Democrats: The “Post-Truth” Party

In September of 2008, U.S. Senator, vice-presidential candidate, and democrat Joe Biden was asked his thoughts—“as a Roman Catholic”—on when life begins. Demonstrating a vast ignorance of science, along with an unflattering display of faith, he told NBC’s Tom Brokaw, “Look, I know when it begins for me.” A decade later, using the same “post-truth” relativism, New York Mayor, presidential candidate, and democrat Bill de Blasio, after signing a law that allows New Yorkers to declare their chosen gender on their birth certificate, told a cheering crowd, “You be you. Live your truth. And know that New York City will have your back.”

Likewise, biology-denying Joe Biden, more than once, has recently called “transgender equality” the “civil rights issue of our time.” Recall that because of his efforts and the efforts of other post-truthers in the Obama administration, among other perverse, “creepy,” and ignorant things, boys started using girls’ restrooms and locker rooms, and military women were declared “at least as strong as men” and officially marked for combat. Soon afterward, boys started—and continue—to take trophies from girls, and military physical standards were lowered.

Also recall that Joe Biden beat his buddy Barack Obama to the punch when it came time for democrats legally to redefine the oldest institution in the history of humanity. I don’t mean to pick mostly on “Uncle Joe,” but since he is the current front-runner in the democrats’ race to see who can deny the most truth the fastest—and become the presidential nominee for the post-truth party—I thought it only fitting to highlight his post-truth accomplishments.

Of course, Joe Biden is far from alone in such thinking. Virtually every democrat in America shares Biden’s post-truth views on life, marriage, sex, biology, the climate, and so on.

Thus, no one should be surprised that Joe Biden has now flip-flopped on the Hyde Amendment. In addition to subsidizing abortion through the federal funding of Planned Parenthood, this new position by Biden would force further taxpayer investment in the killing of unborn human beings. But this is where the Democrat Party now is in 2019, because such further moral capitulation is where post-truth thinking always leads.

Post-truth thinking is why Barack Obama flip-flopped on marriage. Post-truth thinking is why Barack Obama—along with several other modern democrats—argued for infanticide. Post-truth thinking is why a quarter of a century ago (in Planned Parenthood v. Casey), Justice Anthony Kennedy declared, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Thus, no one should’ve been surprised by Kennedy’s post-truth-informed vote on marriage.

Post-truth thinking is why the perpetually pale-faced Elizabeth Warren for decades falsely claimed she was of Native American descent. Post-truth thinking is also why she got away with it for decades. Most anyone grounded in the truth would’ve seen through Fauxcahontas’s fraud and would’ve called her on it. This says much about the post-truth worldview that dominates the academic and media institutions who’ve enabled Warren’s career.

Post-truth thinking is why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk can claim that because of the man-made climate change myth—a result of the “greatest scandal in the history of science” which has led to “the greatest scientific fraud of all time”—the earth is soon doomed unless we adopt a socialist green agenda. Post-truth thinking gave us the Green New Deal, which, though democrats presented it as realistic public policy, as John Zmirak correctly notes, it’s nothing more than “a delusional wish list, a ransom note pasted together with clipped out words from storybooks and glued in place with bubblegum.”

Post-truth thinking is why Bernie Sanders can claim that his version of socialism will work when all others have failed. Only in a post-truth world can the failures of socialism play out right before our eyes, while the American left claims, “Venezuela didn’t collapse because of socialism. It’s a story about epic mismanagement.” In the 20th century alone, with no exceptions, dozens of socialist nations “mismanaged” their way into enslaving and murdering millions. Only a post-truth mindset would fail to learn from such.

Only academic campuses dominated by democrats and corrupted by post-truth thinking would censor speakers and opinions rooted in a conservative or biblical worldview. Truth-telling professors as well as truth-telling campus guests are paying the price for contradicting the dominant post-truth worldview present at virtually every college and university in the U.S. This “college apocalypse”—as Steven Hayward has called it—has turned educational institutions into little more than day care centers.

It was a post-truth mindset that fueled the vile attempt to derail the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. Aided and abetted by the like-minded media, with a mountain of lies, Senate democrats engaged in one of the worst episodes in American political history. Only post-truthers clinging to an evil post-truth agenda would take decades-old uncorroborated accusations and treat them seriously in something as grave as a Supreme Court nomination.

Lastly, and of course, only a political party corrupted by a post-truth worldview would attempt to reverse a presidential election by inventing a Trump-Russia-collusion conspiracy and then invent the crimes to attempt to justify their failed coup. Only post-truthers would spend two-plus years and millions of dollars investigating an incident they know did not occur—all in the name of undoing an election result they didn’t like. Only a post-truth media would devote millions of words and thousands of TV hours in support of such a farce.

