I’m originally from Kentucky, though these days I live just across the river in Indiana, and I am still sufficiently bound to the Bluegrass to be deeply embarrassed by its Congressional delegation.
In particular, the blowhard James Comer, who – like so many of his caucusmates – can't be bothered with inconvenient frivolities like legislating; instead, Comer is hellbent on finding someone – anyone! - to impeach. Because “getting even” is his GOP’s top priority, per their party leader.
So he set his sights on President Biden himself. Whether this was a GOP get-even for the impeachment of Donald Trump or simply a high-profile target Comer felt worthy of his ministrations may never be clarified; but he committed to the task with gusto, and on May 3, 2023, he publicly accused President Biden and his son Hunter of accepting a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian oil company when the senior Biden was veep.
Comer buddied up with Sen. Chuck Grassley, chair of House Oversight and Accountability, in writing to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray to make this accusation, supposedly supported by a “highly credible” whistleblower. Part of the whistleblow implicated the DOJ and FBI as having “valuable, verifiable information that you have failed to disclose to the American people.” In their letter, they declared with great piety that since the DOJ and FBI couldn’t be counted upon to follow up on the nefarious Bidens, Congress would conduct its own investigation.
In July, Comer subpoenaed the document containing this “valuable, verifiable information”, which was by definition “raw and unverified”, as it was filed on an FBI FD-1023 form – a form used specifically to document information that is “raw and unverified”. The actual informant involved, Alexander Smirnov, was the source of the allegations that the Bidens had accepted the bribe, and he himself was as sketchy as the content of the document. Comer was warned of this by his colleagues.
When Comer and Grassley got ahold of the document, they let their peers read it in a secure facility. Marjorie Taylor Greene promptly took pictures of it and published them on social media, proclaiming “Joe Biden is a criminal!”, and Grassley himself released the contents of the document, citing it as a “criminal bribery scheme”.
Ted Cruz then joined the fray, citing the “mounting evidence” of the Biden family’s criminality.
Two months later, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched impeachment proceedings – without citing any evidence that any wrongdoing had been committed.
And on Valentine’s Day, 2024 – appropriately – a federal grand jury indicted Smirnov for “creating a false and fictitious record”, with DOJ Special Counsel David Weiss (a Trump appointee) entering a filing declaring Alexander Smirnov to be an agent of Russian intelligence, who has been active in disinformation campaigns extending far beyond the Bidens. A declaration based on (wait for it!) evidence.
To say that Comer’s face is covered with egg is to grossly understate, but the embarrassment of his transparent traducement exposes deeper miasma within: it’s not just about saying things that aren’t true to smear good people to curry favor with ignorant voters, or to sabotage the agendas of the opposition.
It’s about tipping the balance in the ongoing war between belief and evidence.
Belief v. Evidence
Among authoritarians – people who derive emotional comfort from taking their decision-making cues from powerful leaders, and who prefer a hierarchical social organization to an egalitarian one – belief is often the cognitive force that drives them to ascent and commitment. Believing a thing, to such a person, gives it all the weight that’s necessary to act on the basis of it.
This is true of authoritarians in all domains. In authoritarian politics, belief is what renders something true, above all else; belief in what they are being told, or belief in the person saying it, removes all doubt, regardless of any evidence supporting or disproving it.
This is concerning, of course; for belief to ever trump evidence is a horrifying proposition, as it enables falsehood to prevail over truth based on the flimsiest of motivations – the emotional comfort of individuals. It opens the door to a parade of abuses – legal, social, political, economic – and empowers those who are not really worthy to wield authority. And it has, regrettably, been a near-standard behavior of leaders for centuries.
Comer and Grassley have been exposed as leaders of this stripe, having wasted the better part of a year attacking the American president on the basis of their belief that he had done something wrong – a belief based solely on allegation and innuendo, unsupported by any evidence at all. When McCarthy initiated impeachment proceedings without providing any evidentiary foundation for doing so, protests arose from all quarters – including some GOP Congresspeople – decrying the impropriety of invoking such a process without factual support.
When the Republican Congress then successfully impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – again, with no evidence whatsoever – over simple policy differences, the world went bananas, and rightly so. The abuse of the impeachment mechanism for such shallow, craven ends is an offense to the American political system.
But here’s where it gets really odious.
Within the authoritarian system of thought, it isn’t just that belief is favored over evidence, in deciding and acting; prizing belief over evidence is actively rewarded. When an authoritarian rejects evidence to embrace belief, they get a prize; they are incentivized. They are publicly praised; they receive enthusiastic support.
