We’re less than a week out from another federal election here in Canada, so it’s time for another of my super-perceptive and unerringly prophetic political posts.

The story of this election has been the crazy reversal of fortunes in the polling. Up until the beginning of January the Conservatives were predicted to be on their way to winning in a walk. Then . . . well, here’s the graph (you can click on it to make it easier to read):

That is crazy. The way the election flipped on a dime (if that metaphor makes sense) represents one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history. In fact, for its speed and for the size of the swing it probably is the most dramatic turnaround we’ve ever seen. How did this happen?

I don’t think there’s any mystery to it at all. There were three drivers.

(1) On January 6 Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning as prime minister. It was time. People were tired of him. I said in my notes on a previous election that he made me sick. The rap against him was that he was a pretty boy with great hair who looked good on TV but was a mental lightweight. I think that’s pretty accurate. What I could never understand is how poor a retail politician he was. As his critics never tired of pointing out, he’d been a drama teacher. Why was he such a lousy communicator?

Was he a bad prime minister? He didn’t have an easy time of it what with dealing with Trump and a pandemic. But even so it’s hard to think of his having much of a legacy. Not that this is always a bad thing.

Anyway, getting rid of him gave the Liberals a big bounce. Personally I think Mark Carney is a smart guy but also an arrogant establishment man of the type that the Liberal Party has always elevated to positions of power. I doubt he’ll wear well, but for the moment he’s been able to sell himself as a change candidate as he’s never been a politician. That he’s been the creature of politicians, running the central bank in Canada and then the U.K., seems not to have hurt him yet.

(2) Also on January 6 the American congress certified the election of Donald Trump, beginning his second term. This was probably the biggest factor in swinging the race, for two reasons. First of all, Trump has behaved in an unhinged manner right out of the gate, swinging wildly in terms of foreign policy while managing to insult and offend everyone. It’s hard to overstate how despised a figure he is outside of his base.

This has affected our election not so much because Trump has tainted the political right in Canada (Doug Ford successfully ran against Trump in winning Ontario’s provincial election) but because Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, has made a career out of acting like a Trump Mini-Me. Every part of his campaign has been drawn from the Trump playbook, down to saying that Carney was somehow illegitimate for being chosen by a party congress. And the fact is, Canada’s Conservatives just aren’t as good at this stuff as the MAGA movement. Their commercials this cycle, for example, have been terrible. But the bottom line is that while Poilievre has tried to put some distance between himself and Trump, the stink is on him too deep, and it’s shown in the polls.

(3) In a polarized political environment, and with our stupid and outmoded first-past-the-post electoral system, third party support has collapsed. That yellow line on the graph marks the fading fortunes of the NDP. They look like they’re going to get crushed, and all those voters are going to the Liberals, in a strategic shift trying to block the Conservatives.

I don’t think this means the end of the NDP though. I mean, I’ve been predicting the death (even “annihilation”) of the Greens for the last three elections, and they’re still holding on (and good for them!). But I do think Jagmeet Singh is gone after this. Politicians have expiry dates and he’s reached his.

As for predictions, the race is tightening but I’m guessing the Liberals stay ahead and may even pick up a majority. Ontario in particular will be a rock for them, seeing as it just went Tory provincially and voters tend to split the difference. The polls are probably right and I don’t think things will change much between now and election day, in part because there isn’t much time but even more so because this past weekend saw record-breaking turnout for advance polls. My own polling station was just a five-minute walk from where I live so I dropped by on several occasions after I saw the line was too long to bother waiting. I finally voted Saturday night. So the election may already be decided.

Political punditry potpourri

We live in political times, which is an observation that isn’t diminished by the fact that in many democracies a lot of people don’t care about politics at all. We know this because  of voter turnout numbers, a measure of what is the most minimal level of political involvement.

This is a point I first started thinking seriously about twenty years ago while reviewing the pollster Michael Adams’s book American Backlash. “Non-voters are the majority non-party in American politics,” I said in my review. At the time, the most recent presidential election had been in 2004, which felt like another very political time, what with George W. Bush running for a second term after the Iraq War. As a percentage of the voting-age population though the turnout was only 56.7%. In 2024 it was 59%, which was actually down 3.8% from the 2020 presidential election.

