There is an old test for distinguishing reality from everything else: reality is what does not go away when you stop believing in it. The novelist Philip K. Dick offered that definition almost as a joke, but it is the sturdiest one available. Your opinion of gravity has never once been consulted by gravity. The bacterium does not read the press release. The ledger balances or it does not, whatever the shareholders have been told.
This indifference is precisely what makes truth valuable. A fact that bent to preference would be worthless — you could not build on it, navigate by it, or hand it to a stranger and expect it to work. Truth is the only material in human affairs with load-bearing strength, and it has that strength because it is not ours. We do not make it; we can only find it, or fail to.
Winston Churchill put the same point with a shrug in the House of Commons in 1916: the truth is incontrovertible — panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is. Notice what the sentence does not claim. It does not say the truth wins quickly, or that lies are harmless, or that the record cannot be buried for a lifetime. It says only that the truth does not require our cooperation to remain true. It can wait. Semmelweis's mothers were vindicated by germs that never heard the ridicule; the cold O-rings were indifferent to the launch schedule.
This is, oddly, the most hopeful fact in the whole argument. Because truth does not need defending to stay true, defending it is never futile — the thing you are defending cannot actually be destroyed, only abandoned. Every honest measurement, every corrected error, every accurate sentence is a reunion with something that was there all along, patient as bedrock, waiting to be built on again.