Our host for the weekly provocative question challenge is Jewish Young Professional, aka JYP. This week she asks us to…

…share a fun fact. It can be one you learned recently or one you’ve had in your mental trivia database forever. Bonus points if you share the source/reference.

Facts? Ha! Don’t you know we live in a post-facts world these days? Facts, truth, and reality don’t matter anymore. If we don’t like what we hear or read on the news, we simply call it “fake news.” We live in the world of alternative facts. Or facts that are altered to fit someone’s beliefs or perceptions.

Comedian Bill Maher often prefaced something he was about to say with this disclaimer: “I don’t know this for a fact…I just know it’s true.” And then there is “truthiness,” a word first coined by another comedian, Stephen Colbert, a number of years ago. Truthiness is the quality of seeming to be true based upon one’s intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to logic or factual evidence. It’s when someone feels, believes, or wishes that something is true even when it is not supported by the evidence.

We have become a society where truthiness trumps truth. We are so partisan that both sides — particularly the Republicans — have their own sets of facts and swears by them.

For example, in the 2020 presidential election, seven “swing” states attempted to submit fake electors: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In these states, groups of Republican officials and activists falsely claimed to be the legitimate electors for Donald Trump, despite him losing the popular vote in those states to Joe Biden. They signed and submitted certificates purporting to cast their states’ electoral votes for Trump, even though Biden was the actual winner. This fake electors scheme was a key part of Trump’s broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

In another very recent example, on June 11th, the World Bank noted in a published report…

The global economy is stabilizing, following several years of overlapping negative shocks. Despite elevated financing costs and heightened geopolitical tensions, global activity firmed in early 2024. Global growth is envisaged to reach a slightly faster pace this year than previously expected, due mainly to the continued solid expansion of the U.S. economy.

On the very same day, Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House tweeted on X…

“Everything President Biden has touched has been a disaster. We’ve got to revive the American economy again.”

There are what the Republicans call “facts,” and then there is reality.

So the one fact that I want to share is a quote from Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote…

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

Except that in today’s post-facts world, with deepfake audios and even videos, perhaps Poe quote should be updated to…

Believe nothing you hear and nothing that you see.