In the U.K. general elections in 2024 the voter turnout was nearly the same at 60%, which was the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4%.

Canada does a little better federally, averaging in the mid-60s in the last couple of decades. But again, these numbers are all national. At the state and provincial level the numbers drop considerably. In Ontario’s just finished provincial election the voter turnout was 45.4% of eligible voters. This was one percent higher than the last provincial election, which was the lowest voter turnout in the history of our provincial elections.

Drill down to the municipal level and the numbers drop even further. In my hometown’s last municipal election in 2022 only 28% of eligible voters voted. A number that was down 8% from 2018! The 2023 mayoral election in Toronto had a turnout of 38%. To take a random municipal election from the U.K., the turnout for the Sunderland City Council election in 2024 was 30.8%. The 2024 mayoral election for London hit 40.5%.

What this seems to underline is the fact that, to invert the famous adage often associated with the American politician Tip O’Neill that all politics is local, today all politics is national. Just as local news media have been dying, leaving no one covering city hall, the public’s attention has been focused more and more exclusively on politics at the national level. And with the importance of the Internet to fundraising this has only become more pronounced.

This is something I find very concerning, for reasons that I’ve talked about before. Chief among these is the fact that a lot of national political debate is of less direct consequence to citizens than what is going on at the local level, and that if no one is paying attention to what’s happening locally you’re opening the door to a level of corruption that (I think) would shock people if they were aware of it. I know I’ve been shocked by it when I’ve had dealings with local government in both rural and urban areas. You know things are bad when a single family has half-a-dozen members filling different jobs on council. But it’s rare to get reporting on this in places that have become “news deserts.”

But to go back to where I started, it’s been locked in for decades now that slightly more than a third of all eligible voters in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. do not vote and will never vote. If non-voters were a party they would win every election. And that’s at the federal level. On the provincial or municipal level the non-voter party would win landslide majorities. Does this constitute a functional democracy?

If so, I think it’s one that could be improved. In the lead-up to Ontario’s recent provincial election. the Toronto.com website had a poll asking people who seldom or never vote why they don’t vote. 62.5% said their vote wouldn’t make any difference. They are right to be so disillusioned. The three English-speaking jurisdictions I’ve been talking about all use a first-past-the-post electoral system rather than one based on proportional representation. In Germany, which has a proportional representation system, the 2025 general election had a voter turnout of 82.5%, which is the highest since German reunification.

I think proportional representation is a better system, but there’s no chance the political parties will allow it to happen here, as public apathy to it as an issue means there’s no call for change. That non-voting party seems to want to keep their official status of invisibility.

A few weeks ago I found a post on another site where someone had asked an AI to write a film review. The results were what I think you might expect: a bland, clichéd summary of opinion such as you’d get from a review aggregator.

The reason this is what you’d expect is because the way these programs work (and I’m aware that people who understand this field better don’t even consider it to be AI) is to just take all the data there is on a subject and melt it down to something that sounds like a general consensus. So of course it’s going to be clichéd and derivative. Cliché is, by definition, the most common form of expression in the datasets from which it draws on.

What we’re left with is the hive mind, which is where we were heading anyway what with review aggregators and the like. The “wisdom of crowds” is a distillation not of the best that has been thought and said but of everything that’s been thought and said. And I think for a lot of people, and for different purposes, that may be good enough. For people who read genre fiction by the bale, those looking for executive summaries of generally held views, or students looking for a precis.

In the field of aesthetic response or opinion writing, however, is this the best we can expect? I started thinking about this because of an article I read online at the Yahoo! Sports page covering NFL football. I originally pulled a blank on the byline “Castmagic.” Was that a person? People have lots of strange names these days so I thought it possible. But when I clicked on the link to read it I found this:

(This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy. Please reach out to us if you notice any mistakes.)

I immediately had some questions. It was just a short opinion piece, so what did it mean that it was written “with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team”? My own sense was that it was written entirely by AI and just proofread and copyedited for factual errors or anything that might get Yahoo! in trouble. I also wondered if this was a direction more news organizations, and not just Internet ones, were going to be heading in.

The subject of the piece was the New York Giants football team. The Giants were a very bad team last year, resulting in their having a high pick in the upcoming draft. They don’t have a clear starting quarterback on their roster and it’s usually assumed that a team in such a situation will pick the best QB on their draft board as this is the most important position to have filled. So the question posed to “Castmagic” was “Is it time for the Giants to draft a quarterback?”

