Trump’s anti-truth crusade is not just an attack on facts – it’s an unravelling of the Enlightenment | Polly Toynbee

The US president, JD Vance and Nigel Farage seem to believe that checking facts is a form of censorship. Nonsense: speech is only free when it is anchored in truthFacts are becoming less sacred by the day in Donald Trump’s US, where many of his supporters now deny the very existence of truths. To them, inconvenient evidence is by definition “bias”. His followers and those who fear his fist are falling into line: media, universities and that infamous regiment of tech zillionaires who stood right behind him on inauguration day. The day after Trump’s election victory was certified by an electoral vote tally in Congress, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that, starting with the US, the company would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.A similar hammer blow has just struck Full Fact, the exceptionally valuable UK factchecker whose word is a gold standard for honesty. Google has pulled its £1m funding. Along with the ending of sizeable donations from Meta, the charity tells me this amounts to a loss of a third of its funding.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

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