For MAGA, Facts Are Irrelevant When Beating You Is Everything.

Multiple interpretations about a fact do not make multiple facts.

For example, I had eggs for breakfast. What that means cannot be reduced to one interpretation. It might mean I was hungry, following a diet, eating what was available. Or, all three at once. It might illustrate economic privilege or the opposite. Where did I get the eggs? Do I have chickens? But whether I ate eggs is a factual question. Evidence can show that.

Arguing the meaning of my eating eggs is not arguing over the facts of what I had for breakfast. Nevertheless, some people, politicians in particular, confuse and conflate the difference between “why” and “what”: why I ate eggs isn’t the same as having eaten eggs.

We see this with MAGA leaders who gauge a story by its political usefulness rather than its factual accuracy. What matters is whether the story produces the desired response, not the facts.

An expression of this attitude appeared in a 2004 article by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine. Suskind chronicled a conversation with an unnamed aide to George W. Bush who dismissed Suskind as belonging to a “reality-based community” and explained: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

There is some truth to that. The President’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., was justified with a crime narrative when crime in DC was declining. The power to justify it does not make the justification factual. Putting troops on the streets changed daily conditions. Yet those troops do not establish the factual accuracy of the crime narrative used to justify their presence.

Is exercising the power to change conditions the same thing as the stories we are told that underlie or frame why troops are patrolling the streets of DC? No. The power to determine consequences isn’t the same thing as the power to decide facts, although they often go hand in hand. Conflating the two creates a gaslit ghost story that spooks us, such as ones told by JD Vance.

Do you remember when Vance amplified the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Ohio? When CNN analyst Dana Bash exposed the lie in September 2024, Vance doubled down on it, saying he would “create stories” when necessary for media attention. Credible evidence is irrelevant in this tactic.

Vance recently defended Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s political ad featuring opponent Amy Acton’s mother calling her a liar. He said “politics is a tough business” and the advertisement’s contents were “not really my concern.”

Republicans criticizing the ad are tactically out to lunch from Vance’s “wrong is right” strategy, arguing that any tactic that helps defeat Democrats is a good tactic, facts be damned.

Vance celebrated Ramaswamy’s brazen horror show, endorsing the advertisement while targeting Acton’s objections to it as evidence, fact, that she is not up for the hard job of governing Ohio. The ad says she lied about being homeless and once living in a tent, in turn calling into question her account of being raped at twelve.

Acton’s stepfather raped her when she was twelve. Investigators found overwhelming evidence this happened and took her from her mother’s care. Acton remains estranged from her mother. Meanwhile, her mother stood by her man while he fled the state before he could be tried, dying in 2004. His daughter said he raped her, too, before he raped Acton.

It’s incomprehensible. Vance demands Acton endure the MAGA lies about her childhood while erasing any accountability for their contents. Acton isn’t tough because facts expose Ramaswamy’s lies? Come again?

Does political need justify spreading lies regardless of the social and personal harm to people? According to JD Vance, yes, it does justify the harm. The end justifies the means. Winning at the expense of people, facts and democracy is okay for the current Vice President of the United States.

Multiple meanings or interpretations do not justify falsifying what happened. Just because power can mold our understanding doesn’t mean authority dictates what the facts are. When power weaponizes interpretation, it displaces and replaces the evidence that it answers to.

We may argue about what my eating eggs for breakfast means, but saying you ate a neighbor’s pet because your eating pets would help me win an election is chickenshit. We are covered in it.