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Nobody Tells the Truth
Why would anyone have faith in the government’s telling the truth? It’s clear that if the facts get in the way of their agenda, they aren’t interested in “complicating” their message. We always knew that government, and especially politicians, “mishandled” the truth, but we figured that behavior went with the job. After all, they desperately wanted to fool as many people as possible. But now the lying is so ubiquitous that the word “truth” has lost its meaning. I’d like to think the lying happens less on the Right, but I simply don’t know if that’s true anymore. Even more disappointing is that more than ever, the media has decided that its mission is to defend the Leftist agenda, so they are happy to collude in the lying.
The fact is, digging up the truth can be inconvenient: who wants to conduct an investigation, with the time and effort it will require, when you can just make it up? Not only is making that effort tiresome, but you might discover facts that simply don’t support your agenda. A much more “helpful” approach is to be creative; make up your own facts from innuendo when you report on the Right, and ignore or embellish your facts when they aren’t flattering to the Left.
The rest of us are left to try to determine the truth on our own. How are we supposed to do that? We’ve known that the media has slanted Left for a very long time, but it is now dominated by the Left’s agenda. How did the media become so committed to making up their own facts?
I’d point to a number of cultural changes that both the government and the media have been subject to:
- Lack of a connection or commitment to moral and religious values—Even people who appear to be engaged with their religions are prepared to compromise their values when it suits their motives.
- Lack of impulse control—Rather than fight the impulse to be the first out with any kind of news, the media chooses to be the first to report the most outrageous story—the worse, the better. Lack of impulse control also refers to those people who spout attacks and derogatory accusations against the people they dislike—without any interest in making sure that the defamations are accurate.
- An abundance of narcissism—Too often legislators and reporters want to be part of, if not central to, the story. They take over the headlines, rather than letting their version of the facts relate the story. One only needs to think of Nancy Pelosi and Jim Acosta to know the truth of this statement.
- The thrill of intrigue—Everyone loves a good story. But when we are reading or listening to the news, we want to be informed, not titillated. More often than not, reporters are focusing on exciting their readership, not educating them.
- Destroying the enemy—with the ongoing polarization, the two sides are not merely adversaries; they are now dangerous threats to democracy. Some of these battles seem to become, metaphorically, Biblical in proportion. The people must be killed, the landscape laid waste. It’s a take no prisoners mentality.
- Lack of maturity—Too many people seem to be trapped in ideas that lack perspective or maturity. The only thing that matters is getting one’s way, and making sure the other side loses. There is little appreciation for human nature, relationships and serving the people.
President Biden leads the way in lying to the people. He has told repeated lies about the coronavirus. He has misrepresented the proposed spending for infrastructure. He lied about the Texas and Georgia election bills leading to voter suppression. He has insisted that the border situation is being managed. He doesn’t understand the second amendment and the importance of protecting it. He mischaracterized the riots of last summer. He said there was no vaccine distribution plan. He claimed he inherited a mess on the border. He’s insisted people wear masks when the science didn’t support him.
And there’s much more.
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So, what can we do to overcome the lies that we are repeatedly exposed to? Here are a few suggestions:
- Get your information from multiple sources, and have at least one that you believe is likely to tell the truth.
- Follow the story over time. For example, you might find that a school district claims to have removed Critical Race Theory from its curriculum; take the time within a month or two to make sure that change occurred.
- Speak out against distortions and lies, especially at the local level.
And to maintain a sense of equilibrium, try these:
- Mourn the loss of losing a more virtuous country—but find a way to move on.
- Speak the truth at every opportunity.
- Don’t adopt the language of the Left.
- Take risks; do this not just to do the right thing, but to be an example to others that you are prepared to step up.
Let’s start a movement among us to simply tell the truth.
Published in Group Writing
Generei: Journalism was never about truth. Mourning the passing of something that never was is just strange.
I am not sure about that. There was a time that “liberals” cherished the truth, while of course there have always been journalists who wouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. The sad reality is that many former “liberals” have been seduced into fashionable Marxist theology and have turned their backs on what they formerly believed.
