We are living through an age that has abandoned the dedicated pursuit of truth. Our politicians and news personalities talk about “the narrative.” Our academies teach young minds to accept “expert opinion.” Our philosophers argue that truth is “subjective.” Social theorists argue that truth is an “illusion” that powerful people use to control others.
Whenever I hear Democrat Senator Cory Booker all riled up on television, he’s talking about “her truth,” “his truth,” or even “their truth” — as if a hundred conflicting descriptions of the same event could all be truthful.
During Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, Democrats called Dr. Christine Blasey Ford to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ford claimed that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982 when both were in high school. Kavanaugh vehemently denied the allegation and argued that many parts of Ford’s story didn’t add up. When Kavanaugh told the senators that the whole thing was a political spectacle being used as a weapon to derail his confirmation, Senator Booker shouted, “Are you calling her some kind of political operative?” Kavanaugh calmly pointed out, “The witnesses who were there [the party at which Blasey Ford claimed the alleged assault occurred] say it didn’t happen.” Kavanaugh then stated that, although Blasey Ford’s allegations were false and harmful, his “family has no ill will toward her.”
This is how Booker responded to Justice Kavanaugh’s total denial of the allegation against him: “She came forward. She sat here. She told her truth.” Her truth. Not the truth. The “truth” that was most likely to help Democrats “Bork” Kavanaugh’s nomination — just as then-Senator Joe Biden and fellow Democrats tried to do during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings back in ’91 when they brought in a witness who claimed that Thomas had made “unwelcome sexual comments” when the two worked together, a charge Thomas similarly and furiously denied.
What was revealing about Booker’s made-for-TV moment was his disregard for whether Kavanaugh had actually done anything untoward forty years earlier in his life. He didn’t care. The lack of any evidence that could credibly support Blasey Ford’s allegation didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that Kavanaugh flatly denied the allegation. For Booker, the only “fact” that mattered was that Blasey Ford was willing to testify to something that might sink Kavanaugh’s nomination. “Her truth,” even if false, made it compelling.
Booker’s flippant disregard for the truth was reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s rationalization to a grand jury that he never lied about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky when he told his staff, “There’s nothing going on between us,” and Jim Lehrer of PBS, “There is no improper relationship.” As everyone who recalls Lewinsky’s stained blue dress knows, Clinton’s statements were lies. But when Clinton testified before members of a grand jury, this was his truth:
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.…Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said ‘no.’ And it would have been completely true.”
At that moment, President Clinton proved to Americans that he had no interest in truth. He did not care if he lied. He cared only whether the American people might catch him in a lie. Whether Clinton had “plausible deniability” mattered. Whether he could confuse enough jurors over the meaning of “is” mattered. But the truth? Well, the truth is for rubes and suckers. Clinton’s dissembling and Booker’s disregard for what actually happened in 1982 are symptoms of the same disease: our dishonest age’s abandonment of — and even hostility toward — what is true.
Politicians lie. That’s hardly breaking news. What is newsworthy, though, is that our society does not even pretend to pursue truth anymore.
During COVID, we were forced to follow government mandates that made absolutely no sense. Why was it safe for Walmart to remain open when small businesses were forced to close? How could paper masks, arrows painted on the floor, plexiglass walls, or six feet of space save us from microorganisms that don’t care about such things? Why should schools be closed when the virus posed the least threat to young people? Why should healthy people who had already acquired natural immunity be forced to take an experimental injection? The public was right to ask so many valid questions. Yet our government-run health organizations responded with juvenile insouciance: We’re working at the speed of science! That was the “scientific” equivalent of, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
We’re fifteen years into this gender-bender madness during which “experts” (including too many with M.D.s) claim that biological sex is not real and that what we perceive as male or female is nothing more than a self-imposed social construct. People who have refused to play this delusional game have been fired from jobs. People looking for jobs tell obvious lies.
During Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn asked, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” The newest member of the Supreme Court replied, “No, I can’t.” “You can’t?” Blackburn asked incredulously. The jurist who holds one of the most powerful offices in the United States claimed, “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” This is where we are now. A judge with two Harvard degrees can’t tell the American people whether she is actually a woman.
A few days ago, reporter and columnist John Stossel noted that twenty years have passed since former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released in theaters. Along with a short five-minute video that includes research scientists from the Heartland Institute debunking the pseudoscience behind “climate change” fearmongering, Stossel summed up Gore’s lies thusly: “NONE of his scary predictions have come true. Mt. Kilimanjaro still has snow and Glacier National Park still has glaciers.” Yet included in that short video is a litany of celebrity “experts” and Democrat politicians all parroting the same lie: We have only twelve years left to live.
The “global warming” liars spent the last twenty years scaring children all over the world by telling them that they would die before being old enough to drive. Now some of those scared kids have children of their own, and the “climate change” con is still going. Prominent Democrats such as Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Richard Blumenthal have even supported legislation that would prohibit funds to federal agencies that “challenge the scientific consensus on climate change.” In other words, Democrat politicians wish to outlaw the Scientific Method.
Our society does not doggedly pursue truth. It pursues ideological compliance.
Truth does not require President Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board to arbitrate reality for the public. Science is never “settled,” as President Barack Obama claimed in his 2014 State of the Union Address. People without PhDs are quite capable of defining a “woman” and deciding for themselves whether to wear paper masks. To pretend otherwise is just another lie.
Here’s the real problem, though: When our politicians, scientists, educators, and philosophers spread the lie that there is no objective truth, they transform our existence into gooey meaninglessness. Because if everything is “true,” then nothing is true. And if nothing is true, then politicians will decide what is “true” for us.
Pursuing truth does not mean that we ever obtain it. It is the vigilant pursuit of truth, though, that gives us sufficient wisdom to recognize the lies and liars among us. In an age when liars rule, question everything.