Today’s democrats certainly don’t hold a monopoly on post-truth politics and thought, but clearly they are corrupted by it to a greater extent than almost any other collection of individuals one could find. As noted apologist William Lane Craig put it when writing about the Christian perspective on homosexuality, “Today so many people think of right and wrong, not as matters of fact, but as matters of taste.” In a post-truth world, taste determines truth. And if taste determines truth, then we’re all at the mercy of whoever’s in charge, and that’s why today’s democrats—as they are currently constituted—should not be in charge of anything. 

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2019, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Liberals Long Ago Abandoned the Idea that “Truth is Truth”

At the end of 2016—and as they themselves declared, much in response to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States—Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as its 2016 “word of the year.” In other words, because Donald Trump had ascended to the White House, the largest university press in the world decided that much of the American electorate had simply abandoned the truth. Like-minded liberals the world over have decided that we who elected Mr. Trump must be taught a lesson.

Such efforts demonstrate a particularly rich hypocrisy and blind ignorance of their own condition, for in their lust to rule their own world, modern liberals long ago decided to cast aside the fundamental axioms that comprise absolute truth. For such liberals, the age-old quest for “what is truth” has been abandoned or become a foolish and fruitless exercise where “relativism” rules the day.

This is particularly true for liberals in politics, media, and academia—i.e., those leading the charge in trying to reverse the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. As Ravi Zacharias noted is his column addressing Oxford’s “post-truth” conclusions,

These two bastions of values, the academy and the media—where relativism flows in their veins—have become the town criers of this new word. Castigating the politicians, they untruthfully predicted the destination of the untruthful. Excoriating an electorate gone amuck, they wondered how people could be duped into a lie. Having themselves swallowed a camel, they were now straining at a gnat. They are the primary carriers of manipulation with words and repeating distortions often enough to make them into truths. They are the origin of this reality of caring not for truth but for impact and for the manipulation of all thinking. Their victory is pyrrhic.

Knowing well that those after his boss “are the primary carriers of manipulation with words and repeating distortions often enough to make them into truths,” Rudy Giuliani recently told NBC’s Chuck Todd,

…I am not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.

After this statement, shaking his head, Mr. Todd laughingly concluded that “Truth is truth.” Mr. Giuliani should have asked, “Whose Truth, Chuck?” Nevertheless, and again, understanding well who he’s dealing with, Mr. Giuliani regrettably declared that “Truth isn’t truth.” Knowing they had a meme with which they could skewer President Trump and his supporters, gleeful liberals across the U.S. seized upon Giuliani’s three words and enthusiastically engaged in scurrilous scoffing and merciless mocking. In one of the greatest acts of hypocrisy in human history, it was as if in unison they were declaring, “See, we told you dupes that these guys were fools and liars!”

In spite of their recent crowing about “the truth,” few things in the universe are as blind or ambivalent as the truth detectors employed by today’s left. In other words, modern liberalism is notoriously bankrupt and decidedly lost when it comes to producing or discerning the truth.

If there is anything, there is truth. As Thomas Aquinas put it,

The existence of truth is self-evident. For whoever denies the existence of truth grants that truth does not exist: and, if truth does not exist, then the proposition ‘Truth does not exist’ is true: and if there is anything true, there must be truth.

Such a conclusion is in direct contradiction with modern liberalism. John Dewey, a humanist and one of the founding thinkers behind modern liberalism, put it this way,

There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes.

In other words, to admit that there is “immutable truth” is to admit that God exists. Since many want nothing to do with His moral law—especially on matters in the sexual realm—then there can be no truth. Thus, one could say that efforts of modern liberalism could be succinctly summed up as a “war on the truth.”

The consequences of such selfish pursuits have been tragically profound. Virtually every institution that truth-deprived modern liberalism has infected has been corrupted. Whether politics, education, entertainment, corporations, the church, or the family, every significant institution upon which any sound society rests becomes vulnerable to all sorts of nonsense, chaos, and evil once the godless relativism that permeates modern liberalism takes hold.

As we have so often heard, “the truth will set us free.” Sadly, many today have twisted this to mean that “I get to make my own truth so I’m free to do as I please.” No. As Dr. Zacharias reminds us, “True freedom is not the liberty to do as we please; rather, it is to do as we ought. For that we need the truth.”

Just prior to His final act on earth, at one of the most pivotal points in human history, Jesus was asked by Pilate (John 18:37): “What is truth?” Everything precious in the universe hinges on how that question is answered. If we want an honest answer, must look to the One who made the universe and who told us, “I am the truth.”

One of my graduate school mathematics texts—Roads to Geometry—begins with this declaration: “The truth of these axioms [the presuppositions upon which the mathematics is rightfully developed] is not at issue—just the readers’ willingness to accept them as true.” The Bible could end with the same.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2018, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com