Things didn’t get off to a good start: “As the dust settles from the 2024 NFL season, it’s evident that some teams face more pivotal offseasons than others.”

Well, duh. We’re hit in the face with a cliché right off the bat, followed up by an obvious truism. I didn’t need an AI to tell me this.

As “Castmagic” went along it mostly borrowed from an earlier column on the same subject written by one of Yahoo!’s (human) sports writers. But if I’d been that particular writer I don’t think I’d look at this as being the sincerest form of flattery. I’d probably be worried for my job.

Did “Chatmagic” have any original insights to offer on the question of whether the Giants should draft a QB? No. Here’s the conclusion:

In the end, the Giants’ path forward hinges on navigating the delicate balance between short-term success and long-term strategic planning. Whether through drafting a quarterback or trading down to solidify the entire roster, the Giants face decisions that could define the franchise for years to come. Only time will reveal if they choose wisely.

Really? That’s the takeaway? The Giants have options and “only time will tell” if they make the right choice?

Will “Chatmagic” get better? I think it will, if only because I don’t see how it can get any worse. Or less useful. But I think these early, baby steps give some indication of the issues going forward, at least when it comes to this form of writing. How can an opinion of any value on any subject be fashioned out of a dataset that is just a collection of everybody else’s opinion? These programs aren’t interested in original insights or finding out the truth. Are they even capable of that? Only time will tell . In the meanwhile, what we have now reads like a page of Google search results, just the repackaging of random information, some of which is no doubt total garbage, into a paste of content that you can skim your eyes over before clicking onto what’s next.

There were some 50 comments on the article the last time I checked. Most of them piling on the “dummies” who write sports opinions for Yahoo! Only one of them registered that it had been written by an AI.

Today former finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland announced she is entering the race to become the next leader of the Liberal Party. Her decision comes just after that of Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor.

Freeland has to be considered the front runner at this point. She was always touted as a successor to Justin Trudeau, and it was her break-up with Trudeau that basically led to his swift (albeit overdue) downfall. The only other people who have declared themselves as running are Jaime Battiste, Frank Baylis, and Chandra Arya. I have no idea who any of them are. I doubt anyone else does either. Even their constituents.

I think Freeland and Carney are both probably bright people, but have no business running for this position. Freeland got her start as a journalist, and wrote a book on growing wealth inequality called Plutocrats a dozen years ago that I think holds up pretty well. But I don’t think she’s a particularly charismatic type or that aware a politician. She might be a slightly more palatable Hillary Clinton, which isn’t nearly palatable enough. Compared to the rest of the field, however, she stands out. Carney has zero personality and I honestly can’t think of why he’s running. He’s everything Michael Ignatieff was and less. I’ll be shocked if he gets anywhere.

What we have here then are a pair of establishment stiffs who I guess plan to dampen enthusiasm and lean into their lack of personality as an antidote to right-wing, anti-establishment, social media-driven politics. And I don’t think there’s any doubt about who they’re really going to be running against in the next federal election. That is, Donald Trump. Which worked for Justin Trudeau, a complete political moron, but may not be enough to seal the deal again, despite Trump’s best efforts.

Anyway, these are just preliminary thoughts that I’m sure I’ll be revisiting as the next federal election looms into view. My expectations are low, but that means that any surprises may be pleasant ones.

Over the last eight years I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing books about Donald Trump, so with his re-election I thought I’d post a few preliminary thoughts and provisional observations that I will no doubt be returning to for modification and expansion as we move forward. That is, if I don’t decide to unplug from the discussion entirely, which is something I’m starting to consider.

Exercising my nearly perfect record of failure when it comes to political prognostication, I thought Kamala Harris was going to win the 2024 election. Both because she performed very well (and much better than expected) and ran what I thought was a solid campaign, but also because I thought there was a lot more Trump fatigue out there. Leading up the election there was a refrain I heard among many of my American friends (and not a few Canadians as well) that they were just “so sick of the guy.” And I’d add that these were by no means just lefties saying this. It was George Will who prophesied that Trump’s demise would be the result of his becoming boring, which he assuredly was, but on election day a majority of Americans signed up for another four years of the Trump Show. I didn’t think there was that much appetite out there for such programming. I thought people were fed up. I was wrong.

