Who Gets to Decide What Is True?

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By Bear Howard and Associates,

Sedona, Az — One of the great misunderstandings of American life is the belief that everyone sees the same world and merely reaches different conclusions about it. In reality, people often begin with different versions of the world itself.

Each person is shaped by family, religion, neighborhood, income, education, occupation, race, geography, opportunity, disappointment, fear, and experience. A child raised in a financially secure household where books, travel, and discussion are ordinary learns a different relationship with the world than a child raised in a household where survival is uncertain, institutions are distrusted, and change usually means disruption. Neither child consciously chooses those early lessons. They absorb them before they are old enough to question them.

Economic circumstances matter because insecurity changes how people experience risk. Someone with savings, health insurance, and professional mobility may view social or economic change as an opportunity. Someone living one emergency away from financial collapse may view the same change as a threat. Political language about transformation, global competition, immigration or new technology lands differently depending on whether a person expects to benefit from the future or fears being discarded by it.

Upbringing matters just as much. Some families teach children that respectable people obey established authority. Others teach them that authority must continually justify itself. Some religious traditions encourage inquiry and reinterpretation. Others present truth as settled and doubt as moral weakness. Some communities expose children to many kinds of people. Others provide a tightly controlled social environment in which outsiders are discussed more often than encountered.

By adulthood, these experiences become what people call common sense. But common sense is often merely the accumulated assumptions of one’s surroundings.

As people become more intellectually engaged, whether through formal schooling, reading, travel, work, or exposure to different lives, they often discover that the world is less orderly than they were taught. History becomes more complicated. Science becomes less certain but more reliable. Human behavior becomes harder to categorize as either heroes or villains. Institutions reveal both achievements and failures.

This broader perspective often fosters greater openness to social change. It does not guarantee liberal politics, but statistically it often moves people toward positions described as progressive: greater tolerance of difference, stronger acceptance of scientific and medical expertise, more willingness to revise social traditions and more recognition that individual outcomes are affected by systems as well as personal choices.

That is not because educated people are automatically wiser or morally superior. Degrees can certify expertise, vanity or merely the ability to survive committee meetings. Nor does conservatism necessarily indicate ignorance. Thoughtful conservatism provides an essential warning that societies can destroy valuable institutions while pursuing improvement.

The deeper distinction is between two relationships with knowledge.

One sees truth as something inherited and defended.

The other sees truth as something investigated and revised.

That difference now runs through nearly every part of American public life.

Museums offer a visible example because they preserve the physical evidence of the national story. The Smithsonian is expected to celebrate American accomplishment while also explaining slavery, displacement, war, exclusion, industrial power, immigration, scientific achievement and the long struggle over who was permitted to participate fully in the country. Those histories do not fit comfortably into a simple tale of uninterrupted greatness.

The Trump administration has treated that complexity not merely as a scholarly disagreement but as an institutional problem requiring presidential intervention. In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order accusing the Smithsonian of promoting a “divisive, race-centered ideology” and directing officials to remove what the administration considered improper ideology from museums, monuments, and historical sites. The order said federal museums should be “solemn and uplifting” and should emphasize American greatness rather than content that “inappropriately disparage[s]” Americans of the past.

That policy escalated on July 24, 2026, when the president issued another order declaring that Smithsonian leadership could not be trusted to tell American history with “honesty and gratitude.” It directed federal officials to use available funding, regulatory, and contractual powers to force changes and ordered the installation of government signs outside the National Museum of American History, warning visitors about what the administration called its ideological capture.

This is an extraordinary development. A presidential administration is no longer simply criticizing an exhibit or proposing additional historical material. It is using executive authority to place the government’s preferred interpretation outside a museum and to warn the public against the museum’s professional judgment.

The administration describes this as a restoration of truth. But the order reveals a different philosophy of history. It assumes that national institutions should strengthen gratitude, unity and pride. Those are understandable civic goals, but they are not the same as historical inquiry.

History does not exist to improve national morale. It exists to explain what happened.

Sometimes what happened is inspiring. Sometimes it is shameful. Frequently, it is both at once.

