Objective Truth Is Real

I have an old friend from Germany named Sascha.

We met in college, here in the States, before I had ever been to Germany. Before I had been to Europe at all, actually. So, I would sometimes say to him: “Look, I have no firsthand experience of this so-called ‘Germany’ or ‘Europe.’ For all I know, this whole thing is an elaborate conspiracy, and you’re in on it.”

This was a joke, to be clear.

It was funny because it was absurd. Obviously Germany exists. Obviously Europe exists. I didn’t need to personally walk through Berlin or drink a beer in Munich (which I’ve since done) to grant that millions of people, documents, flights, histories, languages, governments, wars, treaties, photographs, and inconveniently punctual trains were all pointing toward the same conclusion.

There is a place called Germany.

That is not “my truth.” It is not “Sascha’s truth.” It is not a matter of partisan interpretation. It is a fact.

And facts are real.

That sounds embarrassingly basic to say out loud. But maybe that is exactly why it needs saying.

We live in a time when too many public figures have decided that reality is unknowable, or at least negotiable. Not because reality itself bends, but because attention does. Confidence can be mistaken for credibility. Repetition can masquerade as evidence. Suspicion can feel like intelligence. And once everything is framed as narrative, spin, bias, or conspiracy, the very idea of a shared factual world starts to look naive.

But it isn’t naive. It’s the starting line.

Objective truth does not mean every question is simple. It doesn’t mean every fact is easy to verify, every source is equally trustworthy, or every disagreement has one clean answer waiting on the shelf. Many of the things that matter most - justice, freedom, fairness, dignity, the proper role of government - require argument, judgment, history, values, and humility.

But those arguments still have to happen on solid ground.

Before we argue about what should be done, we have to make some effort to establish what is. Who said what. What happened when. What the law says. What the numbers show. What the evidence supports. What is known, what is uncertain, and what is simply false.

That distinction matters.

A society that cannot tell the difference between “I disagree,” “I don’t know,” and “that did not happen” is in serious trouble. Not because everyone must think the same way, but because meaningful disagreement depends on some shared contact with reality. Without that, politics becomes less like self-government and more like team sports without rules, played in a fog machine.

Germany exists. The earth is not flat. Trump lost the 2020 election. Words can be quoted accurately or inaccurately. Events either happened or they did not. And while interpretation is unavoidable, not everything is interpretation. That may be a modest claim. But these days, modest claims can be load-bearing.

Objective truth is real. We should act like it.