Today telling the truth has largely disappeared from public discourse.  Let’s use basic history as an example.  Learning history in school was the norm during the period 1952-1969, the formative years up through my graduation from college.  I received a detailed education in public schools of our founding and principles, American history, and world history dating back to antiquity.  As part of a Navy family, I went to school all over the country: Virginia, Maryland twice, California, Illinois, and Nebraska.  History teaching was consistent everywhere, including hard truths about slavery here and around the world.  After college, I continued studying history in depth, including the Revolutionary period up to our founding, the Civil War period and Lincoln, and the major world wars in the 20^th century, especially WWII. 

Studying the Founders was particularly insightful and important in terms of really understanding the true nature of America.  The Founders were highly educated and acutely aware of man’s checkered history.  They excelled in extraordinarily challenging circumstances in establishing a new nation based on principles of liberty and opportunity.  Was our Founding flawed by slavery and other pre-modern holdovers from a more primitive era?  It was.  But abolishing slavery at that time was impossible considering the South’s dependence on it as an essential element of its economy.  So, evil as it was, had it not been accommodated, America would not have been created at all and we would likely still be English. 

Still, America’s Founding was and is one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the human race.  It simultaneously threw off monarchy and created a new form of government with the best elements of all the old forms, a unique new governmental system that had never been tried before.  And it worked.  America at 247 years is the longest-lived democracy in the world. 

A broad knowledge of history and our Founding was the expected norm back then for anyone growing up in America.  What passes for history today?  The execrable 1619 project, a complete fiction that attempts to paint the picture that our nation was founded on racism.  Even its author admits it is not history, yet it is being passed off as history to millions of vulnerable young children today, a travesty and a tragedy to deprive the young of today of the truth about our miraculous founding against the longest odds.  It is true that slavery survived the founding.  But the founders’ core principles as outlined boldly in the Declaration itself that “all men are created equal,” created the very foundation for the end of slavery later and the end of racism in 1964 with the passage of the Equal Rights Act.  Readers can learn about the lies of the 1619 project in Peter Woods’ 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project or Mary Grabar’s Debunking the 1619 Project. 

How could such false history have gained such traction in our society?  It is because liars are promoting false history for a political agenda to fundamentally change America into a totalitarian socialist state.  Lying about our history is the key to overthrowing America.  If the majority can be convinced that they are living in an evil country, worse than others and with a system that systematically harms Blacks and others, it will be easier to convince them to throw off our Constitution and replace it with socialism.  Socialism has been tried and the result is always death, killing over 200 million people to date.  Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  We must not go down that path.

Lying about our history is just the start.  Whether it is the mainstream media, the social media giants, academia, Hollywood, or corporate America, these institutions lie about everything.  They lie that climate change is a mortal threat to civilization.  It’s not.  In fact, there has been zero warming for the last eight years.  Has the media reported that? They lie that gun violence is out of control.  It is not.  Americans are safer from guns 2023 more so than at any time in our history.  Your chances of being killed by a gun is lower by orders of magnitude less than your chances of getting hit by lightning.  They lie about abortion involving women’s health when it is really the murder of children in the womb.  They lie that the nation has secure borders as millions illegally enter our country including terrorists and drug runners.  They lie that the rich pay no taxes despite the U.S. having the most regressive tax regime in the world where our richest citizens pay a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s taxes.  They even lie about basic biology, exploiting the sad plight of victims of gender dysphoria.  In recent years there has been a 4000% increase in young females claiming to be the opposite sex.  Is no one in our vaunted institutions -- academia or the media -- interested in how this could be happening?  They lie about the police being murderous brutes when the truth is that overwhelmingly the police are honest, brave, and fair public servants doing a thankless job to keep our citizenry safe from criminals.

Americans need to demand truth from all our institutions.  If a person, a company, or an institution is dishonest, they must be challenged by the way you relate to them.  How you behave, what you choose to spend money on, the way you consume, what you watch, listen to or support is everything!  If they lie, avoid them.  Do not consume their products.  Money and interest drive the marketplace.  Disney just announced massive layoffs because Americans are staying away in droves from their woke ideology.  The power of the purse can restore truth to the public square.  Each American must seek truth and use the power of his own pocketbook to lift up those institutions, companies and people that tell the truth and to deny attention and money to those who won’t tell the truth.

Image: Jens Rost