version of the world. Would I have been able to distinguish reality from his narcissistic fiction? I really don’t know.

Nevertheless, countless children will march through a Trumpian version of the world on field trips, unaware the exhibits are propaganda. Visitors from foreign countries, if they’re not too scared to come, will see an embarrassingly twisted version of the world they know is wrong. Some number of kids will spend their summers wandering a militarized Mall learning everything they can from a museum designed by a deviant fascist regime.

This is a very personal example of what I have referred to as epistemological totalitarianism, or the seizure of the means of knowledge by the state. I know that I would be a different person were I not to have had a vivid picture of how the world actually works. But the regime and its allies are not just attacking museums and universities because of “woke ideology,” they are deliberately closing every possible avenue to the world outside the boundaries of Trump‘s narcissism.

War on Knowledge vs. War on Knowing

This is not just about changing the facts. Knowledge is made of facts whereas knowing is a process. You can erase or change knowledge all you want but if there is still a way to reality-test against the real world there is always a way to know the truth, to assert your epistemological freedom.

That’s why what the regime is doing is not just about changing exhibits, or facts. It’s about epistemic control—control of how you know anything at all.

All Levels of Testing Reality

What methods do we use to test our concept of the world? How do we know things? What is our epistemology? Let me give you four examples:

• Real-time, trustworthy statistics

• Accurate history and true stories

• Trustworthy shared public news and values

• Friends and trusted voices online

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was created in 1884 because businesses and the government needed accurate real-time data to forecast and plan. It has published monthly statistics since 1915. It is hardly a “woke” institution, and it was deliberately designed to prevent the appearance of partiality.

That is exactly why, when BLS reality-tested the country and reported accurate information back to the world that was unfavorable to the regime, Trump immediately fired the commissioner, attacked the credibility of the institution, and hired an unqualified extremist podcaster who wants to end monthly jobs data for the first time in over a century.

8/8/24 — Youtube

Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian Institution is emblematic of the systematic dismantling of both the institutions of government and the stories that undergird our shared understanding and values. History based on facts can be very boring. History based on shared stories is far more interesting, especially to kids. That’s also why Trump is dismantling the Department of Education and doing everything in his power to destroy the higher education system. These are all ways that people can gain knowledge, independent of his ideas. He is deliberately shaping an inescapable alternate reality around escaping his own deviance and failure.

He is not alone in this project, of course. The Republican Party has gone all in. Here is House Majority Whip Steve Scalise saying with a straight face about cutting funding for PBS and NPR:

Look, if you want to go watch public broadcasting, you can pay for it.

[h/t Aaron Rupar]

Scalise is deliberately ranking a vehicle for the public to test neutral objective reality in the same category as Newsmax and Adult Swim. But privatizing reality is just the beginning.

In one of the most disturbing examples of the potential for massive reality distortion I’ve personally experienced, Elon Musk has started experimenting with changing what people say for them. Here is the same tweet, as I originally wrote it, and what everyone actually sees.

This is not a glitch. It is a deliberate choice by Elon Musk to “translate slang” automatically, so everyone gets a sanitized, official version of what you said. “Weird flex” is intentionally idiomatic. “Strange boast“ sounds like a foreign agent pretending to be an American.

This is the ultimate in Orwellian, epistemic control. If you can’t trust that your own words are going to be communicated correctly, how can you trust anyone else’s? And how might this capability be abused? Let’s say Elon Musk wanted people to vote a certain way. He could automatically change any facts he wanted, coming from sources that people trust. In this kind of environment, it is literally impossible to tell what is real and what isn’t.

Trump Collapses Reality in Two Minutes

As a final example of epistemic control, here is Trump showing how it’s done in a press conference. Asked whether the upcoming meeting in Alaska with Putin will stop the killing of civilians in Ukraine, Trump takes the question, inverts it, pulls it into his own alternate reality, and projects his own failure onto his political opponents.

REPORTER: Yeah, do you believe you can convince [Putin] to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine?

TRUMP: Well, I'll tell you what, I've had that conversation with him. I've had a lot of good conversations with him. Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street. So I guess the answer to that is no because I've had this conversation. I want to end the war. It's Biden's war, but I want to end it…

I actually told him. I said, you know, they got this phony investigation going on. Russia Russia Russia…

It was a hoax created by the Democrats but in particular Schiff and crooked Hillary the whole group. And now we've learned all the stuff that's come out over the last two months is incredible through intelligence. And hopefully something's going to happen with it. These are people that put our country in danger, in real danger.

In two minutes, Trump manages to take a totally legitimate question about Putin’s war crimes into a Stranger Things Upside Down where it is actually the fault of Adam Schiff and Hillary Clinton that Russian missiles and drones are slaughtering innocent civilians every day. It’s his personal alternate reality theater—and Trump wants to ensure it’s always on and there’s nothing else to watch.

The Precedents Are Not Good

Historically, the two most dangerous modern regimes to seize and control the means of knowledge were the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In 1937, a Soviet census revealed population losses from famine and purges. Stalin had the statisticians arrested and ordered a new count in 1939 that, as historian Stephen Wheatcroft notes, “yielded precisely the results Stalin had forecast.” This destruction of real data created a feedback loop where policy was made in a sealed chamber of falsehood, contributing to the deaths of over eight million people in the 1930s from famine, executions, and gulags—deaths that could have been mitigated if the truth had been knowable.

In Nazi Germany, the aim was not simply to persuade—it was to make the Nazi worldview the only framework through which facts could be tested. Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda eliminated competing sources of knowledge, fusing the emotional, the political, and the factual into one state-controlled reality.

“It is not enough to reconcile people to our regime; we want to work on their souls.”

—Joseph Goebbels

Protect Your Reality

In America, the system of propaganda and psychological capture that I have modeled has taken a massive toll on the population. At least a third are deeply ensnared in the Trump regime’s alternate reality—to be more blunt, they are brainwashed. The moves Trump and his elite backers like Elon Musk are making are designed to make Trump’s fake version of reality official. It is to their benefit if the entire population believes the government doesn’t do anything, that immigrants are a foreign invasion, and that climate change isn’t real. Ultimately, it is only this that gives them power—and power is all that matters.

The war on knowing has just begun. Now that DOGE has every bit of our personal data, the surveillance of the state will be near perfect. The regime will know all about us. So I’m afraid unless you want to go off-grid, whatever that means at this point, you should start collecting sources of trusted information now. You should diversify across as many platforms and news sources as possible. And you should make sure that you have a secure way to communicate with people that matter to you in times of crisis securely—because unfortunately, those times will surely come.

The ability to know truth from fiction is the same thing as knowing right from wrong. You can construct a world in which anything is true, and therefore any action justifiable. As Voltaire famously said a decade before the French Revolution:

Those who can make you believe absurdities are those who can make you commit atrocities.

To avoid the fate of France in the 18th century, an aristocracy in which 2% of the population controlled everything, we must fight it now, by any means necessary. As a father of three, I look forward to taking my grandchildren to a Smithsonian that celebrates not a man, or an ideology, but reality in all its beauty, its tragedy, and its truth—however dark.

If you are able to help me continue my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It really means a lot. Thank you!

Here are a few benefits to upgrading:

• Live Zoom call each Sunday

• Ability to comment and access all content

• Wonderful, supportive community

• Helping independent journalism fill in the gaps for our failing media

Thank you for reading and sharing my work. Grateful for your support.

If you’d like to help me with expenses, here is my DonorBox. 💙

If you’d like to help with my legal fees: stopmikeflynn.com.

My podcast is @radicalizedpod & YouTube — Livestream is Thursdays at 4PM PT.

Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson