This week two events (1) the citizens’ “Expert Legal Symposium,” and (2) Rep. John Larson’s introduction on April 6, 2026 of House Resolution 1155 “Impeaching Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors in violation of his constitutional oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” may spark the rise of citizen movement to impeach President Donald Trump. Already a majority want him out!

Rep. Larson (D-Conn.) is a mainstream Democrat serving his 14th term of office. The 13 articles in his H. Res 1155, drafted with constitutional law specialist Bruce Fein, portray the violations of the most lawless president in American history. Trump’s dictatorship is rapidly intensifying (though his support is dropping in the polls). Trump regularly boasts that “I can do whatever I want as president,” “Nothing can stop me,” and “This is only the beginning.”

Chronically lying Tyrant Trump is an open, clear, and present danger to our Republic. He is driven by a fact-deprived, perilous, megalomaniacal, and vengeful personality.

The citizens’ symposium, first of its kind held inside the House of Representatives, gathered experts and advocates for Trump’s removal from office to provide the legal case, highlighting three planks. They were:

1. President Trump’s usurpation of the congressional war power;
2. The credible fear that President Trump will obstruct, interfere with, or invoke the Insurrection Act to outright cancel the 2026 midterm elections; and
3. Trump’s “industrial scale bribery and extortion.”

Audience questions following each panel expanded on the presentations. You can see the entire four-and-a-half hours on C-SPAN: https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/activists-lawyers-and-others-discuss-possibility-of-additional-trump-impeachment-proceedings/677013.

Participants at the symposium exhibited a strong sense of urgency, not just from Trump’s escalating war crimes but from the lassitude of Congress, whose bipartisan leadership never considered canceling their two-week recess to address the burgeoning violent outlawry pouring from the White House, most prominently illegally blowing apart Iran and indirectly Lebanon.

The event was co-sponsored by Essential Information, RootsAction, and Free Speech for People with participants from Public Citizen and the Cato Institute.

The Republican Trump lapdogs continue to betray, with historic cowardliness, the people of America.

FOR TRUMP, IT IS ONLY GOING TO RAPIDLY GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. The strongest critics of Trump can’t keep up with his onslaught, understating his foreign and domestic crimes. He is a dangerously unstable, egomaniacal, eruptive personality, wielding the most lethal powers of anyone on Earth.

Not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which he craves, by asserting falsely that he had ended eight wars since January 2025, Trump told the dumbfounded prime minister of Norway, “your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize” so he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace.” That was Trump’s signal that he was going to be engaging in wars. What’s the street language here—a head case in the White House.

Trump constantly creates or fails to address catastrophes. Recall, his calling the climate crisis “a hoax,” that Covid-19 is just like getting a cold, losing valuable time in 2020, costing many American lives. Trump stereotypes journalists as “deranged and demented,” as he extorts millions of dollars from television networks via grossly malicious lawsuits.

The question is why 77.3 million voters support a man few would want as a friend, co-worker, or neighbor, much less a boss with the power of life, death, deprivation, and tyranny over them.

Having pardoned over 690 convicted violent criminals and additional fraudsters, he lets it be known that his loyal, extremist supporters can do what he wants and expect to be pardoned.

Credit Trump with teaching us how weak our democratic institutions are to thwart the US fascist dictatorship emerging from the 2024 election. He taught us, with luminous exceptions, that the media, the academic world, the legal profession, the labor unions, the retired military (brass who despise Trump and his norm-busting secretary of defense), and the civic community, among other constituencies, have not risen to the urgent need to counter tyrant Trump. He has issued one illegal executive order after another and then transgressed beyond those dictates in fits of fearsome rage.

He also reminds us that there has been a price to pay for pushing aside civic education, teaching civic history, skills, and providing students with “learning by doing” in their community or neighborhood. Decade after decade of vocational and rote teaching for multiple-choice testing ignores critical norms of moral restraint and accountability. No wonder they atrophy.

Two examples illustrate how low our standards have fallen. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, a former governor of New Hampshire, had to resign after a press report that he accepted a vicuna coat as a gift from a textile industrialist friend. Later, in 1984, Sen. Gary Hart, competing for the Democratic presidential nomination against Vice President Walter Mondale, was photographed with a young lady—not his wife—on a small sailboat off Miami (he denied an affair). The norms of that time pushed him to quit the race.

Fast forward. Any one of Trump’s many vile transgressions would have stopped anyone from being a candidate, much less getting elected President. He is a daily chronic liar about serious matters and his business and political record as well as about people he dislikes; he is a convicted felon (and was under four criminal indictments); a draft dodger; a mocker of people with disabilities; serial adulterer; he consorted with pedophiles; he is an intense racist and brutal misogynist; and a business crook who cheats workers, consumers, and creditors. He openly committed many violations of federal statutes in his first term, when he also defied over 125 congressional subpoenas (Nixon was about to be impeached for defying two in 1973-1974); and he is an inciter of violence at his rallies and in his remarks. The list goes on.

The question is why 77.3 million voters support a man few would want as a friend, co-worker, or neighbor, much less a boss with the power of life, death, deprivation, and tyranny over them. That question is best answered by the so-called leaders of the Democratic Party, who, instead of landsliding this loser, this crusher of decency and truth, lost both the popular and electoral college presidential vote.

A mere switch of 240,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2024 would have sent Trump back to golfing at Mar-a-Lago. That could have been achieved had the Democrats really championed raising the stagnant federal minimum wage to $15 per hour instead of the $7.25 per hour still today (that would help 25 million workers) and cracking down on corporate greedhounds stealing from consumers and lobbying against raising the Social Security benefits, frozen since 1971, paid for by raising the limit of Social Security taxes on higher income people (over 60 million people benefiting).

(For many more vote-getting compacts shunted aside by the dominant corporate Democrats and their corporate-conflicted consultants, see winningamerica.net).

President Donald Trump says the quiet part out loud. He is plain as day when it comes to policy preferences to line the pockets of his donor class. You can’t blame him alone for supporting the military-industrial complex, sometimes called the Blob, the enforcer of economic imperialism.

There’s a bipartisan history of like-minded presidential administrations and Congress critters funding war spending on the taxpayers' dime since the Cold War. It ended with the fall of the former Soviet Union. Still, the corporate gravy train for war contractors keeps on rolling.

Meanwhile, the federal government cannot pay for guns (war) and butter (education, health, and housing), according to the president, at the White House during an Easter luncheon. He promised the opposite on the campaign trail. We are supposed to forget that.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

As citizens of an empire in decline, the American population is facing in part a battle with the Blob over federal assistance.

You heard it there. State funding can replace the budget duties of the federal government, since the role of Uncle Sam is to finance war primarily, according to the president. What's wrong with this picture?

The federal government can and does run budget shortfalls. The federal debt and deficit are proof of that. Such borrowing requires willing lenders.

State governments can do no such borrowing. One need not be an economist to see a budgetary outcome. Sharp funding cuts to education, health, and housing assistance that help the US working class living in blue, red, and purple states.

Federal assistance to cool and heat homes? Cut. Federal assistance for nutrition? Cut.

Federal assistance for disease control? Cut. Federal assistance to address wage theft and help small businesses? Cut.

Apparently, the unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran, a violation of international law, is an example of guard duty for the country. Tell that to the survivors of Israeli bombings of residential neighborhoods in South Lebanon and US strikes against hospitals and schools in Iran. Israel is the top recipient of US military assistance, year after year.

Trump's 2027 budget proposal calls for a Pentagon funding increase of $445 billion, 15 times the annual price tag for Obamacare subsidies. US war corporations such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX Corporation welcome the increased federal funding. The Blob has quite an appetite.

It would feast larger in part from shifting federal assistance away from providing fresh produce to poor women and children. The proposed budget from Trump for assistance to Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) would create more hunger among them.

“The science-based increase to WIC’s fruit and vegetable benefits has led to meaningful improvements in how families eat," according to a statement from Georgia Machell, head of the National WIC Association, "Young children now consume an additional one-fourth cup of fruits and vegetables per day, and parents report being better able to afford a healthier, more varied diet. The proposed cuts would reverse that progress, reducing benefits to levels that would meet just 19% of the recommended intake for children and 12% for breastfeeding mothers, short of what families need to support healthy growth and development."

It's what the war corporations demand and get the old-fashioned way, the economic playbook since WWII. That is war spending as an economic stimulus policy. Congress and the White House receive campaign contributions from war corporations to make that policy happen.

Despite overwhelming US public opposition to the current war of choice, the president is doubling down on his more guns, less butter approach to the federal budget. Meanwhile there is a global economic crisis due to the unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran. The economics and politics of this are fraught with a harmful prognosis, from higher energy and fertilizer prices to use of nuclear weapons.

