March 3, 2021

When Lies Matter More Than Facts

“The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”

This week, The New York Times ran a long piece re-reporting a supposed race scandal from Smith College. The scandal, originally reported in midsummer 2018, featured a black student, Oumou Kanoute, who claimed that she was racially profiled while eating in a dormitory lounge. She suggested in a Facebook post that she was confronted by a campus police officer, who might have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” and a janitor, adding: “All I did was be Black. It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

The janitor was placed on paid leave. The college president issued a campuswide statement explaining, “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The incident was reported by establishment media outlets far and wide.

There was only one problem: It was a lie.

A full investigation by an outside law firm found no evidence of bias. Kanoute was eating in a closed dormitory, and the janitor was doing his job. The campus police officer had no weapon.

So, did The Times apologize for its original coverage? Of course not. It turned the story into an investigation of supposed structural biases based on race and class. In one of the more astonishing sentences ever written in a major newspaper, The Times reported, “The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”

For those who speak English, this sentence translates thusly: The story highlights the tensions between lies and the truth. But for those who speak the wokeabulary, this sentence actually makes equivalence between lies told on behalf of a self-serving victim narrative and factual truth. The two must be balanced against each other, not one dismissed for its patent falsehood.

This is the society we now inhabit: a society in which a “deeply felt sense of personal truth” must be weighed against “the facts.” And typically, our society dismisses “the facts.” That’s because it has been infused with the spirit of deconstructionism, which sees all facts as merely a manifestation of how our social structures “define” truth based on cultural context. “Facts” are merely a reflection of how your society sees truth. But there’s no reason your society’s definition of truth must be the only one. In fact, a more tolerant society would make room for the expressive self-definition of “your truth” and redefine truth along individual lines; an accepting, kind society would allow a “deeply felt sense of personal truth” to flourish by requiring others to accept it as fact.

What of those harmed by that “deeply felt sense of personal truth”? This is where structural arguments about power come in. We can choose which sense of personal truth ought to triumph with reference to societal structures: Those who are deemed more victimized ought to be given more credibility. Thus, Nikole Hannah-Jones, de facto editor of The New York Times, declared that the janitor put on leave might have been the truly privileged one in the story: After all, “What is the social class of the Black student that this entire piece centers on? What is the actual power dynamic at play here?”

This is how we arrive at the insanity of a transgender agenda that calls for banning books that demonstrate the unmalleability of sex: A “deeply felt sense of personal truth” is at odds with the biological facts, and the biological facts must lose.

In the end, perhaps the deconstructionists were right; perhaps a society’s emphasis on facts, data and actual truth reflects the values of that society. Such a society values the individual, since facts are accessible to individuals and aren’t the select preserve of a priestly caste. Such a society allows the possibility of consensus by appeal to verifiable facts. If facts don’t matter, there can be no common polis — or there can only be a polis as dictated by those in power. And perhaps that’s precisely the point.

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.