I also thought Trump ran a very bad campaign, by the end of which he appeared so tired and sounded so incoherent that more than one observer thought he was actually trying to lose. He seemed cooked to me, and I don’t think that was a false impression. Just since 2020 he has clearly taken a significant step down in his mental functioning and I would put his chances of serving out his entire term to be only 50/50 at best. Despite his usual bluster about being a perfect mental and physical specimen, he is old and not in good health. But I guess as long as doctors can keep him upright he’ll do for the establishment. As the anti-government crusader Grover Norquist once described his ideal president: “We don’t need someone who can think. We need someone with enough digits to hold a pen.”

There have already been many Democratic post mortems. I don’t know how convincing or even useful they are. There are still some hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters out there who see him as representing a populist turn the party should have taken in 2016. I don’t think Sanders could have won in 2016 and I still don’t see him as a viable national candidate, as popular as he is personally and how well some of his policies play. The non-partisan establishment would crush him. That same establishment despises Trump, but they know he can be bought. A point I’ll return to.

The most common explanation for Harris’s failure is that inflation was the deciding factor in the election. Perhaps. But America has experienced higher inflation and it had anyway come down to the point where it was lower than when Biden took office. Not to mention that inflation is largely out of the control of a president. During the campaign Trump not only gave no explanation of what he would try to do about it, one of his few absolute declarations on economic policy – the imposition of staggering tariffs – would be inflationary by definition. If it was the “economy, stupid,” then the U.S. had one that, as even The Economist declared weeks before the election, was “the envy of the world,” and was the strongest it had enjoyed since the 1960s. None of that mattered.

Many people also say that Harris was hurt by not having been chosen in a primary. I don’t see how that would have helped her much at all. Yes, Biden, who was far too old for the job (as is Trump), should have announced he was only going to serve a single term at the outset of his presidency, but that would have put the party in an awkward spot, as Harris wasn’t seen at the time as an attractive candidate and it would have seemed strange to have made her Vice President and then immediately rejected her for the top job.

My own sense, which I share with the outspoken Saunders, is that cultural issues didn’t help the Democrats, and haven’t for a while now. They should probably walk away from identity politics, which many people (especially white, working-class people) have come to see as a scam and that have often accelerated into comic depths of virtue signaling and self-flagellation. What I mean is stuff like Trans rights (from pronouns to athletics), DEI initiatives, or anything that can be made to fit under the label “woke.” In Canada I think Indigenous issues are taking on much the same character. People are sick of hearing about this stuff. I get an earful of people complaining about it nearly every day. What the Democrats need is someone who will declare that “the era of identity politics is over” and that social justice initiatives are dead. This does not mean endorsing or turning a blind eye to racism or sexism or whatever but it does mean the end of the government being active in trying to fix the same. It’s not like pursuing these policies are doing the Democrats any good, as both women and people of colour have moved toward Trump while white people without a college education (not a minority among the American electorate) have solidified as a Republican base.

But in the end, looking at the breakdown of the vote, I mostly agree with those who say there probably wasn’t anything Trump could have done to lose. The media, understood broadly, is entirely right-wing now. And by media “understood broadly” I mean talk radio (iHeartRadio, formerly Clear Channel), social media platforms (X), and podcasters (Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, et al.). Newspapers like the New York Times don’t count anymore, and Fox News still rules cable (drawing nearly double the viewers of either MSNBC or CNN on election night). Yes, everyone lives in their own media bubble now, but the right-wing bubble holds a lot more voters. As Michael Tomasky observes:

Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.

…

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

Fed a diet from such information (not quite news) sources, people felt the country was on the wrong track and voted for change. Voting for change is frequently what happens, but I’m never sure if it’s just optimism (change can only be for the better) or anger at whoever’s in power. Either way, I think in this case it was a mistake.

As so many of the top office holders in his first administration warned, Trump is not fit to be president and poses a grave threat to American democracy. At his age it is also clear he is not going to change, pivot, or become more presidential. He is going to behave like he did in his first term, only worse because he is mentally failing and there will be no guardrails. So we can expect a lot more anger, grievance, and resentment.