Conversely, when an authoritarian favors evidence over belief, rejecting the belief in favor of provable fact, they are disincentivized – punished - and often ostracized (see Cheney, Liz).
And this principle is emphasized even more powerfully, if that’s possible, in the tradition of another authoritarian population: Evangelical Christians.
In Evangelical Christianity – technically, in all of Christianity, based on its foundational document – faith is prized over evidence. To have faith is the ultimate authentication.
Per the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews – unsigned, but credited to the Apostle Paul - “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
One’s hopes trump one’s observations; what one wishes for supersedes what is.
Put another way, wish fulfillment transcends acceptance of the world.
Perhaps the most important point to be derived here is that in the Evangelical mind, faith constitutes evidence. If you believe something, you can consider it true.
There is no more certain recipe for social catastrophe. There is no more masterful subversion of the human capacity to respond to the world, no more effective dismantling of all that nature built into the human mind to ensure survival.
And a recipe it certainly is. The promotion of faith over evidence is very much a means of instilling within someone a confidence in what isn’t over a confidence in what is. It is pure and simply a means of manipulation; the ultimate means of manipulation.
Don’t believe your eyes and ears and mind; believe this belief instead. It's the most insidious toxin men have concocted in the service of deceit and control.
There could be no deeper subversion of the harmony and efficacy of the human tribe. Because the next belief step away from evidence is to make belief, or faith, the central requirement of tribal membership.
Purity, they call it, in both Evangelical and political circles: if you believe everything our tribe believes, and profess that belief publicly, and commit to acting from those beliefs and no others – then, and only then, you may be one of us.
This is, again, the most potent social toxin humankind has ever devised. It has been the foundation of endless conflicts, conquests, and wars; it has loosed rivers of blood. It has torn families asunder, set cities on fire, toppled nations, enslaved millions. Belief as tribal membership card – if there is an actual original sin, this is it.
Layers
We have layers, then – even a widening chasm - in this belief-over-evidence thing:
Choosing belief over evidence
Prioritizing the embrace of belief over the embrace of evidence
Rewarding the embrace of belief and punishing the embrace of evidence
Accepting the believer and shunning those who embrace evidence
Protecting the believer and killing those who embrace evidence
We see it all around us. We see believers, whether political or religions,
believing the Earth is 6,000 years old, in the face of endless evidence to the contrary
believing that men are naturally superior to women, in the face of endless evidence to the contrary
believing that people with white skin are naturally superior to people with dark skin, in the face of endless evidence to the contrary
believing that those who adhere to political opinions other than our own are out to control and ultimately destroy us
believing that those whose views on religion differ from our own are inherently evil
It is, in fact, a progression. Pulling faith and fact apart is often a systematic process, where control of a group or advancement of an agenda depends upon distraction of the group from evidence that the agenda is not in its best interest. The pulling-apart is almost inevitably a step-by-step process, with consequences mounting. The result is the GOP and the Evangelical church of the 21st century – rabid, angry, purity-obsessed, willing to crucify anyone within their ranks who dares to challenge the official group rhetoric, or has the impertinence to promote facts or insist on evidence.
Return to Reality
What can be done about this? The gap between belief and evidence must be closed; there must be a return to reality, a renewed commitment to the world as it actually is. The how of that isn’t clear to anyone; there is no magic formula. If someone had it, they’d be working it.
But we can do much to clarify it.
Being an adult in the modern world, taking responsibility and providing true leadership, requires an understanding of why the authoritarian mind prizes beliefs over facts. There’s some complexity there, but it comes to this:
Belief is an emotional state, a mental comfort and assurance that brings peace and confidence. It creates social bonds, and is often tribal currency.
Fact, on the other hand, is emotionally neutral; it is cold and neutral, and offers no feelings or social accommodation. And it is friend to no tribe.
On the other hand, being an adult in the modern world, taking responsibility and providing true leadership, requires commitment to reality – to invest one’s energy in the world as it really is, in people as they really are, in service to bettering that world... as opposed to inventing and populating a fake one, wasting time and energy instead.
James Comer’s buffoonery, the antics of the GOP Congress in general, and the escalating dysfunction of Evangelical America all represent accelerating departures from reality, the squandering of opportunity and energy in the service of tribal dominance. It needs to be called out and resisted at every turn; and those of us doing the calling-out must take the step they all refuse to take:
As they perpetually turn their beliefs into evidence, we must dedicate ourselves to turning evidence into our beliefs.
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