Of the many lies that Donald Trump spewed during his 2024 presidential campaign, one of the strangest was that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. Despite wide circulation on social media, the claim was obviously ridiculous, not to mention blatantly racist. This lie had been particularly propagated by Trump’s running mate at the time, JD Vance, now vice president of the United States.

When Vance was confronted about this falsehood, he tried to justify spreading it. While his reasoning was deeply cynical and absurd, it was also revealing about the nature of right-wing thinking. Vance’s response was:

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

To Trump and Vance, and to millions of their supporters, the fact that it was a lie didn’t matter because at the bottom of it was supposed to be something true. This incident captures, in essence, the conservative ideology. Whether facts are true or “alternative” is beside the point. What is important to them is that there is some value at the bottom that is true.

We see this ideology play out over and over again. They know, for example, that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, but it’s ok to lie about it because, in their eyes, conservative values are more important than who actually got the most votes. They know that most undocumented immigrants are hard-working people who have no interest in committing crimes, but they believe that, at the base of their lies about those immigrants is a truth about who America is really for.

But we know that no amount of lies can add up to the truth. We know that there is no bedrock base of truth at the bottom upon which the heap of bullshit actually sits. As the saying goes, it’s turtles all the way down.

This is important to understand, because we sometimes think that if we just give right-wingers the facts that they’ll change their views. But their views aren’t based on facts. You’re not going to come to with the perfect, magical silver bullet combination of words that is going to stop the rise of fascism. It’s a much harder problem than that.

But cynical and dishonest as it is, Vance’s statement actually contains something that the left can learn from. The American people are suffering. Half of all renters and a quarter of homeowners are paying more for their housing than they can afford [source]. 14% of the nation, about 48 million people, don’t have reliable, consistent access to enough food to live a healthy and active life [source]. The number of people experiencing homelessness has never been higher.

These are real and serious problems, and we don’t have to make up lies about immigrants eating pets to address it. We just need to tell the truth. The truth is that the problems in this country aren’t coming from the poor, the politically weak, and the marginalized. The truth is that our problems come from the same source that such problems always come from: the wealthy, the powerful, and the elite.

And these aren’t shadowy figures operating behind the scenes. They’re people like JD Vance and Donald Trump. And just to be bipartisan about it, it’s also people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. It’s Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. They are people who make up lies and tell you that undocumented immigrants are keeping your wages low and your costs high. They want to keep you looking down so that you don’t look up and see them getting rich off your misery.

We have the ability to solve these problems if we work together in solidarity across the working class. The way we start is by telling the truth.