How the US public responds is key to their best interests and that of global humanity. As citizens of an empire in decline, the American population is facing in part a battle with the Blob over federal assistance. To say that much hangs in the balance is a mighty understatement.

Nicknamed the “God Squad” for its power to rule whether economic or national security interests outweigh the possibility of wiping out an animal species, the Endangered Species Committee has granted two exemptions to the Endangered Species Act since it was created by Congress in 1978. It is composed of the secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture, and the Army, and the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Council of Economic Advisers.

The last time the committee granted an exemption was in 1992 when it allowed logging in sensitive areas for the northern spotted owl. Public outcry and litigation ultimately led to that requested exemption being withdrawn.

Last month, the committee was convened at the request of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As gasoline prices in the US have soared past $4 a gallon and diesel fuel past $5 during President Donald Trump’s reckless war on Iran, Hegseth told the committee it was “a critical matter of national security” that fossil fuel extraction in the Gulf of Mexico be prioritized over any species at risk of extinction.

Never mind that one of those species is the Rice’s whale, which NOAA itself acknowledges is one of the rarest in the world. The whale exists only in the Gulf, with perhaps 50 or so left.That obviously means nothing to Trump and Hegseth, who are both so maddened that they have become modern Ahabs chasing a Moby Dick. In his right-wing Christian crusade, Hegseth openly prays for every bullet and missile to “find its mark” in war. In the war for oil, he obviously is not interested in hearing about collateral damage, saying: “Disruptions to Gulf oil production doesn’t hurt just us, it benefits our adversaries. We cannot allow our own rules to weaken our standing and strengthen those who wish to harm us. When development in the Gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country and as a department.”

Fifty whales by themselves don’t stand a chance against the rhetoric of keeping gas under $5 a gallon.

Rice’s whale is hardly the only creature that could be decimated with ramped-up oil production. According to NOAA, the gulf is also a habitat for the endangered sperm whale; the endangered hawksbill, leatherback, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles; and the endangered pillar coral. There is also a host of other animals listed as “threatened,” such as loggerhead and green sea turtles, Nassau grouper, the giant manta ray, and queen conch.The committee, chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, unanimously granted the exemption, based on Hegseth’s “findings.” Typical of Trump’s government, there is no description of those so-called findings. Burgum did not explain why this country’s pursuit of petroleum justifies further endangering endangered species. All Burgum said in a statement was that oil production in the Gulf “must not be disrupted or held hostage by ongoing litigation.”

The truth is that there is no evidence that the Endangered Species Act has “chilled” oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, let alone held it hostage. During the same week that Burgum’s committee granted that exemption, the Interior Department that Burgum leads announced that 2025 was the best year ever for the production of offshore oil. It is likely we will see a record-breaking output from the Gulf this year.

In fact, any argument that we need to risk eradicating more wildlife for oil was blown away by Trump himself. During last week’s address to the nation regarding his attack on Iran, he told Americans not to fret because “under my leadership, we are the No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet.” He said, “We don’t need” oil from the Middle East. He boasted, “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East.”

Even under current protections, wildlife is constantly being sacrificed for oil and gas. The biggest recent single hit to the Rice’s whale’s population was likely the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. NOAA estimated the population of Rice’s whales may have plummeted 22%, as nearly half its habitat in the eastern Gulf was exposed to oil. The spill, according to NOAA, also killed up to 200,000 adult, juvenile, and hatchling turtles, and the deaths of dolphins, on top of the whales, became the largest cetacean mortality event ever recorded in the Gulf.

Even though Rice’s whales dive during the day as deep as 400 feet to feed, studies cited by NOAA have found that they spend the night within 50 feet of the surface where the hard-to-see creatures can be struck by vessels. NOAA’s website reports that the top threats to the remaining population are vessel strikes and the noise from vessels and energy pollution and says, “For Rice’s whales to recover, we must address existing and emerging threats to the species and their habitat.”

Yet even NOAA yielded to Hegseth’s demand for an exemption.

NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs promised that despite the exemption, oil and gas activities would still include “various protective measures for the Rice’s Whale.” Given Trump’s crippling of the Environmental Protection Agency and rollbacks of regulations under the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, Jacobs’ statement is about as comforting as the statement from the American Petroleum Institute praising the exemption, claiming with a straight face that the oil and gas industry “has a long track record of protecting wildlife while developing offshore energy responsibly.”

