If you watched yesterday’s senate judiciary hearings with CEOs from Twitter and Facebook, two things would have stuck out to you. First, why is Jack Dorsey addressing the senate from the kitchen department at an IKEA? Second, how did a judiciary hearing about misinformation campaigns somehow turn into a misinformation campaign itself? At the heart of this hearing were social media companies making more information available to users to address misinformation; why weren’t any senators interested in examining the facts surrounding such decisions, I wonder? Rather, senators demonstrated an eye-rolling indifference to truth and instead took the opportunity to peddle their own conspiracy theories of partisan bias, chastising the companies for doing actual fact finding whenever the facts contradicted a senator’s version of reality. The entire thing ended up one big partisan temper tantrum, and was an embarrassment to the American people, frankly.

Truth and facts – regardless of topic, have never been, and never will be a matter of partisan perspective, and anyone who tells you differently is a politician. Truth doesn’t work in reverse – it is impossible to start with a narrative, and then create a truth to accommodate it, yet that’s how our terribly dysfunctional political system has worked for the past four years. One can only draw a perspective out of an interpretation of truth based on the facts, and without accurate facts, narrative ends up where it is today – anything you want it to be, if you’re willing to torture truth to be what you wish it was. But facts don’t change just because you “believe” something different, and when genuine facts disagree with your narrative, you just look like an ass trying to wage war against it.

Alas, politicians aren’t known for operating in truth. Quite the contrary, politicians are known throughout history to excel at lying. Were this not true, there would be little need for fact finders in this country. It was quite ironic to see the people doing the fact finding getting roasted by the very reason we need fact finding in the first place. How ironic it is, that those who govern by our consent should be the ones to criticize the watchers.