“What those images suggest … [is] quite different than learning what actually happened, determining the facts.” This was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas trying to have it both ways in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. He wanted to justify his and President Joe Biden’s disgraceful condemnation of mounted border officials controlling Haitian migrants, yet also insist that those officials would be investigated fairly.
His weasel words betray a poison in our politics that gives as much weight to feelings as it does to facts, even when the feelings are based on false perceptions and deliberate lies. Philosopher Allan Bloom drew attention to this trend, corrosive of good government and moral coherence, in his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind.
A quarter of a century later, tyrannical impulses have free rein (as long they come from the Left’s, not the Right’s, tin-pot dictators) to destroy the lives and careers of people whose opinions they dislike. An earlyish example of this was Google’s sacking in 2017 of James Damore, a software engineer who suggested there might be fewer female engineers than males not because of sexual discrimination but because fewer women want those jobs.
There was mass outrage over Damore’s countercultural point, and this entirely outweighed any thought that perhaps what he said was true. There is, in fact, a great deal of social science data confirming that men and women want different things. Never letting the facts get in the way of a good story was something we joked about on Fleet Street 30 years ago, but today, it’s an article of woke faith. The narrative is all, and truth be damned.
Everywhere around us, political activists demand that public policy assert what ordinary people know is false. We’re supposed to accept, for example, that black people are more in danger from rogue police officers than from black murderers, that women can impregnate men and that it’s appropriate for genetically male fighters to beat up women in cage matches, that trillions of dollars of government spending cost “zero” because they’ll be paid for by the biggest tax hike in history, etc., etc.
A vast souffle of lies, inflated by the heat of our political culture, is almost begging to be deflated by a blast of cold reality. This presents a great political opportunity to anyone brave enough to seize it. It is the opportunity to tell the truth. Any aspiring politician who does so will be excoriated ceaselessly by those whose path to power is paved with the sort of lies I’ve just mentioned. So it will take courage and a thick skin, but the rewards could be spectacular.
A key reason Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 was that he attracted voters who thought he “told it like it is.” They loved him repeatedly smacking down left-wing nostrums. They delighted in the fact that he would bluntly say what was on his mind — damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. But Trump’s fatal and obvious problem was that he had an entirely casual relationship with the truth himself, and his rhetoric was littered with lazy and ignorant falsehoods. This eventually outweighed the truth he told about left-wing nonsense, as did his brutishness. People who hoped Trump would become more presidential in office were disappointed. America got the whole package with him, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
But truth can be told, even in unvarnished form, without resorting to crude aggression and without being accompanied by its own bodyguard of lies. A conservative politician prepared to be staunch in telling it like it is, prepared to brave the assault that will come his way, and prepared to hit back decisively but without boorishness could land a knockout blow.
Ordinary Americans are sick of the ways of Washington, of the self-serving disingenuousness, and of principles being trimmed and then abandoned according to the latest ideological fad. They yearn for a man or woman with the skill and courage to talk sense plainly. This might be a Democrat, but since that party is hogtied with falsehoods, it is more likely to be a Republican. And the GOP has not had a leader of the necessary caliber since Ronald Reagan.
Nevertheless, it is also a generation since we’ve seen a moment as propitious as the current one for someone to separate themselves from the pack and offer the nation what it craves — leadership and policies based not on feelings, perceptions, and narratives, but on the truth.
