Can you kill truth? Probably not, but a lot of people are doing their best to dig its grave.

A man I know teaches in a prestigious private school in Northern Virginia that prides itself on its progressive agenda. Students and faculty attend workshops on such subjects as critical race theory, and teachers must be careful what they say in the classroom for fear of inadvertently offending a student. This same school assigns each of its high school students a faculty member as an advisor.

Recently, my acquaintance—let’s call him Tom—was meeting with an advisee, a senior, whom he considers the brightest student in her class. During their conversation, she mentioned that she didn’t care for Elon Musk. When Tom asked for her thoughts on Musk’s release of the Twitter Files, she had no idea what he was talking about.

Her ignorance surprised him. Afterward, as he was walking to his classroom, Tom decided to conduct a little experiment. He stopped a colleague in the hallway and asked what she thought about Elon Musk, Twitter, and the recent congressional hearings regarding Twitter and government censorship. She shrugged and said: “Sorry. I really have no idea what you mean.” From the rest of their conversation, Tom learned that his colleague took her news from The Washington Post and corporate television.

These encounters provide only anecdotal evidence of ignorance as well as censorship and suppression by corporate media and so must be approached gingerly as to their meaning and consequences. Nonetheless, if we multiply that teacher by millions of others who rely on the corporate media, we can conclude that many Americans are unaware of the import of the Twitter Files.

When I told Tom’s story to another acquaintance, she remarked, “It’s like we’re living in two different universes.”

In the alternative universe, reporters and commentators sculpt the news to make it fit a cultural and political agenda. In the recent school shooting in Nashville, for example, where a mentally ill woman identifying as a man murdered six Christians, including three children, some in the media and certain politicians tried to shape a narrative more sympathetic to the killer than to the victims.

Moreover, in the first reports of that mass shooting, we were told that the murderer had left behind a manifesto. That was over two weeks ago, yet the manifesto remains under wraps. So, why isn’t the press pushing for its release? Are they afraid of what that manifesto may contain?

Since the turn of the century, and particularly during the last two years, truth and hard facts have become as rare as frugality in our government. The list of cover-ups, half-truths, and outright lies boggles the inquiring mind. Hunter Biden’s laptop, the deceptions practiced during the pandemic, the catastrophic failure in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, the support for critical race theory and transgenderism, the lies about inflation and the health of the economy, and the sinister machinations of our intelligence agencies are swamps of obfuscation and unanswered questions, but all these events go largely uninvestigated by mainstream media. And that’s just the short list.

During the Trump administration, The Washington Post for the first time featured a slogan on its website: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The alliteration is catchy, but that slogan contains a double entendre. On the surface, it crowns The Washington Post as the bringer of light to the darkness. A tyrant, however, or a cynic might derive a more sinister meaning from that slogan: “If democracy dies in darkness, all the better. Let the darkness prevail.” Conceal facts and truth, and you can dispatch democracy—or a republic, if you will—to the boneyard.

To defend and promote truth and facts, we might start with some excellent advice from Ryan Bomberger of The Radiance Foundation: “We need less activism, more factivism.” In other words, rather than running with our emotions, we should first learn truth and facts about issues like abortion, gun control, and government overreach. We should then use that knowledge as our first line of defense against tyranny while sharing our information with others.

Encounters like those of Tom with his student and his colleague occur myriad times every day in our land. In his case, he handled himself perfectly. He didn’t directly confront either one of them, blasting them with information and making them angry or hurt. Instead, he simply asked a few questions, which may later bring them to do some investigation.

“The truth will set you free,” Scripture tells us. It will also keep us free.
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Image credit: PickPik, NC

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