Among our elites—those in government, corporations, universities, the mainstream media, and the culture at large—are many who fall into three categories: the liars, the muddlers, and the dreamers of the day.
The liars look straight into a camera or the eyes of an audience and boldly proclaim as truth what many listeners know to be false. Joe Biden is an outstanding performer on this stage. An article in The Hill, for instance, takes Biden to task for his last State of the Union address, which “was full of lies and mistruths.” Near the end of this article, Alfredo Ortiz writes: “Don’t expect the mainstream media ‘fact-checkers’ to call Biden out on these lies. These are left-wing opinion journalists masquerading as independent truth arbiters to help advance the Democrats’ agenda.”
Ortiz’s scathing remarks about the press, which proved correct, brings us to the second category, the muddlers. The muddlers are those who deliver stories by mixing fact with fiction, and they dominate in today’s mainstream media.
The reporting on the recent tragic Nashville school shooting provides examples of the muddlers. A Reuters report refers to the killer as Audrey Hale throughout its story, neglecting to tell us until well into the article that Hale identified as transgender. CBS News has gone a step further and banned reporters from describing Hale as transgender.
Then there are the dreamers of the day. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his autobiographical account of the Arab Revolt during World War I, T.E. Lawrence writes:
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
The wicked dreamers of our day are both liars and muddlers who deliberately weave their webs of lies and half-lies to undermine our republic. To identify them is difficult. Only through a misstep or arrogance do they reveal their intentions as they chip away at the Constitution and our liberties.
These are the people who have, in just a few years, expedited the ruin of our economy, the corruption of our courts and our elections, the division among our people, and the destruction of trust in our major institutions. If you want to see the abysmal depths to which this trust has fallen, read the Gallup poll titled “Confidence in Institutions,” which includes statistics on everything from television news to public schools to the military to medicine to Congress.
In the case of nearly all these institutions—the data goes back for decades—public trust is at an all-time low. Worst of all for 2022 are the ratings for Congress, with only 7 percent of those polled expressing a “Great deal/Quite a lot” of confidence in that institution, and television news, which scores 11 percent in the same category.
Given the low levels of trust in such key institutions, how do we fight against the deceivers who are destroying our republic? How do we battle the creeping soft totalitarianism that has now infected our politics and culture?
In his 1974 manifesto, “Live Not By Lies,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn levels charges against the lies of the Soviet Union, with some accusations that could apply to today’s America. He also lists some specific tactics to avoid a life of lies, all of which may be summed up as the daily determination to “shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect from one’s children and contemporaries.”
Solzhenitsyn also recommends surrounding ourselves with like-minded people—friends, family, and others who have seen through the lies and want to stand in truth. He writes:
“This would not be an easy path, but the easiest of all possible ones. Not an easy path — but there are people among us, dozens of them, who have been observing all these conditions for years and who live by the truth.
Therefore you will not be the first to take this path, you will join others! It will be easier and shorter if we embark on it in great and friendly numbers. If we are in thousands it will not be possible for them to do anything to anyone. If we are in tens of thousands we will not recognise our own country!”
We are about to enter another election cycle. Let’s keep our eyes peeled, discerning to the best of our abilities the truth and lies we will be told, and resolve never to cease fighting for our God-given liberties.
