This week, Keir Starmer joined the ranks of those shooting the messengers. He added his voice to that chorus deploring people who are in uproar about the failures that allowed the grooming gangs to go unpunished. In reply to Elon Musk’s provocations that “Starmer is complicit in the crimes” and that Jess Phillips is a “rape genocide apologist”, the Prime Minister denounced those “spreading lies and misinformation” on this matter.

His words repeated two common tropes found among those whose reaction to the Oldham papers has been, at worst, equivocation and deflection. The first is that the people making such a commotion are a problem in themselves, being a nasty, resentful and “far right” rabble who seek to stir trouble and stoke division. The second is that this mob constitutes low-information morons who parrot only what they read on X, and are hence captive to such “lies and misinformation”. Starmer’s focus on perceived falsehoods echoes the sentiments made by the Rev Richard Coles on X in relation to the furore: “Free speech ensures the right to say unpopular things. It does not enshrine any right to say untrue things.”

The first idea, that those who call attention to the affair are foremost motivated by personal and political interests — or as Starmer continued, “not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves” — may well be true in some cases. But a cause is not defined by its worst advocates. To doubt the sincere concern of millions who have been vociferously appalled is flippant and insulting. This accusation is ironic, too, because it was selfishness that let these crimes happen in the first place. They went unchallenged because white people in authority feared being accused of racism, a charge that would have risked them losing face or losing their job. The same cowardice and instinct for self-preservation that enabled mass rapes to take place has reasserted itself in recent days with obfuscations and evasions of the same order.

The second assumption, that those who are bringing light to the issue are spreading falsehoods, should also raise eyebrows. Musk may be guilty of hyperbole, as is the tone of so much debate and exchange on his forum, but for the most part people aren’t sharing and discussing fake news. The problem here isn’t lies being disseminated. The problem here is the facts that rarely were. The masses are talking about events that were downplayed and overlooked for years. If we include silence, the refusal to speak the truth and a tacit negation of facts in the category of “untruth”, then the negligent authority figures of the past and those deflectors and equivocators of the present have themselves been guilty of deception and mendacity.

This obsessive preoccupation with the “misinformation” of others has also been in evidence this week in the reaction that Facebook is to relax its restrictions on freedom of expression, with Nick Cohen responding to Mark Zuckerberg’s post: “Meta bends the knee to Trump and facilitates the spread of his propaganda”.

The focus on “misinformation” epitomises a quintessentially modern malaise, one characteristic of a hyper-liberal dogmatic mindset. This is an outlook that is highly controlling, judgemental and simplistic — one that categorises and divides the world into those who are right and righteous and those who are wrong and revolting. This is the philosophy that censors and cancels, save only those who can literally afford to speak with impunity, such as J. K. Rowling or Musk himself.

This dogma, which remains a potent and silent force today despite much talk of “woke being over”, is partly an offshoot of a postmodern relativism that was hostile to those tenets of the Enlightenment: reason, doubt and open inquiry. That’s why progressive managerialism is so absolutist — why today’s liberal clerisy are unduly concerned with heretics who question iron certitudes. They are intolerant of dissent because they presume that truths are cast in stone and sacred.

The Enlightenment was founded on the concept and virtue of doubt. The father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, made doubt the starting point of his thinking, the principle from which everything else followed. The Enlightenment that continued after him proceeded in the quest for knowledge from the first principle that everything can be questioned, that conclusions must remain imperfect, provisional and open for revision. It was a spirit developed even into the mid-twentieth century, elaborated by Karl Popper, who said that scientific truths aren’t proved, only disproved. We understand this principle today in the language of law courts: we accept things to be true when evidence is “beyond all reasonable doubt”.

An obsession with “misinformation” is a symptom of a dogma beholden to a belief in the inviolable truth and righteousness of its own position

Enlightenment tolerance of the objectionable opinions, beliefs and assertions of others was based on twin principles. The first is that no-one has a monopoly on absolute truths or has insight into a noumenal, ultimate reality from which they derive, to what is objectively and eternally right or wrong. The second is that in a free and liberal society we must tolerate opinions, attitudes and beliefs we don’t share or like — even if these tenets cannot be disproved, as is the case of revealed religion (including the revealed religion as held by the Rev Richard Coles).

Letting others make unverifiable assertions and repeat ostensible untruths is the price we pay for freedom and a bulwark against mental ossification and political authoritarianism. And that insidious drift towards authoritarianism has been evident in the past ten years, ever since woke hyper-liberalism, with all its belligerent moralising, made itself manifest.

An obsession with “misinformation” is a symptom of a dogma beholden to a belief in the inviolable truth and righteousness of its own position, the attitude of an elitist, gatekeeping creed that fears “populism”, one that mistrusts the masses for their stupidity, suggestibility and incapability of dealing with facts and processing information. As Luke Conway wrote in Liberal Bullies, his book of last year: “One of the defining elements of authoritarian regimes, both past and present, both right-wing and left-wing, is that they try to control information”.

Lies and untruths can indeed be destructive. But so too can be holding slavishly to truths, or sticking without question to one’s beliefs and convictions. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1878 in Human, All Too Human, a book he dedicated to Voltaire: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”