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.
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