In all these cases, the facts will succumb to political agenda. So what’s the point of them? In a world where the fact has been demoted to political point-scoring, the time has come to consider where facts came from in the first place, and what exactly they are. I’m not talking here about the journalistic obsession with verification, nor the relative merits of weighing one source against another — but the fact that there are any facts whatsoever. “There was a time when facts did not exist,” the historian of science, David Wootton, reminds us in his book The Invention of Science. “The story of the fact is a story in which the lowest and most unreliable form of knowledge was magically transformed into the highest and most reliable.”

The problem of the fact had long lingered in the background of politics, philosophy and science until it came roaring forth half a decade ago, blasting through the mediasphere in the now-ancient controversy regarding the size of Trump’s first inauguration crowd, a dispute that inspired the then-presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway to introduce the term “alternative facts”. Legacy media, horrified by this subversive twist on their hitherto unchallenged epistemology, did not know where to start. After a good deal of sputtering, there emerged a solution. What ensued was a golden age of fact-checking the first Trump administration — a parade led by FactCheck.org, Metabunk, PolitiFact, Snopes, RealClearPolitics, to name but a few. The status of the fact has since swallowed enormous portions of resources, money, air time, and attention.

Yet strangely enough, journalism had gotten along for quite a long time without fact-checkers. The first of this exotic new species appeared in the 1890s and early 1900s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, alongside the birth of the telegraph. It was during this period that the idea that journalists could pinpoint the “objective” truth first caught on, the notion that reporting the news could be closer to science than literature. Unfortunately, as the velocity of news increased, so did the prevalence of what Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, called “honest inaccuracies”. By 1938, a new sub-set of professionals devoted to the cause of accuracy had been officially institutionalized, as Colliers magazine ran its first ad for “researchers and fact-checkers”.

Since then, fact-checking has become part and parcel of news-gathering. At the core of this enterprise was a new definition of truth — journalistic truth — which rests not upon the eternal verities of philosophical or religious truth, but upon the idea that if there’s someone else or something else out there to back up your assertion, it’s fair game for publishing.

The problems with this approach to what has come to be called “verifiable truth” became evident by the end of the first Trump presidency. As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “while facts are sacred to writers, readers, and, above all, editors, they are sometimes more work than they’re worth”. On the other side of the aisle, Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation noted precisely the same phenomenon in his criticism of the “fact-check industry”: “When you aren’t winning a policy debate, it’s much easier to appeal to a supposedly ‘third party’ judge who is on your team already.”

For both Left and Right, then, the facts became insoluble conundrums. In a stormy sea of blog posts, clickbait, Substacks, and studies in obscure journals, what constitutes a fact? There is in fact — as it were — a small group of academics who study that precise question, and those are the historians of science. They attacked the question with a great deal of optimism. Their assumption was that while one may endlessly debate the political ramifications of, say, the Battle of Culloden, or the economic consequences of FDR’s New Deal, conclusions become a bit more clear-cut when it comes to the discovery of gravity and the moons of Jupiter. At least that was the hope — soon to be dashed. As the late great historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, presciently noted in his 1962 landmark study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “Myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods… that now lead to scientific knowledge.”

Kuhn’s intellectual descendants include Steven Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, and Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge. Schaffer’s best-selling iconoclastic tome, Leviathan and the Air Pump, caused nothing less than an academic scandal. For years, the pair have studied what has come to be called the “social construction” of truth, specializing in the origins of modern biology, chemistry, and physics in early- to mid-17th century Europe. They have come to the conclusion that “The history of science occupies the same terrain as the history of politics.”

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This is the sort of conclusion that outraged physics professor Alan Sokal, sparking his submission of gibberish to the academic journal, Social Text. It was an attempt to embarrass the academics who might publish “an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”. He then published a book titled Fashionable Nonsense, aimed at blowing the social construction of truth out of the water.

For all his indignation, the years have not been kind to Sokal. The notion that truth is a social construction has not only been normalized but glorified through social media, where like makes right. And, of course, Donald Trump was one of the first to translate the controversial academic idea into a controversial media company, “Truth Social”.