A museum that explains how Thomas Jefferson helped articulate principles of liberty while enslaving human beings is not necessarily attacking Jefferson or America. It presents the contradiction that defines both the man and the nation. Removing one side of that contradiction does not create neutrality. It creates comfort.

This struggle is not limited to museums. State legislatures have increasingly attempted to determine how teachers may discuss race, sexism, and disputed episodes of American history. Since 2021, dozens of states have considered measures restricting such teaching, and a number have enacted laws prohibiting various “divisive concepts,” limiting discussions that might cause discomfort or restricting material associated with critical race theory or the 1619 Project.

Supporters say these laws protect children from ideological indoctrination and racial guilt. That concern cannot simply be mocked away. Teachers, textbooks and school systems can present political opinions as settled fact, and parents have a legitimate interest in what children are taught.

But discomfort is not proof of indoctrination.

Teaching that slavery was central to the nation’s economy, that segregation was maintained by law or that government policies produced unequal effects does not assign personal guilt to a modern child. It explains how the country developed. A student may feel disturbed by that history because it is disturbing. Legislatures cannot make the past less painful by regulating the vocabulary used to describe it.

Something similar has happened with scientific and medical information. Early in the current Trump administration, federal agencies removed public health pages and datasets in response to directives on gender-related language and policy. Material taken offline included information about HIV, adolescent health risks, testing, clinical trials, and other subjects used by physicians and researchers. A federal judge ordered the CDC and FDA to restore specified pages, finding that the removals likely had not followed the reasoned decision-making required by law and noting that ordinary Americans, especially those in underserved communities, bore the harm.

That episode illustrates the difference between changing government policy and changing access to evidence.

An administration has the constitutional authority to establish policy within the law. It may alter programs, priorities, and terminology. But when scientific information becomes politically inconvenient, removing the information does not resolve the underlying reality. Viruses do not adopt party platforms. Pollution does not check whether a legislature recognizes it. Pregnancy, cancer, addiction, and infectious disease continue operating according to biology, with the usual lack of respect for campaign messaging.

This is where political conflict over facts becomes dangerous.

A democratic society normally debates what to do after examining the evidence. Increasingly, Americans argue about whether the evidence should be collected, published, taught or trusted at all.

Climate change provides another example. The scientific question of whether human activity is warming the planet is not an even contest between two equally supported theories. There remain legitimate debates about projections, economic consequences, and the best policy responses. But political resistance often treats the existence of uncertainty at the edges as proof that nothing is known at the center.

The same pattern appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientific guidance changed as researchers learned more about transmission, treatment, and vaccines. To people familiar with science, revision was expected. To those who believed expertise should produce immediate certainty, revision appeared to be evidence of incompetence or deception.

That misunderstanding proved politically useful. A changing recommendation could be presented as a lie rather than as a response to new evidence. Public officials discovered that distrust was easier to cultivate than scientific literacy, one of humanity’s less charming efficiencies.

The pattern has also entered elections.

A functioning democracy depends on citizens accepting that votes can be counted through imperfect but verifiable procedures. Yet after the 2020 presidential election, many Americans accepted claims of massive fraud despite the absence of evidence sufficient to overturn the result in court or through state certification processes. The rejection of the outcome did not arise from a better competing body of evidence. It arose because the result conflicted with a political and emotional commitment.

Once that way of thinking takes hold, evidence becomes conditional. Courts are trustworthy only when they rule correctly. Elections are legitimate only when the preferred candidate wins. Scientists are credible only when their findings support prior beliefs. Museums are educational only when their exhibitions produce pride. Journalists are honest only when their reporting confirms what the audience already suspects.

This is not skepticism. Skepticism asks for evidence.

It is motivated disbelief, in which the conclusion is protected by continually disqualifying every institution capable of challenging it.

Political leaders across the spectrum can manipulate facts. Progressive institutions can become insulated, self-righteous and too quick to dismiss dissent as ignorance or prejudice. Universities and cultural organizations can adopt fashionable theories before those theories have been adequately tested. Government experts can communicate poorly, overstate confidence or resist admitting error.

