U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio created quite a stir at the Munich Security Conference last week. Rubio’s speech emphasized the shared heritage, history and culture of Europe and the United States — described broadly as “Western civilization” — and called upon the nations of Europe to defend and be proud of that heritage and to preserve it.

Rubio mentioned just a few of the great contributions Europe has made to America and the people of the world, including “the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution.” He credited Christianity as the foundation of Western civilization, referring to the Christian faith of America’s founders and first settlers as “a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”

One thing Rubio did not mention specifically, but which is inherent in every point he made, was that the greatest achievements of Western civilization are grounded in the pursuit, protection and promotion of truth.

Europe’s and America’s great universities were created for the pursuit of truth and to convey those truths to future generations. The scientific method is designed to uncover truths through investigation and the rigorous testing of hypotheses. Among the primary purposes of a fair legal system is to discover the truth. A free press should aggressively search for the truth and expose it to the public. And a just government should protect the truth and those who seek to bring it to the public.

This is not the situation in which we find ourselves today, either in Europe or in the United States. In fact, the countries that appear to be most at risk of imploding or losing their cultural identities are those that have departed the furthest from the principle of truth as a foundation of their society. Cultural practices and government policies that are built upon fundamental untruths are inevitably societally corrosive.

Examples are legion.

Abortion is built on the lie that the developing child in utero is not a human being. The United States has some of the most extreme abortion laws on the planet, with several states permitting abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. In the United Kingdom, which permits abortion through 24 weeks (significantly later than other countries in western Europe), nearly one in three pregnancies ends in abortion. This is beyond tragic; it is a recipe for civilizational collapse.

Similarly, welfare laws in the United States effectively reward single motherhood, ignoring the reality that children do better in a home with their mother and father. In 1940, only 15% of Black children in the U.S. were born to single mothers. By 1965, it was 24%. In 1991, it was 68%. Presently the number hovers between 70% and 80%. Although numbers are somewhat lower for Hispanic and White children, those demographics have also seen substantial increases. The consequences of huge numbers of fatherless children play out in lower academic achievement and higher rates of destructive behavior, criminality and imprisonment.

Another lie that pervades western nations is that all cultural practices are equally conducive to human flourishing. This is demonstrably untrue, as western European nations have discovered to their chagrin with the influx of millions of males from countries where Islam is the dominant religion. Instances of sexual assault and rape have exploded in Europe, along with other violence and crime.

Perhaps the most egregious (and most recent) lie being used to support disastrous policies is that sex is “assigned” at birth, that a man can become a woman, or vice versa, through chemical sterilization or surgical mutilation of healthy sexual organs and other body parts. Even more absurd is the corollary that a child can “decide” his or her “gender” and consent to extreme, permanent medical interventions in pursuit of a different “gender.”

Certain things routinely happen when denial of truth becomes a society’s modus operandi. Among them is that lying becomes the government’s default position. It’s not merely, “Hey, all politicians lie at times,” but that the official policies of the government are lies. Inevitably thereafter, people who try to convey the truth are denounced (as racists, bigots, etc.), socially and professionally ostracized, censored and, in extreme cases, arrested and prosecuted.

This is already happening in the UK, where citizens who dare complain about the sexual assault of white girls by Muslim men find themselves charged with hate crimes, convicted and imprisoned, while many of the rapists themselves manage to skate without consequences. It is apparently easier to attack those attempting to bring the truth to light than to admit the unpleasant results of immigration policies based upon lies.

The U.S. isn’t far behind. Consider the recent exposure of massive financial fraud by immigrant populations in Minnesota, Ohio and California. You would think that those in positions of power would be aghast at the theft of resources from American citizens. But no. The ire, instead, is turned against the people like independent journalist Nick Shirley, who exposed the fraud and brought the truth to the public’s attention.

This is by no means limited to immigration issues. Americans who tried desperately to obtain accurate information about the origin of COVID-19 and the actual risks of the mRNA vaccines were accused of spreading “misinformation,” silenced and censored. Many lost their jobs. The same phenomena play out when challenging the prevailing narratives about “climate change” or “systemic racism.”

Why has this happened?

In some instances, it’s been born of the understandable but misguided impulse to make everyone feel good about the choices they make, even when those choices are personally damaging and societally corrosive.

But academia has played an unfortunate and outsize role. The philosophy that “there is no such thing as truth” has been popular in certain scholarly circles for decades. According to this worldview, “truth” is merely a matter of individual perspective. Some “scholars” go further, denying the existence of any negative consequences or characterizing opposition to those consequences as mere “bias” or “oppression” by groups of people who can be dismissed as the “patriarchy” or “white supremacists” or persons imposing “heteronormativity.”

This is a terribly irony and a betrayal of the principles upon which the western concept of the university was founded.

Rubio received a standing ovation from the audience in Munich. But applauding a message and acting on it are two very different things. Restoring the strength of western civilization depends upon having the courage to demand that truth return as the basis for our most important cultural institutions.

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