Truth Election Commission: That’s How Trump Could Have Lost

Joe Rogan has to be the most influential podcaster on earth because he has the one currency you can’t dispute, the US dollar. Spotify bought exclusive rights to The Joe Rogan Experience for $200 million in 2020; and upped that to $250 million in 2024 without exclusivity! He is also an extremely skilled trapeze ideologue, who effortlessly vaulted from endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. He is an anti-vaxxer who supports gay rights and same-sex marriage, but also bats for gun rights. He is an extraordinary performer with a rainbow of convictions. 

Roe Vs Don – A Fusillade of Falsehoods

Ten days before America was to vote, Joe Rogan sat Donald Trump down for a 3-hour podcast.

It was a monumental success, logging 20 million views in 20 hours. Nine days later – just a day before polling – he endorsed Trump because if Elon Musk says so, it’s got to be right. The three musketeers – Trump, Musk, and Rogan – simply ignored Trump’s 32 false claims that were meticulously flagged by CNN through the podcast.

It was a fusillade of falsehoods: 

• Biden abandoned $85 bn of military hardware in Taliban’s hands; the real number was $7 bn 

• The trade deficit with China is an overwhelming $500 billion; it’s lower than $400 billion 

• Kamala Harris has “very low IQ”; no evidence was given 

• Young people cannot buy homes because mortgage rates are 10%; they are about 6% 

•  Schools perform gender surgeries on kids without parental knowledge, a wild untruth 

• Trump claimed that 29000 people attended his Las Vegas rally in a venue with a capacity of 19000 

• Trump claimed Jimmy Carter had advocated a ban on mail-in ballots, but all that the Carter Commission had done was point out shortcomings without asking for a ban 

• Trump crowed that he had orchestrated the “biggest tax cuts in history”, but that’s not so 

• Trump asserted that Wisconsin officials in 2020 had confirmed that the election was “rigged” and “robbed”, but there was no such confirmation 

But Roe Vs Don wasn’t the entire catalogue of falsehoods. Trump’s supporters created AI-generated images of fawning Black voters, clearly intended to sway a minority with an exaggerated narrative of support. Memes were created to show that Kamal Harris was fudging the scale of crowds at her rallies.

AI created an image of Taylor Swift in Uncle Sam’s costume to suggest she had switched her erstwhile support of Biden to Trump. Perhaps the most egregious was the claim that migrants in Ohio were eating their cats and dogs!

Now think of the violent nuclear fusion that occurred when these false claims were mixed with earlier invocations of hate. When Mexican immigrants were referred to as “rapists”. When the COVID-19 bug was called a “Chinese virus”. When Proud Boys were told to “stand back and stand by”, a thinly veiled invitation to attack minorities. 

How a Post-Truth World Was/Is Created

Once these poison darts were fired on social media, a band of Trump-fluencers took over. Tim Pool (over 1.5 million followers on YouTube), Dave Rubin (another 1.8 million on YouTube) …  and the Colossus himself, Elon Musk (over 200 million followers on his own platform, X). They would tweet, post, repost, retweet, push, shove, yank, and do whatever, to make these untruths go viral. If civilisation ever needed validation of the old, pre-digital age proverb - just repeat a lie a thousand times, and it shall become the truth - this was it.

So, you see how the modus operandi is frighteningly simple. Just put out a lie, crank your infrastructure of verbal terror and put that lie in an unending loop of reiteration and validation. Before you can say, Donald Trump, you would have created the perfect post-truth world.

The Existential Challenge for Democracies 

What I’ve described above is an existential challenge for democracies around the world. Is it a coincidence that in one democracy after another, we are seeing the rise of political leaders and parties that have cynically used outrageous lies to create a narrative of fear, exclusion, hatred, revisionism, ghettoising a vulnerable minority, radicalising a triumphant majority, to win unquestioning, maniacal support from a band of brothers who espouse the same extremism?

So, these politicians win elections easily, and once in power, double down on their vicious narrative to create even deeper fault lines that sustain their political supremacy. If you criticise them, you are excoriated as an anti-national element out to subvert democracy.

But is democracy such a simplistic, majoritarian idea? That you brainwash people with hatred and lies, numb their faculties so they vote in a post-truth fog? Isn’t it a critical pre-condition to have citizens who have the capacity to think freely, whose minds are unvitiated, unmanipulated? If their free will and minds have been hijacked by carefully orchestrated falsehoods, then isn’t that a denial of democracy, rather than its validation? 

We Need a Truth Commission 

So, the time has come to rewrite some of the rules of a fair democracy in a post-truth world poisoned by social media. For well over a century, modern democracies have outlawed hate speech, invocations to violence, and financial crimes as disqualifiers. We now need to add “the truth” as an equal, if not more potent, threshold. Many of you would quickly jump at me, saying it’s impractical, it’s an abbreviation of free speech, it’s going to be misused. I concede to all these vulnerabilities – BUT just because an unpostponable reform is difficult, should we not even try to do it? 

Why can’t we have a legally empowered Truth Commission, comprising unimpeachable, bipartisan individuals who conduct a daily fact-check on what the key campaigners are claiming? There’s very powerful AI technology that can conduct instant, 99%+ credible checks on “facts” that politicians propagate. And every morning, the infringing campaigners get a notice listing all the questionable “facts, claims, and lies” peddled by them the previous day. They are given 24 hours to publicly apologise/correct the lie or face a monetary penalty of $1 million per lie.

If their cumulative penalties cross $10 million, they are slapped with a punitive vote count – ie, for the 11th un-retracted falsehood, their ultimate vote count would be reduced by 110,000 votes; for the 12th un-corrected lie, their ultimate vote count would be reduced by another 120,000 votes … and so on. The final winner or loser would only be notified after accounting for these punitive, negative votes. 

Yes, the above is a rough-hewn model. At this stage, it’s just a thought, an idea. It’s laying down the bare principles. Experts will curate a fair, scientific model around it. As it’s implemented, the warts will get wrung out. But it’s critical to start. If democracy has to be saved.