It might be a stretch to call Trump a master of epistemology, but the arguments that Shapin and Schaffer espouse eerily align with his populist approach. The historians of science argue that unlike ancient scientific “facts” — such as Aristotle’s beliefs that spears fly in horizontal lines, and that women have fewer teeth than men — the modern scientific fact does not rest upon logical deductions from unexamined givens and axioms, but emerges from educated and social elites gathered in a privileged space to witness the scene of laboratory demonstrations, after which they might use the tools of printing and publishing to disseminate what these scholars call “virtual witnessing”. In short, it is the idea that if enough people believe in Tinker Bell, publicly vouch for Tinker Bell, and distribute learned treatises about Tinker Bell, then Tinker Bell is, for all intents and purposes, true. Such facts become facts because of their omnipresent acceptance among both the brilliant and the ignorant. On the basis of this insight into the birth of the fact in 17th-century Europe, the historians of science have inadvertently helped us understand how reactionary politics and liberal politics not only create wholly different species of fact, but of evidence and reasoning.

The social construction of truth flies in the face of a tradition many of us take for granted — the idea of scientific progress going hand in hand with the progress of rationality, toleration for civil dispute, and liberalism. “Our goal”, Shapin and Schaffer have acknowledged, “is to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.” And to be sure, their deconstructions clarify once and for all why it is fruitless to hail facts and fact-checking as the antidote to MAGA ideation — that if only people understood “science” we would all be good liberals. Indeed, the adage among the anti-vaxxers is the same as the adage of Moderna and Pfizer: “Do the research.”

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Of course, those basement-dwelling, Ketone-IQ-swilling independent internet researchers were not the first people to question the fact’s value. As modern science took its infant steps away from philosophers like Aristotle towards “natural philosophers” like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, the great conservative and defender of monarchical power, Thomas Hobbes, rose against the dominion of the fact. Much like those today who view corporate science as a form of oppression, Hobbes mocked the artificial and clubby lab-centric experimentalists of his age, claiming that the so-called geniuses of the scientific revolution were “just another conspiratorial group whose interests were in obtaining power over citizens”.

Hobbes believed that the esoteric truths created in the laboratory were entirely unrelated to the ordinary common-sense truths that emerge from everyday reality. He scoffed at the idea of a vacuum created by the air-pump, perhaps because he could not imagine the use of barometers and thermometers, not to mention microwaves and guitar amps. Faced with modern physics, he would surely have asked, what does the quark-gluon plasma created for a fraction of a millisecond in the Hadron collider have to do with us?

It was only as the Scientific Revolution proved its cash value (by way of the locomotive, steamboat, cotton gin et al), that defenders of the ancient fact succumbed to the unbridled sense of awe that marked the early industrial age. Nineteenth-century fact worship would transform into social science, thereby becoming an enduring attribute of liberalism — despite the bothersome irony that facts contravene the most basic of all liberal tenets, namely the freedom to disagree. And who would be foolish enough to disagree with the efficacy of a sewing machine — or an atom bomb? Hence the strange and cockeyed genius of Donald Trump, who perceived how thin the ice had grown beneath the scientific fact that no one really understood, and who grasped that fact had become dogma.

Alternative facts, fake news, and conspiracy theory on one side. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to disagree, and an end to all censorship on the other. Again and again the historians of science have proved their prescience: during the height of the Cold War, one of the founders of the field, Herbert Butterfield, was already anticipating the growth of “giant organized systems of self-righteousness — each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked — each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred”. The solution, of course, was democracy. But as has become increasingly evident, democracy cannot solve the problem of the fact, as democracy was itself a parallel expression of the Scientific Revolution. To prove one by the other descends into the logical inconsistency philosophers dismiss as tautology.

