Tell the Truth!
Harvard is America’s first university, founded in 1636, shortly after Pilgrims first arrived in Massachusetts. On a blank slate, Harvard chose to etch the simple but profound word, “Truth.” Veritas links to the 9th Commandment, “Don’t lie.”
“For although the act condemns the doer, the end may justify him…”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses: I, 9
Profound it may be, “Don’t lie” is often disregarded, easily broken. Truth takes issue with Machiavelli’s 1517 teaching that “the ends justify the means”
In America’s battle for votes, Veritas routinely loses to, in the words of Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, “All’s fair in love, war and politics.”
Then there are "White Lies.” Modern psychology seems to defend them. Here, from the website VerywellMind, “white lie” help for those troubled by guilt:
The adage that you always should tell the truth is mostly right, but in some situations fibs or white lies have a purpose. [W]ith a white lie, often more like a harmless bending of the truth, the intent is benign and positive, and usually, the consequence isn’t major. People tell white lies to protect others, protect the self, and defer to those in power.
“Defer to the powerful.” Is that a good?
— Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
In America’s founding creed, Thomas Jefferson in 1776 bound happiness to God, equality, and freedom:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The parties seem divided today about God. And under God, freedom’s coin comes with its other side: responsibility. Given freedom, one should practice responsibility. As Micah Meadowcroft writes:
the ethical crisis of our time is the exercise of power without responsibility. . . peoples all over the world have made clear that they refuse to let their cultures and societies be dissolved away without a fight.
And from Tristan Justice: "The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms."
Moral Relativism seems documented in Ed Kilgore’s New York magazine article about “Spiritual but Not Religious” voters:
The “Spiritual but Not Religious” believe in the existence of non-material entities like souls (89%), in a realm beyond nature (88%), and in a “higher power or spiritual force” in the universe (73%). Just 20% believe in God as described in the Bible, while only 21% pray daily (though 78% do regularly “look inward” or “center themselves.”) Most SBNRs don’t think of “souls” as inherently a human phenomenon, either: 78% believe non-human animals have souls, and 71% think mountains, rivers, or trees may have souls or “spiritual energies.” As a group, they are kind of on the fence about heaven and hell (about half believe in the former and 40% in the latter), but they are more likely than religious or non-spiritual people to believe in reincarnation, and in the ability of the deceased to communicate with, assist, or even (yikes!) harm the living.
The “Spiritual but Not Religious” belong with the Democratic coalition, an active alternative to Christianity’s God. Democratic separation from religion begins with secularism’s sole reliance on the material world, and gains from opposing right-wing history on abortion (freedom of choice) and LGBTQ activism (love is love).
The Party is an educated elite joined to a disadvantaged voter mass assembled for victory. In Marxist fashion, intellectuals develop an ideology that 1) combats selfish capitalism (the Green Revolution), 2) gathers secular upper class support, and 3) purchases disadvantaged voters through favors.
Religion plays a political role in Europe, as in divided America. According to James Tilley in the London School of Economics Journal, the continent has seen a withering of class politics, but religion remains significant. In France and Spain, practicing Catholics are on the right. In Britain, religion is dismissed as an important marker of vote choices, Tilley noting that in 2003, aide Alistair Campbell interrupted an interview of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to tell the reporter that “we don’t do God.” Few U.K. politicians refer to religion and few are openly religious. Yet in fact, religion remains a good predictor of British votes.
For Democrats, Barack Obama, as we said earlier, is their human god. Substack’s Sasha Stone refers to 2008, “the historic election of the nation’s first Black President,” as having sparked “not just a movement, but a full-blown religion that would influence American culture in ways not felt on the Left since JFK.”
Stone later exited the Obama “full-blown religion,” after realizing she was “an American through and through.” She found that “I cared about the truth more than anything else.”
Ah, Veritas!
Obama recently said, tying together lies and half-truths:
“We had the spectacle of a nominee of one of the two major parties sitting in court and being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 counts. You have — his foundation is not allowed to operate because it was engaging in monkey business and not actually philanthropic work. You have his organization being prosecuted for not paying taxes.” Even if you put aside Trump’s daily outrages, Obama argued, it should be clear that Biden is the candidate standing for basic American values. (emphasis added).
The day after his June 28 disastrous debate performance, President Biden at a Raleigh North Carolina Pep Rally, told us:
We’re the only nation in the world built on an idea. All other nations are built on ethnicity, geography, and other — religion. But we’re built on an idea that we’re all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives. We’ve never fully lived up, but I’ll be damned in the year 2024, just two years — just two years before the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence that I’ll let Donald Trump walk away from it. (emphasis added)
The “idea” came from God; it IS religious in origin. We are created equal, what follows is up to us, not government employing the euphemism “it takes a village.” Our inalienable rights include freedom (liberty) and the “pursuit of happiness.” Biden ignores these important rights on the eve of July 4, mangling the Declaration of Independence in the process.
Let’s appreciate how happiness gains from balancing freedom with responsibility.
Here is Biden’s progressive world, as described by Martin Gurri in UnHerd:
A single monolithic class controls most of the key institutions of American life. [] Conformity in word and gesture is mandatory. And these people have persuaded themselves that contemporary society is too complex for the public to navigate safely. Given the madness of social media, the prevalence of fake news and disinformation, the appeal to simple minds of post-truth populists like Trump — given all the chaos, there’s a need for stern measures. Information must be controlled. Prominent dissenters must be cowed into silence if they wish to keep their jobs. The cops must go after the populists and haul them off to prison.
Miranda Devine is the New York Post reporter whose story about Hunter Biden’s laptop the Biden campaign in 2020 succeeded in suppressing. In the service of Veritas, Devine is documenting the media cover-up of Biden’s senility up until the Trump debate:
- two weeks [before, journalists] were echoing White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s claims that videos of a seemingly disoriented president meandering around at the G7 or having to be led off stage by Barack Obama were “cheap fakes,” manipulated or deceptively cropped by right-wingers.
- The Washington Post fact-checker awarded “Four Pinocchios” to the videos that it said were “especially pernicious [and] intended to create a false narrative [that Biden] is too old for the job.”
- The New York Times defended the president: “How misleading videos are trailing Biden as he battles age doubts.”
- White House spokesman Andrew Bates claimed: “President Biden’s right-wing critics . . . resort to misinformation and cheap fakes because his performance in office . . . is so threatening to them.”
- MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough summed up the attitude with words that will forever haunt him: “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
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