There is reason to be optimistic that, like the ultimate withdrawal of the 1992 spotted owl exemption, this one for the Gulf of Mexico will eventually be blocked by litigation and public protest. The day before Burgum convened the Endangered Species Committee, a federal judge in California invalidated several Endangered Species Act rollbacks concocted during the first Trump administration that allowed agencies to increasingly ignore the harm of projects to wildlife.

The judge, Jon Tigar, said the administration made “serious” errors in an “arbitrary and capricious” effort to gut the Endangered Species Act. Let us hope that the courts continue to find yet more errors with the exemption for the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty whales by themselves don’t stand a chance against the rhetoric of keeping gas under $5 a gallon. The Trump administration is today’s Ahab lunging over its ship with a harpoon. This time, the whale really could be killed in the hunt for oil.

This piece was originally published by MS Now. It is shared here with permission of the author.

Reasonable people wonder if it was a coincidence the escalation (and now fragile ceasefire) of the massively unpopular, senseless, illegal US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran occurred while Congress was away from Capitol Hill for two weeks. Maybe so, but speculation aside, it soon won’t matter, as Congress returns to Washington to resume legislative business Tuesday, April 14.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s monstrous nuclear threat to obliterate Iran’s civilization, calls for his removal from office are rising, understandably. Doing so via the 25th Amendment, which would require Vice President JD Vance and the spineless supine sycophants in the Cabinet to certify Trump unfit for office, is the longest of long shots, though US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former Constitutional law professor and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, notes the amendment mentions the ability for Congress to establish its own mechanism to remove an incompetent chief executive.

While that seems remote, the more familiar route would be impeachment by the House of Representatives, followed by a trial by the Senate, and removal from office. Trump is of course familiar with this as he was impeached twice by the House, but not convicted by the Senate. US Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) recently filed Articles of Impeachment, and for what it’s worth, the betting platform Kalshi put the likelihood of it succeeding at 27%, higher than it had been, but still low.

Anyone who wants to rein in this traitorous regime should press in any way possible, including calling for the 25th Amendment and impeachment, but should not expect those to bear fruit anytime soon.

Political calculations aside, any and all attempts are welcome to stop this awful war, to end the needless death and suffering of Iranians, Lebanese, Israelis, Americans, and people in the Gulf states, and to alleviate the shock to the global economy.

However, Congress will soon be forced to vote on Iran War Powers Resolutions (WPRs) to declare its opposition to the war on Iran, and Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to prevent transfers of US bombs and bulldozers to Israel.

On War Powers, recent votes were close, and almost entirely partisan; with only a few exceptions, Republicans in both houses of Congress voted against, and Democrats voted for, rebuking the administration and reclaiming its clear constitutional authority over the grave matter of taking the country to war. The House might muster the votes to pass an Iran War Powers Resolution, sponsored by US Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), though the Senate is unlikely to do so. While it would not end the war immediately, a House vote in favor of the WPR would be important in representing the clear will of the American people, and clarify the president has no legal authority for its war of choice.

The votes on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval on bombs and bulldozers to Israel, brought forward by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with cosponsors Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), will be interesting, to put it mildly. The Trump administration, as it has often done, bypassed the usual congressional notification on these weapons transfers, spuriously claiming a national emergency. The “emergency” is Israel may be running low on bombs to drop on the people of Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Israel is also running low on interceptor missiles, but this JRD is only about the delivery of 12,000 half-ton bombs. The Caterpillar bulldozers have long been used in demolitions of Palestinian homes, to make room for expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, mostly in the West Bank.

The political dynamics of these JRD votes will be relatively simple. Expect all Republicans to vote no, with the possible exception of Rand Paul (R-Ky.). On the Democratic side, while the most recent JRD votes on other weapons sales to Israel last July garnered (for the first time), majority support among Senate Democrats, they still lost decisively. The difficulty for certain Democratic Senators such as Cory Booker (NJ), Chuck Schumer (NY), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla (both of California) and others who are rightly slamming Trump’s unauthorized war on Iran, is they never vote to prevent weapons transfers to Israel. Their constituents, facing increased economic hardship caused by this foolish war, which as The New York Times reported Trump was all too easily persuaded to wage by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will certainly be unhappy with this contradiction.

