You have a choice.

You can spend the next few weeks laying the groundwork for making a big stink about the fact that the aspiring FBI Director tried to help Trump steal classified documents.

Or you can spend it clinging to false claims about Merrick Garland so you can blame him for the fact that Trump won reelection rather than blaming the guy directly responsible for preventing a trial (and the guy who’ll remain responsible for Trump’s license going forward), John Roberts, to say nothing of the failed Democratic consultants and voters themselves.

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I could give a flying fuck about Merrick Garland. What I care about is that at a time when we need to start establishing means of accountability for a second Trump term, much of the Democratic world has chosen instead to wallow in false claims about the Trump investigation in order to make Garland a scapegoat, rather than the guy directly responsible, John Roberts. It’s classical conspiracy thinking. Something really bad happened (Trump got elected), it’s not entirely clear why (because almost no one bothers to learn the details I’ve laid out here, to say nothing of considering the political work that didn’t happen to make Trump own this), and so people simply invent explanations. Every time those explanations get debunked, people double down on the theory — it’s Garland’s fault — rather than reconsidering their chosen explanation.

And those explanations have the effect of distracting attention from Roberts. Rather than talking about how six partisan Justices rewrote the Constitution to give the leader of the GOP a pass on egregious crimes, Democrats are choosing to blame a guy who encouraged prosecutors to follow the money in March 2021.

It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that guarantees maximal impotence. It’s a choice that eschews actual facts (and therefore the means to actually learn what happened). It’s a choice that embraces irrational conspiracy thinking (which makes people weak and ripe for manipulation by authoritarians). It’s a choice that distracts from Roberts’ role.

And there is a better, more urgent, option.

T The Enlightenment had a good run. Over 400 years ago, an audacious idea emerged among scientists and philosophers that a single shared reality existed that could be measured and predicted using fundamental laws of nature. All the trappings of modern life, every technological convenience and scientific breakthrough flowed from the radical realization that truth exists — not in the proclamations of the powerful, but in underlying nature itself.

The re-election of Donald Trump is a harbinger that the Enlightenment may now be on its last legs. Bored and weary of having to accommodate facts we don’t agree with, many are retreating into bespoke realities served up by social media algorithms. Our ubiquitous devices and online platforms — themselves a product of Enlightenment thought — are ironically becoming its undoing.

Embracing a shared evidence-based reality is hard work. It requires dialogue and compromise among people who disagree and respecting the rights of those we might not respect. Many people seem sick of it. Popular cyber-platforms paired with artificial intelligence provide a convenient off-ramp from a confusing and frightening world that increasingly requires our attention and agency.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari notes that “most information is not truth.” Our social media feeds are a firehose of addictive and largely useless images and videos, curated by online algorithms designed not to inform but to keep us engaged.

These information streams are also increasingly polluted with AI-assisted disinformation in an effective effort to weaponize ignorance and undermine the very concept of truth. Why? Because disinformation works. In the words of Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, “post-truth is pre-fascism.... To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”.

But many children chafe at the limits put on them and imagine themselves happier if only they didn’t have to obey their parents and teachers. Some never grow out of that attitude. Negative freedom is, according to Snyder, “freedom from” some external barrier — freedom from government on our backs, from tedious regulation and red tape, from expensive groceries and unwanted immigrants and refugees.

But negative freedom has consequences. When we think we’ve freed ourselves from our imagined burdens, we soon miss them. We feel the absence of government services; if our groceries are cheaper because they’re no longer inspected, they may also infect us with listeria. Or the groceries may be more expensive than ever because the immigrants and refugees who grew them, packed them, shipped them and put them on our supermarket shelves are now gone forever.

Snyder cites Freedom House, an organization that ranks over 200 countries by their people’s access to political rights, civil liberties and internet freedom. It ranks the United States as “free” with a score of 83, like Romania and South Korea.

Canada’s score is 97, just behind Sweden’s 99 and Finland’s 100.

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He goes on: “Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to.”