Speaking at a conference in Washington, DC, late last year, former Barack Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz complained about the difficulty of having a “sane conversation with younger Jews” about Gaza. In attempting to “give data and information and facts and arguments,” she had found that she couldn’t get through to them because TikTok was “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

The comment was deeply illuminating. In essence, Hurwitz was arguing that direct documentary footage from Gaza did not count as “information” or “data,” and that the Left was so consumed by the irrational feelings these videos produced that it was incapable of seeing the real facts of the case — leaving the pro-Israel Democratic Party centrists like herself as the sole stewards of sober facthood amid a broader political descent into hysterical fantasy.

Hurwitz is hardly alone in accusing the Left of prioritizing feelings over facts. When the New York Times editorial board issued its anti-endorsement of then-mayoral-candidate Zohran Mamdani, it characterized him as someone who “ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance” — that is, refuses to face the facts of power and economics. When Ezra Klein argued for softening the Democrats’ commitment to abortion for electoral reasons, he chided the Left for lacking the “willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.” Across the board, centrist Democrats make reference to hard facts to dismiss dissent from the Left, who are supposedly incapable of internalizing the ironclad economics of housing, the political realities of governing, or the considerations fueling an ongoing genocide.

But a closer look at this dynamic reveals less about the Left’s naivete and more about the modern Democratic Party’s criteria for deciding who’s worth listening to. As Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin argue in their book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, establishing the “matter of fact” is a long and combative process. Facts aren’t discovered but are materialized, and this process of materialization is never neutral. It involves technological systems, information networks, and assumptions about power and authority. And for the Democrats, it almost always involves consultants, donors, and focus groups — to the exclusion of other data sources.

For Hurwitz, facts are constructed by “data and information,” but this category excludes video evidence of wanton destruction and first-person footage from Palestinians documenting death and terror. In explaining Mamdani’s popularity, the New York Times seemed to take its facts from the political chattering classes who attributed Mamdani’s success to savvy branding and social media, rather than from everyday New Yorkers who reported agreeing with Mamdani’s messages of affordability and equality.

In the aftermath of Renée Good’s and Alex Pretti’s murders in Minneapolis, the centrist Third Way think tank urged Democrats to avoid the slogan “Abolish ICE” because it was “emotional” and therefore politically “lethal.” It did not matter that the slogan accurately reflected the Left’s view of what should happen to the brand-new, unnecessary, and highly volatile agency — the Left’s position was still portrayed as driven primarily by feelings, which ran counter to focus-group-tested facts.

Centrist Democrats’ process of materializing facts tends to privilege consultants’ interpretations of dig data, often at the expense of immediate experience and direct testimony. Indeed, anything too close to the ground loses legitimacy for that very reason, as if a “fact” could only emerge after it had undergone a series of sanitizing abstractions. This contingent has taken its cues from contemporary tech corporations, which give more weight to conclusions drawn from big data interpretation (e.g., “People download apps like this, so we should build more”) than to direct experience or observation (e.g., “These apps make life worse”). This similarity between Democratic Party insiders and tech companies becomes even more concrete when we consider how political consulting firms have partnered with tech to, for example, use artificial intelligence to quickly generate frictionless “consensus” statements, rather than using real-world discourse to build true political consensus.

Of course, feelings don’t necessarily disappear in this paradigm, and a few actually do get elevated to the status of a fact. But which feelings get vaunted, and which get dismissed as irrational or counterproductive, is highly revealing. Take the fear of antisemitism, which is broadly accepted to reflect a real fact about the world. All good so far — no disagreement here. Yet whenever those who stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza speak about their fear of political retaliation or lament the “wall of carnage” they’re seeing before them, this is characterized as an irrational product of TikTok brain rot. Some feelings are fact-based, while others aren’t. It just so happens that the legitimate ones line up with the agendas of big donors like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Or take Klein’s suggestion that the feelings of pro-life conservatives in battleground states should be treated as a hard and unchanging fact of political life. Meanwhile, the feelings of pro-choice advocates in those same states are regarded as malleable, something they should and can put aside for a bigger purpose. Pro-life feelings are facts, while pro-choice feelings are feelings. As ever, the realpolitik urged by centrist liberals only appears to take for granted the immovability of those across the aisle, taking their political commitments seriously while dismissing the Left’s as grounded in unreality.

The discourse-killing exhortation to simply face the facts is something we often associate with Republicans. In reality, Democrats are equally guilty, only they tend to wield it against the Left rather than the Right. Centrists use “facthood” to maintain power over a growing movement in their own base by appealing to the high-minded idea of truth: a machine-made, consultant-delivered truth that just so happens to advance donor agendas and sustain political careers.

For our part, the Left must engage in political mobilization to create new, unignorable facts, like Mamdani’s victory in New York City or the American public’s broad sympathy with the people of Gaza. The more successful we are, the less plausible the narrow regime of centrist facthood will appear — evidently upheld by nothing more than the flimsy feeling that this is how facts ought to be. And at the end of the day, facts don’t care about your feelings.