Going forward, if the administration comes to Congress with a war funding request for up to $200 billion (on top of its unprecedented proposal for $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon’s “regular” budget), possibly dressed up with sweeteners such as farm aid (necessary as farmers are hurting not just from increased fuel and fertilizer costs from the war, but also from Trump’s tariffs), said senators will be challenged to adopt Sen. Van Hollen’s position of “hell no,” not another dime for the Iran war.

Political calculations aside, any and all attempts are welcome to stop this awful war, to end the needless death and suffering of Iranians, Lebanese, Israelis, Americans, and people in the Gulf states, and to alleviate the shock to the global economy.

We live in a flawed but still functioning democracy. The American people are solidly, sensibly against this stupid war, and need to make sure their lawmakers get the message—Congress, do your job, and stop this madness, by any and all means at your disposal.

Our dependence on fossil fuels does more than pollute our air. It destabilizes the world and empowers the ultra wealthy to profit off of that volatility, leaving working families to pay the price.

This dynamic has been on full display since President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran.

Trump’s invasion of one of the world’s most oil-rich regions jolted energy markets, sending gas prices soaring to the highest level in either of his terms. In 2024 he campaigned on cutting them in half. Instead, Americans are now on track to pay roughly $720 more for gasoline this year.

The full cost to working families will be much steeper as high gas prices drive up prices on consumer goods across the board. We’re already seeing that ripple effect take hold, as the US Postal Service has proposed a temporary 8% fuel surcharge on package deliveries to offset rising transportation costs tied directly to the war-driven spike in oil prices.

To reclaim our foreign policy from those who see a global crisis as a line item on an earnings call, we must break the billionaire grip on our energy system, economy, and democracy writ large.

At the same time, the oil and gas companies that invested at least $75 million in Trump’s reelection are cashing in on this instability. A recent Financial Times analysis estimates that US oil companies could collect an additional $63 billion in revenue this year if crude prices remain at these wartime levels. In March alone, the industry is expected to generate $5 billion in extra cash flow.

This type of windfall isn’t a fluke. We’ve seen this pattern for decades.

Oil has a way of appearing in the background of every chapter of US military intervention in the Middle East and beyond. Iran nationalized its oil industry in the 1950s, and a CIA-backed coup followed. Iraq, sitting on some of the world’s largest reserves, was invaded in 2003. And earlier this year, the US invaded Venezuela and immediately began plans for a taxpayer-backed oil industry takeover.

Dependence on fossil fuels keeps us trapped in this cycle. Oil executives have spent billions to maintain this status quo, backing politicians like Trump who will protect their profits. As the oil industry rakes in eye-popping profits, it gains more power to elect leaders who prioritize policies that ensure Americans remain reliant on fossil fuels.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Congress considered a windfall profits tax on large oil companies that would capture the excess profits generated by the crisis—and return the money to American households. Roughly 80% of Americans supported the idea.

Failure to advance that legislation cost us. Researchers calculated that if the US had redistributed the portion of fossil fuel profits that exceeded 2021 returns, every American household could have received $1,715.

As oil executives profit off the war in Iran, Congress must once again push for a windfall profits tax on the largest oil companies. This isn’t an outlandish idea. Other countries have already done it. After the 2022 energy shock, the United Kingdom enacted a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, raising about $3.3 billion in its first year and roughly $4.5 billion the next—money used to help households pay their energy bills.

The current situation in Iran underscores how unchecked extreme wealth fuels corporate control, leaving working families vulnerable. New data from Impact Research for Tax the Greedy Billionaires shows that voters blame billionaires for the affordability crisis and want leaders to do more to address this. In fact, 77% of voters nationwide—including 65% of Republicans, 75% of Independents, and 91% of Democrats—support raising taxes on billionaires.

Under the Trump administration, war profiteering has reached new extremes. Confronting corporate power and taxing the ultra wealthy isn’t just about economic fairness—it’s a national security imperative.

To reclaim our foreign policy from those who see a global crisis as a line item on an earnings call, we must break the billionaire grip on our energy system, economy, and democracy writ large. If we want a democracy that works for the people, we must stop letting it be sold to the highest bidder.

Sorting fact from fiction in statements by President Donald Trump and members of his administration can be demoralizing and cringe inducing. The ratio of untruths to truths is astonishing—and many of the lies seem almost pointlessly cruel.