Instead of becoming mired in the ooze of fact and alternative fact, perhaps we would be better off if we were to entirely exclude facts from our political discussions and jettison the 400-year-old fetish. At this point, would anything be that different? Freed from the trivial battle of fact against fact, perhaps we might spend more time on the difference between right and wrong.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than “shared values”. Practically, it was an implicit warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflict raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled Left-wing deep state must end — or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Hillary Clinton would later put it, if social media companies “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.”

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the US Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

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Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (i.e. state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was effectively, as one federal judge later described it, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could force internet companies the world over — including US companies — to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access. This imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century.

American “partners” quickly began setting up a network of structures to force global internet content “moderation” as part of a de facto counter-populist alliance. This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube into signing the “Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online”, which required the “removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours” and ordered them to “remove or disable access to such content” permanently. Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of “trusted reporters”, i.e. a network of ideologically aligned media organizations, often funded by the state. Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalized a vast array of “misinformation”, or the UK’s “Online Safety Act”, which made illegal such vaguely hateful behavior as causing “needless anxiety” and “non-trivial psychological or physical harm”.

This process of regulatory political containment reached its ultimate form in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which began to come into legal force in 2023 and is now fully operational. The DSA’s “main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation”, and it does so by threatening to fine any internet platform anywhere in the world (from social media to app stores) up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down “false” or “harmful” content within a matter of hours. Information fit to be censored is determined by small committees of “experts” chosen by the European Commission. Overall the DSA is, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has rightly put it, “the most comprehensive censorship law ever passed in a Western democracy.”

For a long time, these regulatory methods worked. As revealed by the “Twitter Files” uncovered by reporters like Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, Twitter employees were for example regularly producing enthusiastic reports on the company’s global compliance with Germany’s NetzDG. Overall, Twitter’s legal policy office reported internally that it was “spending 50% or more” of its time “on global regulation” and compliance with foreign censorship demands by 2022.

The construction of this counter-populist system was formalized as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the “Christchurch Call to Action” summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers, and “civil society and partner organizations” to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online”. These commitments were self-described as “wide ranging, covering everything from applying appropriate laws and regulation to specific technical measures, to efforts to address the underlying drivers of terrorism”. (“Underlying drivers” in practice here meaning Right-populist and anti-establishment political views, quickly expanding to include any dissenting views on Covid and misgovernance during the pandemic.)

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Following this, the world saw an explosion of hundreds of “non-governmental” organizations, think tanks, “fact checkers”, and academic misinformation “researchers”, all sprouting up to help coordinate censorship without borders. These organizations provided ready-made “expertise” on which governments and technology platforms could draw when deciding who to target for silencing or worse. Additionally, they could provide cover by giving the whole scheme a sheen of independence and scientific objectivity. They quickly became integral to the counter-populist project. In particular, these outfits became adept at coordinating campaigns to cut off financing for political opponents and ideological adversaries by pressuring advertisers into boycotting dissenting websites, platforms, and media outlets by smearing them as dangerous extremists.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British Labour Party cutout, proved especially effective at this ploy, successfully cutting off ad revenue flowing to perceived Right-wing sites. It also managed to drive away many advertisers from Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, with leaked CCDH documents later revealing the outfit had explicitly listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic priority. CCDH did far more than this, however; it worked hand-in-hand with governments to provide enemies lists and custom-made excuses for censoring political opponents. When CCDH published a report labeling 12 influential Covid lockdown skeptics as the dangerous “Disinformation Dozen”, 12 Democratic Party attorney generals in the United States all inexplicably sent a letter on the same day to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook citing the CCDH report and demanding the Disinformation Dozen be deplatformed. It was later revealed that the NGO and the Democratic Party had regularly shared drafts and coordinated their attacks in advance, which was of course precisely the point.

Moreover, CCDH appears to have acted as a dedicated foreign lobbyist, meeting continuously with US legislative staff and reporting internally on making “progress towards change in USA and support for STAR” — STAR being a proposed “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media” that CCDH seemed convinced America could be cajoled into adopting if Democratic Party rule continued. Perhaps this is part of what Vice President of the European Commission Věra Jourová was referring to when, at Davos two years ago, she confidently asserted that European-style hate speech laws were something “which you will have soon also in the US”.

