I was reviewing the first few posts I had written for this site when I realized something uncomfortable: I had done the very thing I am about to ask you not to do. I had stated opinions as though they were facts. I had used absolutes I could not prove. In posts built on sourced data and careful citations, I had still let unverified claims slip through — because they felt true.
This is a human condition — and if the research is any indication, none of us are immune (Strömbäck et al., 2024). Most of us have probably done it at one point or another. It does not make us stupid. It makes us human — and it makes us vulnerable.
That moment — that tiny, almost imperceptible decision to accept what we are told instead of verifying it for ourselves — is one of the greatest threats to self-governance in America today. Not any one politician. Not any one party. Not any one cable news network. The threat is the quiet, comfortable habit of letting someone else do our thinking for us.
In fact, I will let you in on something: this post you are reading right now? I had to rewrite it. Multiple times. Because in a post about objective truth, I kept catching myself making claims I could not actually prove — stating opinions as facts, using absolutes where I should have used qualifiers, and doing the exact thing this post argues against. If the irony of that is not lost on you, good. It was not lost on me either.
What Do We Mean by “Objective Truth”?
Let’s keep this simple, because the concept itself is simple — even though entire industries have been built on making it seem complicated.
Objective truth is what remains true regardless of how you feel about it, who told you about it, or which political team you play for.
The national debt is a number. It does not care whether a Republican or a Democrat created it. Unemployment is a statistic derived from actual data — it does not change because a pundit on television tells you the economy “feels” bad or “feels” good. A bill that passed Congress either contains a specific provision or it does not. You can read it yourself. These things are verifiable. They are knowable. They are not opinions.
The philosopher William P. Alston spent his career at Syracuse University defending what he called alethic realism — the straightforward idea that a statement is true if what it describes matches reality. That is it. Not true because it is popular. Not true because an authority figure says so. Not true because your preferred news source reported it. True because it corresponds to what actually is (Alston, 1996).
This might sound obvious. But if it were truly obvious, the spin doctors would be out of a job.
The Rise of the Spin Doctor
The term “spin doctor” entered the American vocabulary on October 21, 1984, during the Reagan-Mondale presidential debates, when a New York Times editorial described the senior political advisers who would descend on reporters immediately after the debate ended, “spouting confident opinions” and trying to shape how the event would be reported before journalists could form their own conclusions (“The debate and the spin doctors,” 1984). Four days later, The Washington Post picked up the term, with reporter Elisabeth Bumiller defining spin doctors as “the advisers who talk to reporters and try to put their own spin, or analysis, on the story” (Bumiller, 1984). By 1986, the term had become prominent enough that William Safire devoted his influential “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine to tracing its etymology (Safire, 1986). Merriam-Webster defines a spin doctor as “a person (such as a political aide) responsible for ensuring that others interpret an event from a particular point of view.” The metaphor comes from sports — the spin you put on a ball to make it curve away from its natural path.
That was forty years ago. The spin doctors never left. They got bigger budgets.
For the sake of transparency, I am a registered Independent — not because I do not care about politics, but because I care too much to let either party do my thinking for me. And here is something that makes my blood boil — not as a liberal, not as a conservative, but as an American citizen and a taxpayer:
In 2023 alone, interest groups spent a record $4.2 billion lobbying federal lawmakers, according to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan research organization that tracks money in politics using data from the Senate Office of Public Records (OpenSecrets, 2024). The federal government itself spends approximately $1.5 billion of your tax dollars per year on public relations activities — that includes both contracted advertising services and the salaries of roughly 5,000 public affairs officers on the federal payroll (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2016). And political advertising spending is projected to hit $10.8 billion for the 2026 midterm elections alone (OpenSecrets, 2026).
These are not conspiracy theories. These are line items in budgets. Filed in quarterly reports. Exposed by a federal watchdog agency. We are paying for the privilege of being spun.
There are entire industries — not a handful of shady operatives, but industries — whose profession is to take objective, verifiable facts and reshape them until they support a predetermined conclusion. To make you feel a certain way about something before you have the chance to think about it. And they are very, very good at their jobs.
Hannah Arendt, one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, warned about this decades ago. In her 1968 essay “Truth and Politics,” she wrote that the deliberate manipulation of facts is not just dishonest — it destroys the shared foundation of reality that citizens need in order to govern themselves. When facts become secrets, or when facts are so thoroughly spun that nobody can agree on what actually happened, the public loses its ability to make informed decisions (Arendt, 1968).
Arendt was not writing about social media. She was not writing about cable news. She was writing about something far more fundamental: the human tendency, present in every era, to replace uncomfortable truths with comfortable narratives.
She also observed something chilling that, to me, feels like it was written this morning: the long-term result of systematic lying is not that people believe the lies. It is that people stop believing anything at all. They become cynical, disengaged, and convinced that everyone is lying — so why bother trying to figure out what is true?
Sound familiar?
This Is Not a Left-or-Right Problem
Let’s be very clear about something, because this is where most conversations about truth go off the rails.
It is difficult to find a major political faction in this country that does not engage in spin. If you believe that only “the other side” manipulates information, that belief itself is worth examining. The entire architecture of partisan media, on every side, is built to make you feel like your team tells the truth and the other team lies.