I think the turning point however was the indoctrination of our young in the Marxist/Nihilist idea that “all truth is relative” meaning there really is no real truth, ever. Once a person is open to that idea, which many of our young are, the honest to god truth has lost it’s currency and does not the validity it does for the rest of us.
So Susan, I think your list is a good one but it misses a couple of things:
A. Most of young adults have been throughly brainwashed and have been conditioned deliberately with the fear of retribution to not believe anything Conservatives, the Religious and Republicans say.
B. Most of young have been so poorly educated while also trained what to think but not how to think, that they just don’t have the mental wherewithal to understand the truth when they see it and/or to recognize when they are being lied to. Our government may seem simple, but to the normal poorly educated American adult it is not. Our issues on the other hand are even more complex, where it often takes a fairly solid understanding of many things like how our economy works, how logistics work, and what it takes to provide a solution to complex problems where the interests of many are often in conflict. Todays’s young are much more likely to believe simple sound bite solutions that play to their indoctrinated understanding of the world than to put in the effort of really trying to understand what is actually happening around them.
You’re right, of course, in talking about our young people. My focus, though, was primarily on government and media. But those young folks coming up are going to be taking positions in both venues, aren’t they? Thanks for pointing that out, @unsk.
Things that can be true at the same time: Masks are good sometimes, other times not; the vaccines are good for some of us, for others not.
Finally! Something we agree on! Patience does pay in the long run, after all! :-)
All the best,
Deplorable Jim
Susan, thank you for this excellent discussion; as another commenter put it, there is a lot of food for thought here and I learned a lot from it. As to the sentence above, while it is hard for me to try to put myself in the place of the younger portion of our citizenry, I ask myself just about every day–how in the world can they possibly believe in “the truth” as they see so little of it in our “Anointed” class, to use Dr. Sowell’s perfect description of the elite? In that connection, they see a President, who I am sure must strike them as some kind of comic figure straight out of SNL, who, as you put it, “leads the way in lying to the people.” He lies about just about everything and here I must try to be charitable, as one would naturally want to be charitable to a family member suffering so obviously from dementia, but to be most considerate of his condition he is at least voluntarily (?) reading the lies written for him by Ron Klain or Susan Rice or Valerie Jarrett.
In this regard, you and our colleagues might find interesting an article I saw right after noting your post–it is entitled “Imagine if they hadn’t lied to us for the last 18 months” and can be accessed here. In my opinion, and, judging by some of the other comments here that opinion may not be shared by all, this piece gets right to the heart of your concern as the author catalogs the many ways the public has been lied to about masks, lockdowns, and the many other inconsistencies they have foisted off on the public, with no accountability whatsoever and with no humility at all. As he says, “.. they are wrong all the time, and instead of owning up to it, they treat you like some sort of idiot for noticing.” I simply cannot let this moment pass without noticing how lucky you and I and the other Ricochet Floridians are to live with a Governor and administration so committed to transparency and honest reporting!
Who, exactly, do the young Americans look up to for any semblance of honesty, in a time when former Cabinet Members, Members of Congress, the Speaker of the House, and many others go on CNN and MSNBC at every opportunity and (still!) spout charges such as Russia! Russia! Russia!, just for one example, which every citizen with a sentient mind knows have been disproven after years of investigation and millions of dollars expended in a maniacal effort to “get” President Trump? What must they think when they see Congressmen like the execrable Schiff and the embarrassing Kinzinger pretend they are crying in a Congressional hearing? As another comment above put it: “Wonderland”! Indeed.
Thanks again for this thought-provoking post.
Thanks, Jim. I don’t know who the next generation will look to. The future looks dark, but I see glimmers of possiblity. And I won’t let that go! Yes, I am very grateful to be a resident of FL. Another glimmer of hope.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under the July 2021 Group Writing Theme: “We Hold These Truths (or Fictions).” Stop by to sign up for the August theme: “A day in the life.”
Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.