The Cardiff Giant, at rest, at the Farmers’ Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. (Photo by Martin Lewison)

We Americans are so often suckers for clever connivers, especially when they speak with utter authority. A charlatan can offer a simple solution to a complex problem, and that’s much more attractive than struggling to identify and accept truth. Reality is usually a bit messy.

Yes, we’re talking about contemporary politics here, but we have quite a history of gullibility.

Take, for instance, the example of George Hull, a New York cigar-maker who, shortly after the Civil War, was offended by a revivalist preacher’s insistence on the literal truth of the passage in Genesis that declared, “There were giants in the Earth in those days.” Hull, an atheist, figured he might as well get rich off such nonsense, so he hired a stone carver in Chicago to create a 10-foot giant out of a hunk of Iowa gypsum, and secretly buried the statue on a farm in central New York, near the hamlet of Cardiff. When well-drillers uncovered the hulk a year later, it was declared both a miracle and proof of the inerrancy of scripture. Believers flocked to Cardiff from all over the country, paying 50 cents for a 15-minute viewing. Hull cashed out, selling his interest in the statue for about $500,000 in today’s money.

You can see the so-called Cardiff Giant today at a museum not far from where it was first displayed. As to Hull, his trickery was exposed only after he reaped profit from it, and it elicited no apology. In fact, he said, the whole incident backed up his claim that religion preys upon the gullible. As if to underscore that point, he pulled a similar stunt several years later in Colorado.

We can shake our heads at those 19^th-century rubes who saw their unlikely beliefs confirmed by a hunk of rock, but it’s not so different from 21^st-century marks who let themselves be deluded by shameless politicians and cable TV demagogues. We’re witnessing some Cardiff Giant moments in America now, but the swindlers have swapped out their chisels for teleprompters.

This week Tucker Carlson, the most popular host on cable TV, insisted against all evidence that the brutal attack on the U.S. Capitol a little more than two years ago was simply an example of patriotic Americans exercising free speech. After cherry-picking some benign moments from 41,000 hours of security video shot on Jan. 6, 2001, Carlson declared, “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers.”

Right. Sightseers who laid siege to the seat of democracy, garroted and bear-sprayed brave police officers protecting it, and fought hand-to-hand in a battle to overturn the results of a fair election. It’s impossible to justify believing anything on Fox News anymore — unless, of course, your only source of information is Fox News, since Fox doesn’t cover its own duplicity.

That is, most Fox viewers don’t know, as the rest of us do from documents revealed in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, that Carlson was privately disparaging Donald Trump as he was posing to viewers and Trump himself as a supporter. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson declared in a message to his producer just after the 2020 election. The TV star’s duplicity was breathtaking: Those who still justify supporting the untethered ex-president by claiming that a conservative administration produced benefits for the nation might weigh Carlson’s unintended riposte: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” Carlson wrote, in a secret text exchange with a colleague. “But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

Yet it would be a mistake for us to see Donald Trump and the personalities of Fox News, and the many politicians who mirror Trump’s mendacity, as the major impediments to truth in America. They’re liars, yes, but they are byproducts, not progenitors, of Americans’ craving for simplistic answers. They draw power from our unwillingness to recognize the hard truths of both our past and today’s reality.

We see this starkly in the push to make our schools teach a sanitized version of American history, and to stop classroom discussion that doesn’t reflect traditional heterosexuality and white sensibility. It’s a movement conservative politicians are promoting for partisan benefit, but they’re exploiting an aversion to seeing the reality of today’s society and admitting the truths of our history. Teachers around the country are watering down their lessons to avoid talking about LGBTQ issues and the historic oppression of people of color because in one state after another, laws have been put in place that could cost the teachers their jobs if parents are offended by what is taught in their kids’ classrooms. Books are being pulled from school libraries not just in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is building a presidential campaign on voters’ insecurities, but in countless school districts in every part of the country.

In suburban Long Island and in south-central Pennsylvania, for example, students were stopped from reading Front Desk, a middle-grade novel about the experience of a Chinese immigrant family written from first-hand experience by Kelly Yang. Front Desk, incidentally, had won the 2018 Parents’ Choice Gold Medal for Fiction, and was a national bestseller. It couldn’t be coincidental, surely, that a book drawing an attack from white parents involved a young Asian character struggling with how different her life is from those of her classmates.

That has been repeated hundreds of times recently. The books being pulled from the hands of young readers aren’t pornography; they’re accurate depictions of history and expositions on our sociology. During the last school year, according to PEN America, about 40 percent of the books banned from schools featured either LGBTQ themes or key characters who are people of color.

What’s bothering us, apparently, is reality — the reality that American society hasn’t achieved its goals of fairness and equity for all, and that our history isn’t peopled with only heroes. Yet editing our history, or distorting it, won’t change it. Teaching our children that American racism ended when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation is no more justifiable than teaching that giants once roamed the earth.

There’s a peril to this far beyond the next election. As the writer Francine Prose observed in an essay in The Guardian last month, “The truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality.” Prose notes that children taught a polished version of our past, and discouraged from probing for uncomfortable truths, will be unable as adults to distinguish fact from fiction, and more susceptible to the next conspiracy theory to come along.

In another context, even Tucker Carlson recognized that dynamic. In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, Carlson gave support to Trump’s wild claim that unless vote counting was slowed down, fraud would deliver the win to Joe Biden. “Americans who love this country are beginning to fear it,” he said on the air on Nov. 5. “Why? We know exactly why. Because shutting down legitimate discourse and inquiry always has that effect. It destroys social trust and it sets the table for awful things to come.”

There, for once, Tucker Carlson hit upon a truth. What he fails to note is that legitimate discourse about America surely must include the truth of its past and the reality of life for all its citizens today. Shutting that down — by advancing false narratives about the news and teaching sanitized versions of our history — will surely leave a weakened society for our children and grandchildren. It’s a deeply disappointing prospect for a generation that embraced youthful idealism and hope.

In that regard, it is worth noting that the Genesis account of giants upon the earth is immediately followed by the familiar story of the flood, which spared only Noah and his family, along with their ark co-passengers, two of every creature on earth. There have been plenty of stories of explorers finding pieces of Noah’s Ark, of course, and they’re no more credible than the tale of George Hull’s giant in Cardiff, N.Y. Still, the devout may note the reason Genesis offers for the flood: “The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.”

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