A landmark 2024 study published in the Annals of the International Communication Association reviewed over 1,260 peer-reviewed research articles on misinformation and found that susceptibility to false information crosses every demographic, every political affiliation, and every education level. The researchers noted that misinformation poses what they called “significant threats to democratic deliberation and democracy per se” (Strömbäck et al., 2024).
Per se. That means “in itself.” Misinformation is not just annoying. It is not just frustrating. According to over a decade of cross-disciplinary academic research, it is fundamentally incompatible with a functioning democracy.
And in 2024, the journal Science — one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific publications in the world — published an article stating plainly that democracy requires “epistemic integrity”: a shared base of reliable knowledge from which citizens can debate, disagree, and ultimately make decisions. When that shared base is corrupted, democracy does not function (Lewandowsky & Pomerantsev, 2024).
Let’s read that last part again — it does not say, “functions badly.” It says “democracy does not function.”
Why This Should Matter to You Personally
Maybe you are thinking: Okay, but I’m just one person. What am I supposed to do about a systemic misinformation problem?
More than you think.
Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues found that among the strongest predictors of resistance to misinformation — across multiple countries — is not education level, not income, not political identity. It is critical thinking skill combined with trust in the scientific process. In other words: people who habitually ask “is this actually true, and how do I know?” are significantly harder to mislead (Lewandowsky et al., 2017).
You do not need a PhD to do this. You need a habit.
Here is what that habit looks like in practice:
When someone tells you something outrageous about a politician you dislike — pause. Ask yourself: would I believe this if it were said about someone I support? Then look it up. Not on a site that already agrees with you. Find a primary source — one that deals in verifiable fact, not commentary. A court filing. The actual text of the bill.
When a statistic is used to make you angry — find out where it came from. Who funded the study? What was the sample size? What does the original data actually say versus what the headline claims it says?
When a news story uses words like “slammed,” “destroyed,” “blasted,” or “eviscerated” — recognize that those are not journalism words. Those are engagement words. They are designed to trigger an emotional response before your rational brain has time to engage. Actual journalism tells you what happened. Spin tells you how to feel about it.
When you catch yourself sharing something on social media that you have not personally verified — stop. You are now part of the machine. Every share of unverified information, regardless of your intention, makes the problem worse.
The Founders Knew This Was Coming
The framers of this government were not naive. They understood that self-governance only works when citizens are informed — actually informed, not just opinionated.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be” (Jefferson, 1816).
That sentence is over two hundred years old — yet it is as relevant today as it has ever been.
The founders built a system that assumes — requires — a citizenry capable of evaluating information, questioning authority, and making decisions based on evidence rather than loyalty. When we stop doing that, we are not just failing ourselves. We are failing the design.
What Actually Govern Asks of You
We are not asking you to become a scholar. We are not asking you to distrust everything and everyone. Healthy skepticism is not the same as cynicism.
We are asking you to do the one thing that every spin doctor, every partisan hack, and every bad-faith actor in America is hoping you will not do:
Think before you react.
Verify before you share. Read past the headline. Check the source. Ask who benefits from you believing this particular version of events. And when you catch yourself falling for spin — because you will, because most of us do — have the courage to correct course.
That is not weakness. That is the most powerful thing a citizen can do.
A government of the people, by the people, and for the people requires people who insist on the truth — not their truth, not my truth, but the truth. The kind that does not change based on who is in power.
The spin doctors are counting on you to stay angry, stay tribal, and stay distracted.
Prove them wrong.
The division is the product — and we’re not buying it.
References
Alston, W. P. (1996). A realist conception of truth. Cornell University Press.
Arendt, H. (1968). Truth and politics. In Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought (pp. 227–264). Viking Press.
Bumiller, E. (1984, October 25). The spin doctors. The Washington Post.
Jefferson, T. (1816, January 6). Letter to Charles Yancey. In A. A. Lipscomb & A. E. Bergh (Eds.), The writings of Thomas Jefferson (Vol. 14, p. 384). Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States.
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., & Cook, J. (2017). Beyond misinformation: Understanding and coping with the “post-truth” era. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.07.008
Lewandowsky, S., & Pomerantsev, P. (2024). Truth and democracy in an era of misinformation. Science, 386(6719), 261–266. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads5695
OpenSecrets. (2024, February 12). Lobbying spending hits record $4.2 billion in 2023. OpenSecrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying
OpenSecrets. (2026, January). Political ad spending is projected to reach a new high in 2026 midterms. OpenSecrets News. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/01/political-ad-spending-is-projected-to-reach-a-new-high-in-2026-midterms
Safire, W. (1986, August 31). Calling Dr. Spin. The New York Times Magazine.
Strömbäck, J., Tsfati, Y., Boomgaarden, H., Damstra, A., Lindgren, E., Vliegenthart, R., & Lindholm, T. (2024). Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news: Lessons from an interdisciplinary, systematic literature review. Annals of the International Communication Association, 48(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2024.2323736
The debate and the spin doctors. (1984, October 21). The New York Times.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2016, September). Public relations spending: Selected agencies’ activities supported by contracts and public affairs staff (GAO-16-877). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-711
Actually Govern is a project of Whimsy Books LLC d/b/a Actually Govern. We are non-partisan, unaffiliated with any political party, and committed to civic education over political tribalism.