What will be the practical results of his election? I imagine most of Project 2025 is a go. Which means turning America into Hungary, or some other one-party state ruled by an oligarchy (the label fascism, which got a lot of play late in the campaign, is an outdated twentieth-century relic). While Trump himself may not be behind Project 2025, or even know much about it, that really doesn’t matter since all reports from his first term made it clear that he has little to no interest in actually governing. As one of the Republicans running against him in the primaries put it, the only reason he wanted to be president was to make money and stay out of jail. I very much believe that to be the case. And so the criminal investigations against him will now be set aside and I think even a conservative estimate would put his expected windfall from grifting in the office will personally net him in the billions of dollars from tycoons and foreign governments looking to curry favour.

I don’t know what the foreign policy consequences will be, but can’t imagine much positive from someone who has made no secret about his admiration and respect for dictators and his general ignorance of international affairs. I’m willing to bet he’s unable to find Taiwan on a map, and he may not need to in another few years. Which may be true for Ukraine as well.

On the domestic front I assume the push to emulate Hungary (or Russia, or China) will continue apace, working in tandem with the global forces Anne Applebaum dubbed Autocracy, Inc. I don’t see where any pushback is going to come from. The main thing I feel confident predicting though is that we are going to see kleptocracy run mad. The looting of the American state is about to begin, on a scale (to borrow a favourite Trumpism) never before seen in the history of the world. Back during his first term Sarah Kendzior characterized the Republican plan for America as being to “strip it for its parts,” and Trump presided over an administration more corrupt and indeed criminal than any the U.S. had ever experienced. Well, expect that to ramp up bigly. The copper wires are going to be ripped from the walls, the plumbing fixtures torn out, and the lead taken from the roofs. Switching metaphors, the cookie jar is going to be wide open and sitting out on the table for at least the next two years. To indulge a more speculative take, one way I could see this imploding is with the combination of a push for total deregulation of the financial sector coupled with the mad schemes of the crypto pushers leading to a crisis perhaps even greater than the 2008 mortgage meltdown. That’s only one of the unhappy shocks we might have in store though.

As Aditya Chakrabortty put it, “Trump will almost certainly plunder from the budgets for social security and Medicaid. Social services will be cut. The tech bros will suckle on government subsidies, while the suits from private equity get to set government policy.” The rich are about to get a lot richer and the poor are going to take a hit. After the election one of the aphorisms of H. L. Mencken soon started making the rounds: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

A lot of this goes back to the kind of thing Thomas Frank wondered about in What’s the Matter With Kansas? By channeling social issues (politics is downstream from culture!), the political right tricks the poor and working class to vote against their economic interests. There’s some truth in that, and I’m saying that from the perspective of someone who tends to vote for parties that want to tax me more, while getting tax cuts delivered to me by people who really can’t afford them. I guess I can’t complain too much, but I’m not thanking anyone either.

It’s all a bit discouraging. I think the United States is a great country full of great people that has been irresponsibly led for a while now by politicians of all parties. Yes, competent political leadership is in short supply everywhere (Canada and the UK are recent grim examples) but even disliking government as much as I do that’s no reason to blow everything up. I’d like to think Trump marks a kind of nadir or lowest point in the American experiment in democracy, but things can always get worse and I think they probably will. One thing I’ve learned following Trump’s career is that there is no bottom.

Today, President Joe Biden announced that he won’t be standing for re-election. This didn’t come as a big surprise, as it had become evident, glaringly evident since his debate performance against Trump, that he could no longer communicate and hence campaign effectively. What surprised me, and something I still can’t explain, is that he made the announcement by posting a letter on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).

Why X? The platform is not a trusted or respected news source. Nor is it even a platform with that great a reach. Its prominence, even back when it was Twitter, was always overstated mainly because it was used by a lot of reporters.

It is also owned by Elon Musk, someone who has pledged massive funding to elect Biden’s rival.

Biden could have got air time or coverage on any network or platform or service and the statement would have been picked up and immediately re-posted and broadcast everywhere else. So why was it released on X? I’ve never had a Twitter or X account, and only used to go on it occasionally to scroll through some posts back when it was Twitter because they let you do that without registering. You can’t do that anymore, which is one of the reasons X has been losing traffic as well as revenue since Musk’s takeover.

