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Like “free trade” and “democracy”, “fact checking” is a term of craft; it has a counterintuitive definition that, surprisingly, has nothing at all to do with “checking some statement against the facts.”

In the era of Big Data, facts are mass produced; they are then selectively thrown into the public discourse like information shrapnel, tearing apart narrative coherence and argumentative honesty. Data cannot provide any access to truth whatsoever, for the simple reason that the truth is not a collection of facts. A fabricated journal article may be a collection of facts just as much as an accurate journal article, but the truth is a holistic insight into reality.

“Men cannot become women” is a truth. “Political violence stems mostly from the right wing” is a falsehood supported by data that has been laundered, carefully arranged, categorized, and spliced so as to “mathematically support” an ideological presupposition.

The phrase “data doesn’t lie” is as stupid as the statement “words don’t lie”; both words and data are discreet particles of meaning, requiring context, intention, and the company of other words and data points to tell us anything true.

Consider the assertion “Republicans are lying about the government shutdown. Federal law prohibits illegal aliens from receiving federal healthcare subsidies.”

Oh, what a relief!

On the other hand, “federal law prohibits the admission of 9 million inadmissible aliens through ports of entries, as well as the unilateral suspension of federally enforced borders.”

It often seems the immensity of the data set corresponds to a proportionally astonishing ideological near-sightedness on the part of our ‘fact, um, checkers’.

Remember our observation regarding words? Context, etc?

One of the more extraordinary qualities of words is their interchangeability; words can represent each other’s meanings. For example, “illegal aliens” may be replaced with “parolees”, or “immigrants with Temporary Protected Status”, or “immigrants with a [complicated] legal presence”, though whatever phrase is used still refers to foreign nationals improperly imported and allowed to remain in the interior of the United States.

According to The Federalist, 2.8 million “otherwise inadmissible” aliens were granted “blanket parole” by the Biden Administration, thus qualifying them for federally funded health insurance.

If, consequently, you find yourself discussing this latest political tussle with certain lovely folks of a different persuasion, and “illegal aliens” simply doesn’t satisfy their semantic compunctions, here’s an alternative phrase you might employ: people who shouldn’t be here in the first place!