By: Nat M. Zorach

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One particular element of teaching I dreaded when I started a few years ago at Michigan State was the question of pedagogy in what I call the “post-truth era.” Facts are, sadly, less critically important than vibes these days, it seems, and this permeates my field as some of the subjects I teach touch on controversial topics of energy, sustainability, and climate change. So, I did what any competent educator would attempt to do, which is create a pedagogic framing for this question, and developed what I called a “marginal truths” model.

I tell my students that there are immutable truths, and these are the ones that are justified by facts and data. But I also tell them that there are margins to most truths, and those the things—outside of the core truth- that we are indeed free to debate. For example: I tell them that we are not free to debate whether climate change is happening, but I explain clearly how there are many legitimate debates over both climate science and climate solutions, usually around the question of how best to solve a particular problem, or around the urgency of a particular topic. The “truths” framework strikes me as perhaps more important now than ever as we face a bizarre political climate in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections in which disinformation dominates popular discourse, and leading politicians make bold, completely unfounded claims of voter fraud any time an election delivers a result they don’t like.

This threatens American democracy by suggesting that democracy isn’t working.

TLDR: It is working, but it depends on all of us to stand up and defend it to ensure that it continues to work. 

Flashback: In a previous life, I wrote for a now-defunct community newspaper in Detroit as a part-time gig. One event I attended was the protests at the November 2020 vote-counting at then-TCF-previously-Cobo-now-Huntington Place in Detroit. Crowds had gathered both in front of TCF and along the riverfront entrance, and one particularly angry crowd tried unsuccessfully to gain access to the room in the basement of the convention center, where voting was taking place.

“Stop the count” chants dueled with “Count every vote” signs from Michigan United, a progressive advocacy group. Detroit Police stood at the ready, though embracing a variety of restraint they did not maintain during the George Floyd protests six months prior, which saw widespread deployment of violence and chemical weapons.

DJJniks at a protest to protect our vote in November 2020.

What struck me about the protesters—beyond the bizarre character of some of them, including an addled man marching around shouting about conspiracy theories- was that, though brought here by different calls to action, they all seemed to believe that something nefarious was going on, and they had to show up to try and stop it.

At the event, I interviewed one woman who, along with her colleagues, was fiercely defiant at even the possibility that Joe Biden could have won the election. Vote-counting aside, there was just no rationale for it, she thought, because he wasn’t having huge rallies like Trump was. I pushed her on specific points, and she told me I should look at specific news sources and commenters who had the “real facts” (perhaps as opposed to “alternative facts,” as former White House advisor Kellyanne Conway had once suggested). Her list of suggested sources for the “real facts” had included the likes of famously racist pundit Rush Limbaugh or culture war crusader Dennis Prager (who once complained that “white people aren’t allowed to use the N-word anymore”)—all notorious purveyors of disinformation. It has been dismaying, to say the least, to see even educated people so lacking in media literacy, and also so capable of rallying their peers to participate in the arena of disinformation to attempt to destabilize the democratic process.

Their efforts were, thankfully, unsuccessful, but I think about these interactions often as we face a new election with even more disinformation, bolstered by the demise of social media content moderation (it’s more profitable that way!) and an onslaught of AI-generated content and bot accounts seeking to sow seeds of distrust in the political process.

The evidence is clear: voter fraud is exceedingly rare, even by the admission of the research of the far-right Heritage Foundation, the same institution that authored Project 2025 as a governing blueprint for the second Trump administration. Rather, research by Heritage and others shows isolated cases stretched across many years and jurisdictions. Yet the administration continues to push the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, extending that claim into a broader, far more troubling premise: that the only legitimate elections are the ones that produce the desired result.

For a Jewish organization, the phrase “Big Lie” cannot be used lightly owing to its infamous genealogy. In Mein Kampf, Hitler attached the same term to his antisemitic fantasy, projecting deceit onto Jews and the German Left, as Nazism built its power base through scapegoating and continual erosion of trust in democracy. The point here isn’t to flatten history or argue absolute parallels between the Third Reich and the current regime, but, more precisely, to argue that when powerful people knowingly repeat falsehoods in order to delegitimize the electoral process, isolate internal enemies and specific demographic groups, Jewish memory obligates us to pay close attention.

Thus are the threats to send federal law enforcement to polling places so troubling. The president and his deputy, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, have declined to rule this out, and the GOP majority in Congress has declined to attempt to preemptively weigh in. The administration frames this as a question of protecting against voter fraud, but, given the absence of evidence of widespread voter fraud, the more plausible effect is intimidation, especially of immigrants, voters of color, poor voters, and voters in blue-leaning districts. Combined with efforts like Trump’s stalled legislative efforts to impose new burdens on voters for documentation, centralize and demand voter data from states, and purge voter rolls, the result is not election integrity, but rather intentional democratic exclusion dressed up in the theatrical makeup of fraud prevention.

Democracy only works if we all show up. To tweak a popular Jewish adage, it’s totally okay for us to have 345 million Americans and 346 million opinions. Democracy is messy and it’s fine for the process to be contentious. It’s just absolutely vital for us to ensure that all voices are heard, to keep American elections, as they have been for centuries, free and fair for every eligible voter.

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About the author: Nat M. Zorach, AICP, MBA, is a city planner and writer. He has taught green building, real estate finance, and construction management at Michigan State University since 2024, and splits his time between Detroit and Lansing.