When a president fires a government official for telling the truth, it’s not just a personnel decision—it’s a warning to every institution: facts will be punished.
That’s exactly what happened when President Donald Trump dismissed the chief of labor statistics for releasing a jobs report that contradicted his campaign claims. The numbers weren’t wrong. They just weren’t flattering. So the official—whose job was to report economic reality—was erased.
That one act—a petty grievance dressed in executive power—could ripple through financial markets, shake investor confidence, and inject more instability into an already fragile economy. But the greater damage is to the Republic itself.
This is how truth dies—not with a grand decree, but with a quiet dismissal no one stops.
Trump didn’t invent the war on reality. He simply industrialized it.
In Alabama, we’re living our own chapter of this slow-motion collapse. House Bill 445 didn’t just regulate hemp—it obliterated an industry the state itself built. In 2019, lawmakers called hemp a new beginning: a lifeline for farmers, a promise of innovation and jobs. They smiled for cameras, cut ribbons and helped plant the seeds.
Then in 2025, they banned it. Yes, there was a hearing—but it was political theater, not fact-finding. The outcome was preordained. Hysteria over THC variants and confusion about Delta products eclipsed science, data and testimony from those who had followed the law to the letter. The same officials who once celebrated the industry bulldozed it out of fear. Truth was inconvenient. So they buried it.
We see the same pattern in the assault on transgender health care, where decisions that belong to families and physicians have been criminalized based on slogans, not science. We see it in Alabama’s refusal to expand Medicaid—not because we can’t afford it, but because someone once called it “Obamacare.” The result? Closed hospitals, untreated illness, unnecessary death.
We see it in the great lie of our time: that the 2020 election was stolen. No evidence. No proof. Just the wounded pride of one man and a movement desperate to believe him. And now voting rights are under assault—not because of fraud, but because a lie calcified into law.
Yes, American presidents have always lied. Lyndon Johnson lied about Vietnam and lost the trust of a generation. Richard Nixon lied about Watergate and lost the presidency. Biden’s advisers lied, and it’s cost Democrats politically.
But this is something different. What we’re witnessing now isn’t scandal—it’s system. A daily, almost hourly barrage of falsehoods pouring from the highest seats of power. A movement that no longer just denies facts—it punishes them.
And this goes deeper than politics. It cuts to the bones of history.
The entire system of American slavery was built on a lie: that Black people were subhuman, ordained for servitude. That lie was baptized with cherry-picked scripture, enshrined in law, and normalized in pulpits. As Frederick Douglass said, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
After the Civil War, the lie didn’t die—it evolved. The United Daughters of the Confederacy rewrote the war into myth: traitors became heroes, slavery became benevolence, and white supremacy became Southern heritage. Their version of history filled textbooks, dominated public monuments, and bled into policy. And to this day, Confederate statues are defended in Alabama—not in the name of history, but in defense of a comforting fiction.
James Baldwin warned, “People who imagine that history flatters them… are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin.” That’s what happens when lies become law. They don’t just distort reality—they trap us inside it.
Myth has always warned us.
Cadmus, the mythic founder of Thebes, sowed dragons’ teeth into the ground—and from them sprang armed warriors who immediately turned on each other in blind violence.
That’s what lies do when planted in the foundations of government or culture: they don’t produce unity—they produce chaos.
Lies are dragons’ teeth. Plant enough of them, and a nation will devour itself.
Planted in law, in classrooms and in media, they don’t produce justice. They produce bloodshed.
Albert Camus warned, “The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants.” In Alabama and across the country, laws are passed “to protect children,” “preserve fairness,” or “defend tradition.” But more often than not, they protect power, punish the very people they claim to defend, and destroy the very values they pretend to uphold.
This is the turning point. One falsehood at a time. A culture war here; a moral panic there. And suddenly, we are no longer citizens of a democracy—but subjects in a system where obedience matters more than honesty, and loyalty more than liberty.
Truth is not a partisan virtue. It is the oxygen of freedom. And when a government grows hostile to truth, it cannot breathe for long.
If we keep choking it out, democracy won’t die in darkness.
It will die in daylight—by our own hands, in full view, while the crowd cheers for the lie.
You can dress a lie in a suit and a trucker’s hat, but that doesn’t make it truth. A lie is still a lie—no matter how many flags it hides behind or how many times it’s shouted on the courthouse steps. And in Alabama, we’ve been dressing up lies for generations. We were told slavery was benevolence. That segregation was peace. That monuments to white supremacy were just “heritage.” Now they say they want to Make Alabama Great Again.
Please—tell us all: when exactly was that? During the lynchings? The poll taxes? The days when speaking the truth could cost you your job—or your life?
If greatness means silencing truth, punishing science, and rewriting history to comfort the powerful, then what they seek isn’t greatness. It’s destruction. And those of us who still see clearly—who still believe truth matters—have a duty not just to speak, but to shout. Because the lie will not die quietly. And neither should we.