The US Department of Justice now appears to be considering whether CCDH has therefore engaged in a coordinated foreign influence campaign while failing to register as the agent of a foreign power (the UK). Given that the Labour Party was found to have sent as many as 100 staff to the United States to help campaign for Kamala Harris, something the Trump campaign blasted at the time as “blatant foreign interference”, the Trump DOJ seems unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments for the organization’s innocence and independence.

CCDH is just one of many similar organizations, however, including groups like Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index. Collectively, these organizations have, as an UnHerd investigation found, successfully established a cartel of “invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising” and media “fact checking”. Their purpose has been to distort and control the factual information and narratives reaching the public. In other words, they were established as political weapons.

It is striking that a significant proportion of these organizations and similar outfits, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), are commonly both partially state-funded (often by multiple countries on both sides of the Atlantic) and maintain deep connections to the various agencies of the security state. ASD’s founding board, for example, notably included such figures as John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, Richard Ledgett, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency during the Obama Administration, and Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council for Obama.

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This overlap is no coincidence. As the reporter Jacob Siegel has expertly detailed, after 2016 the American security establishment began to turn the tools and tactics of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency warfare, and regime change that it had developed abroad back onto its own people. Particularly after the Christchurch Call, other Western intelligence and security services, especially among the “Five Eyes” Anglosphere intelligence sharing alliance, followed suit. They began to dramatically ramp up their direct cooperation to counter “disinformation” and leverage their own propaganda machines to “win hearts and minds”. In the US, for instance, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a military intelligence unit tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, began to surveil and report on British citizens (despite claiming operations were directed only overseas) while working with other British government agencies and cooperating with other Five Eyes intelligence services on influence operations.

These security services had folded the perceived domestic threat of populist movements into their emerging theories and doctrines of “fifth-generation warfare”, in which the digital revolution is believed to have transformed the world of geopolitical competition into a global “omnipresent battlefield” characterized by persistent cyberwarfare and a constant struggle over “information and perception”. In this view, the minds of citizens (or “cognitive infrastructure”, as governments began to unironically refer to them) are terrain that has to be constantly fought over with rivals like Russia. This made populists the equivalent of foreign adversaries, rather than merely normal domestic political opponents.

Such a pressing threat seemed to necessitate what was described as a “whole of society” approach, meaning the totalizing integration of government, military, private sector, and non-profit spheres, as well as international organizations, in service of defending “democracy”. This united front of public and private organizational power is the real “deep state”. And it is why we quickly began to see intelligence services working so closely with activist NGOs like CCDH, or with putatively private firms like Graphika, a for-profit “social network analysis” company that was initially funded by the US Defense Department to fight terrorist propaganda but then redeployed to identify and censor public discourse about Covid and other concerns.

In short, the transatlantic alliance has for years been waging a hybrid information war on the American public. Above all, its objective was to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the populism he represents. But that war failed: Trump is back and, as Vance warned the political and military leaders assembled in Munich, “there is a new sheriff in town”. The British and European allies of former president Joe Biden have been left stranded in digital trenches on the losing side of an American cold civil war. Vance was politely informing them that their cyber-soldiers had better pack up and leave the conflict zone immediately.

Vance reiterated this to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the White House this week, saying: “Look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British but also affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.” He was not just talking here about American discomfort with British and European disregard for the abstract value of free speech, he was referring to their active information warfare against the United States, its new government, its companies, and its citizens. So when Starmer stammered in reply that “certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across US citizens, and we don’t…” that excuse was both transparently false and unlikely to cut it with the new sheriff.

If Britain and Europe don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reining in their intelligence services, completely cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organizations like CCDH, and backing off of legal frameworks like the DSA and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders.

Washington’s message to its putative allies is clear: end the information war and get the hell out. Or else they may find that the new US government is willing to impose real political and economic consequences for any continued aggression.