I think Biden dropping out was the right call. He’s much too old. Trump is also much too old, but he’s in a category all his own. Leaving that aside though, I don’t see why Biden would make such an important announcement on a platform like X. Surely there was a better way to break the news.

Here’s a little something I said five years ago, on the occasion of a Liberal cabinet minister calling out the prime minister and being congratulated for telling “her truth”:

I’ve been vaguely aware of this expression for a while but I’m not sure where it got started. As near as I can tell, when someone says they appreciate you telling your truth what they’re saying is that they don’t believe what you are saying is true, but they accept that you believe it to be true. It’s very much a backhanded way of saying nothing much. It’s also a perfect political soundbite. In response to the recent accusation of inappropriate behaviour on the part of possible presidential candidate Joe Biden, other Democratic candidates again rushed to acknowledge the complainant coming forward with “her truth.” I guess this covers the bases pretty nicely, without committing anyone to saying what the truth in any particular situation is.

But isn’t this a problem? By just saying that someone has told their truth aren’t we making the claim that no objective truth can be arrived at or is recoverable? That everything is relative to one’s own subjective experience? How is this different from a world where nothing is true and everything is possible?

I found myself thinking about this again recently in response to a couple of news stories, and feel nudged toward saying a bit more. I’ll put it in the form of an appeal: Can we please stop referring to someone as speaking their truth?

The first story has to do with the claim made by Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, that Munro took the side of Skinner’s stepfather after it came to light that he had sexually abused Skinner as a child. I found this revealing in many ways (apparently “everybody knew” about this, but in the approved manner of Canadian literary circles they didn’t talk about it in public), but it was the end of the story that caught my attention. This is from the CBC report:

Munro’s Books, a bookstore Alice Munro founded in Victoria with her first husband, James, posted a statement on its website supporting Skinner. The bookstore has been independently owned since 2014.

“Munro’s Books unequivocally supports Andrea Robin Skinner as she publicly shares her story of her sexual abuse as a child,” the store said. “Learning the details of Andrea’s experience has been heartbreaking.”

The bookstore also released a statement on its website from Andrea, her siblings Jenny and Sheila, and her step-brother Andrew.

“By acknowledging and honouring Andrea’s truth, and being very clear about their wish to end the legacy of silence, the current store owners have become part of our family’s healing,” they said. “We wholly support the owners and staff.”

Is this really unequivocal support? What does it mean to acknowledge and honour “Andrea’s truth”? Doesn’t such a statement imply that they’re not taking a side? Because after all, they’re not saying Skinner is telling the truth, only that she’s telling her truth.

The second story, also reported by the CBC, has it that Indigenous Services Canada is concerned about people who are not of indigenous ancestry claiming identity in that group anyway in order to take advantage of various professional benefits. Apparently this phenomenon is known as “race-shifting” (the people who do it are called “pretendians”) and there are concerns that it is spreading into Canada’s huge public service, which is, as one academic puts it, “fertile ground for race-shifting given the job security, lucrative salaries and its size.”

The solution, according to the Deputy Minister in charge of Indigenous Services? Well, “the key is to honestly tell your truth.” But isn’t that how this problem got started? I don’t want a bunch of frauds telling their truth, however honestly they may go about it.

Hasn’t this nonsense gone on long enough? What does it even mean to speak or tell “your truth”? I suppose the point is that if you believe something is true then it is true for you, and that’s all that matters. Or more poisonously, as George Costanza put it on Seinfeld, it can’t be a lie if you believe it.

In trying to be non-judgmental the term has become a dismissive and condescending insult. “Oh, I’m so glad that you’re telling your truth,” we say. It’s like smiling at someone in therapy. Because we’re quite deliberately not taking any kind of a stand on what the truth is. In fact, as I said five years ago, I think there’s a clear implication when we say someone is telling their truth that we don’t think they’re telling the truth at all.

And are we always so agnostic? Think of election denialism in the United States. Are the people who claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump to be graciously accepted as telling their truth, even if we know they’re not telling the truth? I don’t see that happening.

Yes, there are many different truths out there. And some things may be true for us and not true for others. But truth isn’t always so personal and subjective. To even say of matters that have been adjudicated that they only constitute some individual’s personal truth is to indulge in a relativism so absolute as to be nihilistic. Enough is enough.