Trump lies at a pace that’s puzzling. What conceivable purpose could this behavior serve? And why are his most transparent lies so enthusiastically parroted by his underlings?

My aim in this article is not to engage in partisan lie shaming, but rather to better understand human nature. Why do people—and especially large groups of people—spew and cling to falsehoods?

As we’ll see, the distinction between truth and untruth is fuzzy at the edges, and discussions about the nature of truth can quickly spiral into rarefied philosophizing. In this article, we’ll entertain the centuries-old philosophical question, “What is truth?” only to the degree that’s useful in helping clarify my main thesis—which is that both truth and lies serve overarching social purposes. The better we understand those purposes and the choices entailed in pursuing them, the better we’ll understand ourselves, each other, and the society around us—and the better we will navigate the Great Unraveling which lies before us.

The Social Usefulness of Lies

Lies told by individuals typically serve some immediate need—often to avoid blame or to improve one’s status in the eyes of others. However, lies also serve a larger social function arising from human social evolution.

Kaivan Shroff hinted at that function in a recent article about Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, whose untruthful statements to the press are widely documented. What’s interesting is Shroff’s speculation on why McLaughlin lies so much:

The reason McLaughlin and other people who speak on behalf of the administration say things on television that are demonstrably false is not to try to convince ambivalent people of the merits of Trump’s policy decisions. Persuasion is not their objective. Their objective is instead to offer a demonstration of loyalty to the president and his political project—costly loyalty: The price is their own credibility. The more indefensible a claim, the clearer the signal.

Shroff is saying that, for McLaughlin, status within her social group—i.e., the Trump administration—outweighs accuracy or veracity.

Shroff’s explanation dovetails nicely with the discussion of social evolution in my book Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. As humans developed prodigious linguistic ability, we evolved to become an ultra-social species. There are many other social species (ants, bees, chimps, chickens, crows, and more), but symbolic language greatly amplifies sociality, heightening both its advantages and costs.

Lacking language, many other species still engage in deception (like the mimic octopus, which impersonates toxic sea creatures to discourage its potential predators). But language opens the door to fiction, exaggeration, and just plain fibbing on a scale that no other creature can begin to match. Also, our main targets for deception aren’t other species, but members of our own kind who use the same language.

The biggest advantage of sociality is that greater cohesion among individuals makes any given group more powerful vis-à-vis other groups of similar size. While increased cohesion yields a payoff for the group, there is also a payoff for individual members: Acceptance by a cohort confers a sense of security. Alone, life is dangerous and hard. But if you’re with a tribe, there’s the sense that others have your back. Indeed, we all tend to feel strong psychological pressures to align with any social group in which we want to maintain membership.

Lying is not the only possible demonstration of group loyalty. In “big god” religions, tithing, self-flagellation, and long pilgrimages emerged long ago as signs of sincere dedication to the faith. The key factor in such signs was their costliness: The more costly the demonstration, the greater the payoff in proof of group loyalty and therefore status in the group.

A price of entry for at least for some religious and political groups is belief in absurdities. Examples range from Christianity’s doctrine of the virgin birth to Stalin’s requirement that his followers give credence to his personal infallibility (George Orwell famously satirized such political gullibility mandates in his 1948 novel, 1984, wherein the sole function of the government’s “Ministry of Truth” was to create false historical records and news to align with the Party’s ever-changing narrative).

Absurdities are an affront to common sense, so believers must expend constant effort to justify them. This need for justification creates an employment niche for apologists. Theologians’ justifications for absurdities and contradictions in sacred texts have ranged from simple literalism (“the Bible tells me so”) to earnest hunts for allegorical and metaphorical meaning. For example, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong says the virgin birth isn’t so much a fact as a teaching story meant to symbolize a new beginning for humanity. Such metaphorical interpretations relieve the anxiety that results from too much effort spent justifying an absurdity; in effect, they offer membership in the group at a discounted rate. Nevertheless, the absurdity still stands as a gateway test of group membership.

The Usefulness of Fact-Checking

The problem with lies is that, if you believe them, you can bump into things. If you believe a lie that there is no wall in front of you when there is in fact a wall, a few forward steps can induce severe cognitive dissonance. And if the collision occurs at a brisk gait, you might get a bloody nose or worse.

