“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.