Those failures matter because expertise must earn trust. Credentials are not a substitute for transparency, and institutional prestige does not create immunity from criticism.

But criticism of expertise is different from replacing expertise with loyalty.

A museum curator should be challenged by other historians, artifacts, records, and competing scholarship. A physician should be challenged by clinical evidence. An economist should be challenged by data. An election administrator should be challenged through audits, recounts and courts.

When the challenge becomes “I dislike the conclusion, therefore the institution is corrupt,” society leaves the world of inquiry and enters the world of belief.

This is where socioeconomic experience becomes important again. People who feel ignored by government and cultural institutions have good reason to distrust them. Many working-class Americans have watched factories close, wages stagnate and communities decline while experts assured them that globalization or economic restructuring would produce broader prosperity. Professionals who benefited from those changes sometimes spoke as though those who lost jobs and identity merely failed to understand economics.

Resentment did not appear from nowhere.

When educated institutions speak with contempt toward people who lack credentials, they help create the revolt against expertise. People who feel humiliated do not usually become more receptive to instruction. They search for leaders who will humiliate the institutions in return.

Populist politics understands this. It tells citizens that their instincts are more trustworthy than experts, that complexity is a disguise for corruption, and that undesirable facts were invented by elites. This message is emotionally powerful because it transforms exclusion into superiority. The person who once felt left behind is told that the experts are not merely mistaken but fraudulent, and that rejecting them is evidence of courage.

Yet emotional satisfaction does not make the conclusion true.

An airplane does not remain in the sky because passengers distrust engineers. A bridge does not stand because legislators declare structural calculations elitist. Civilization depends on accumulated knowledge, specialization, and the willingness to accept that another person may know more about a particular subject.

The progressive temperament generally finds this easier to accept because it is more comfortable with complexity, social difference, and institutional revision. The conservative temperament often contributes caution, continuity, and awareness that rapid change can produce consequences reformers failed to anticipate.

Both are necessary.

But they are not equally useful in every circumstance.

Conservatism can wisely protect constitutional limits, local knowledge, and institutions built through experience. It becomes destructive when preservation requires denying observable reality. Progressivism can expand rights, improve knowledge, and correct injustice. It becomes destructive when moral certainty replaces evidence or when disagreement is treated as proof of wickedness.

The central question is therefore not whether the left or the right possesses all truth. Neither does. The question is whether a society maintains processes capable of discovering errors and correcting them.

Science does this through replication and peer review.

Courts do it through evidence and appeal.

Journalism does it through documentation and correction.

Museums do it through scholarship, preservation, and reinterpretation.

Elections do it through ballots, audits, and lawful challenges.

Democracy itself is a corrective mechanism. It assumes no leader, party or generation should be trusted permanently.

That is why current efforts to impose politically approved narratives on museums, schools and public information deserve more concern than ordinary partisan disagreement. The danger is not simply that one administration may present history too patriotically or another too critically. The danger is that the government begins deciding that facts are legitimate only when they serve the emotional needs of those in power.

America’s 250-year experiment has never been a spotless march toward liberty. It has been an argument over who receives liberty, whose experience counts, and whether the country’s principles apply when doing so is inconvenient.

The nation abolished slavery after preserving it for nearly a century. It ended legal segregation after generations defended it. It extended voting rights after repeatedly restricting them. It expanded women’s rights, labor protections, disability access, and civil equality by challenging what earlier generations called tradition.

None of those changes occurred because society already had the correct answer.

They occurred because evidence, experience, and moral understanding accumulated until the older answer became impossible to defend honestly.

That is the larger meaning of museums and universities, laboratories and libraries, courts and free journalism. They are not supposed to tell Americans what they wish to hear. They are supposed to preserve the evidence from which a free people may judge themselves.

A mature nation does not need its history cleaned up before showing it to the children.

It needs citizens capable of loving a country without pretending it has never failed, respecting knowledge without worshipping experts, and questioning authority without rejecting reality.

The future of a democratic society will depend less on whether Americans agree than on whether they retain a common method for determining what is true.

Without that, public discussion becomes performance, government becomes propaganda, and history becomes whatever the most powerful person orders the sign outside the museum to say.