Here’s a familiar real-world example. In 2002 and 2003, members of the George W. Bush administration repeatedly made the case that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and that the United States must therefore attack the country and overthrow its government. Bombers flew, troops invaded, hundreds of thousands died, and Saddam Hussein’s regime fell. But the war is now generally regarded as having been a grave mistake and a strategic failure due to the ensuing destabilization of the region. The supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were never found, and Americans’ trust in government never recovered.

Individually and collectively, we need an accurate understanding of reality if we are to survive and thrive. Sometimes that’s easy: Facts can be plain to see and agreed upon by nearly everyone. Other times they can require hard work, math, and instrumentation to ascertain—and they may still remain controversial.

While factual truths are fragile and evolving, they are essential to a free society, serving as a necessary anchor for public opinion.

As important as microscopes, telescopes, and other sensory augmentations of the modern era are to grasping reality, certain mental habits and methodologies are even more essential. Those habits and methodologies have a history. Indigenous peoples used logic routinely, and the basic functions of reason have been observed in many nonhuman species. Aristotle (4th century BCE) has long been credited with the invention of formal (i.e., written) logic, but thinkers in India and China made independent similar contributions that were arguably as early. Later, Middle Eastern philosophers added mathematical rigor to the process of disciplined thinking. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the founders of modern science applied logic to the assessment of evidence from the natural world using a method that rigorously tests hypotheses—the scientific method. This method differs profoundly from the usual procedure of political or legal debaters, who gather and present evidence that supports their thesis. Scientists instead continually look for evidence to disprove their hypotheses, so they can improve or replace them.

Science has produced immense amounts of reliable information about the world and about us. However, scientists are still human and still susceptible to political and social influences. As Thomas Kuhn explained in his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), major breakthroughs in science occur as the result of a long accumulation of anomalies that cannot be explained by existing theories. However, despite the existence of these anomalies, until a clearly better theory comes along scientists often tend to close ranks around the existing theory.

This happened, for example, in the field of geology, which in the 19th century was confronted by evidence of vast changes to rocks and ecosystems throughout hundreds of millions of years of Earth history. Wishing to distance themselves from theologians who saw such evidence as confirming the biblical story of Noah’s Flood, geologists developed the doctrine of uniformitarianism, which held that all geological evidence should be explained by slow processes (mostly erosion and deposition) that can be observed at work today. A few geologists protested, saying that the evidence also suggested occasional catastrophic events of which there are no ongoing examples, but until the 1970s these catastrophists were largely prevented from publishing prominently. Anomalies kept accumulating until it became clear that events like mass extinctions could only be explained in catastrophist terms. Today it’s fair to say that all geologists are part-time catastrophists.

French philosopher-anthropologist Bruno Latour (1947-2022) argued that all scientific knowledge is socially constructed. In his book Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), he described facts not as objective truths waiting to be discovered, but as descriptions of the world that are generated within social networks of scientists. The exact extent to which commercial and social interests shape science is a question that echoes through today’s vaccine controversies.

Science is always changing. One year, drinking red wine is proclaimed to be good for you. A couple of years later, the same authorities say drinking any alcohol is bad. Science’s tendency to evolve is its virtue, but also its vulnerability: Many people assume that, because scientific understandings change, scientists are therefore often wrong and really don’t know much. Why bother learning what scientists think now when the consensus is bound to shift later? Hence the persistence of flat Earth believers.

Further, there are important questions science can’t answer. What existed before the Big Bang? Is there a creative principle behind the universe that could be equated with God? What is a good life? Methodically probing physical evidence won’t tell you.

Nevertheless, science has proven to be a useful tool in clarifying most day-to-day issues. If you’re a bridge builder and you want to know the tensile strength of a particular kind of steel, you can consult the outcomes of repeated experiments and have confidence in the numbers. Even though scientists can sometimes be swayed by social motives, that’s not a reason for abandoning science altogether, just for doing it better.

“Facts” are simply the current numbers, descriptions, and interpretations agreed upon by experts, based on the best current evidence. Yes, facts can be socially influenced and can change as new data emerges. But fact-checkers still have value. They’re usually right. They’re good at exposing lies. And, as we’ve seen, lies have consequences.

Foucault and Arendt

Social evolution theory isn’t the final word on why groups of people create false representations of reality. Two 20th century thinkers had some relevant insights on knowledge, truth, and lies that I need to touch upon here before we proceed.

French historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) claimed that knowledge is constructed through systems of power and discourse. His concept of “power-knowledge” (pouvoir-savoir) asserts that power and knowledge are inextricable, and fundamental to the organization of societies. While power can operate through simple coercion, it also achieves its ends through discourse, defining “truths” that categorize, regulate, and control individual actions, making knowledge a force that shapes reality.

Foucault argued that knowledge is never neutral; it is always linked to power. Conversely, power is exercised through the creation and application of knowledge. Power isn’t merely repressive (saying “no”) but also productive, as it generates knowledge, discourse, and new ways of understanding the self and the world. Institutions (like medicine, psychiatry, and prisons) produce “truths” that determine what is “normal” or “abnormal.” These, in turn, regulate behavior and justify power structures.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a historian and philosopher who lived through the rise of Nazism in Germany before emigrating to the US. She argued that authoritarian power thrives not just by forcing people to believe lies, but by destroying their capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, thereby inducing cynicism. By constantly changing fabricated narratives, totalitarian regimes destroy the factual basis of society, leaving citizens unable to think, judge, or act. The aim is to create a world where nothing is believed, resulting in a population that can no longer distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies. When people stop believing anything, they become “ideal subjects” for totalitarian rule because they stop caring about what’s true.

Arendt noted that totalitarian leaders try to replace factual truth with a fabricated, consistent narrative that feels more appealing than reality. While factual truths are fragile and evolving, they are essential to a free society, serving as a necessary anchor for public opinion.

Where We Are Now: Nothing Is True, Nothing Matters, and We’re Bumping into Bigger and Bigger Things

There’s a significant difference between a social reality in which experts and the public alike value truth but are often deceived via the influences of financial and political power (i.e., the situation described by Foucault), and a social reality in which elites pursue power at any cost, routinely asserting patent lies and deliberately undermining society’s commitment to reason as ways to exert and extend their advantages (the situation described by Arendt). Foucault was describing the social production of knowledge in most modern industrial societies; Arendt focused specifically on authoritarian, totalitarian states. With Trump in charge, the US is careening toward the latter condition.

Confirming this, Adam Serwer argues in a recent article that “gullicism” (a portmanteau of “gullibility” and “cynicism”) is the tenor of present-day America:

Gullicists see everyone’s hidden motives—except when they don’t. They are able to reject any claim rooted in actual evidence—whether in science, politics, or history—while embracing the most breathtakingly absurd assertions on the same topics. Indeed, documentation is often taken as further evidence of conspiracy, while assertion (that this or that will "detoxify" your blood or that COVID deaths were exaggerated) is taken as gospel.

Unsurprisingly, as gullicism spreads, we’re increasingly bumping into things, including:

• The disastrous Iran war, which is not simply based on lies (like the Iraq war), but on shifting and conflicting lies;
• A chaotic and short-staffed Justice Department that’s no longer able to investigate real criminals due to the Trump administration’s prosecutions of political enemies, which consume staff time, routinely fall apart due to lack of evidence, and cause mass resignations of career prosecutors (like science, the criminal justice system is ideally a search for truth and relies on evidence); and
• Entirely preventable measles outbreaks resulting from the Department of Health and Human Services’ spreading of scientifically questionable opinions and reversal of longstanding vaccine policies.

In some ways the ascent of Trumpism represents a contest between followers of the 18th century European Enlightenment, who still value reason and democracy, and those who say the Enlightenment was a mistake. In place of reason and democracy, Peter Thiel and other MAGA intellectual leaders promote an authoritarian “dark enlightenment.” But it’s a simple truism: In the dark, you’re more likely to bump into things.

If we don’t want to bump into more things, we must hold to logic and evidence. But we can’t do so in isolation. We’re all consumers of information, and now more than ever it’s essential to make a habit of evaluating our information sources for trustworthiness—based not on what “feels right” or what our social group thinks, but on a demonstrated consistency in testing statements.

Because we’re an ultra-social species with language, the tendency toward loyal lying will always be with us. We’ll never eliminate all lies, either personal or collective. But at this moment in history, as we face climate change and a Great Unraveling, we have a rough ride ahead of us one way or another, and the last thing we need is a sudden proliferation of fake road maps.

By Ralph Nader April 10, 2026 This week two events (1) the citizens’ “Expert Legal Symposium,” and (2) Rep. John Larson’s (D-CT) introduction on April 6, 2026, of House Resolution 1155 “Impeaching Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors in violation of his constitutional oath of office to preserve,…

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