Life in Post-Truth America

liesNext month Americans will experience the fifteenth anniversary of the time that the President of the United States shook his finger at the country and informed it, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

Bill Clinton was lying. But the lie was more significant than the thing that he was lying about.

When the lie came crashing down, Clinton and his defenders deconstructed the English language, questioning the meaning of every word in his sentence rather than admit that the lie was a lie.

Given a choice between telling the truth or challenging the definitions of such words as “sex” and “is”, they decided to burn their dictionary.

Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters with an extra layer of lies.

Invite Gruber to testify about the time that he admitted that the administration had been lying and the only thing that will happen is more lies being told by a man who is there only because he lied.

Like the old lady who explained her cosmology to Bertrand Russell as being “turtles all the way down”, with modern progressives it’s lies all the way down.

Lena Dunham served up a rape accusation against a conservative Republican named Barry only to hide behind the ambiguity of being an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator likewise takes the stage at the University of Virginia where a high profile case has dissolved into contradictory stories in which it becomes difficult to tell whether it was the reporter or her subject who was doing the lying.

The unreliable narrator has crossed over from a fictional device in novels to memoirs, journalism and into politics.

Journalists repeatedly dismissed ObamaCare scandals by arguing that no one could have taken Obama’s claims at face value anyway. When Obama promised Americans that they could keep their doctors, the housewife in Topeka, the freelance programmer in San Francisco and the geologist in Tulsa were supposed to be as knowing as the Washington press corps and realize that he didn’t mean it.

Like Lena Dunham, Obama was an unreliable narrator. No one was ever supposed to expect the truth from him.

The significance of Bill Clinton was not in his affairs, but in his cynicism. He got away with lying by dismissing the idea that anyone should have ever expected the truth from him. Obama expanded on his work by eliminating the base truth underneath the lies.

The device of the unreliable narrator puts truth out of reach. It says that there is no such thing as truth, only various perspectives on an event.

Lena Dunham doesn’t claim to be providing facts, only different versions of a story. The facts themselves cannot be retrieved because there are no facts. The man in question is no longer named Barry. Every descriptive detail about him might be equally false. The whole thing may never have happened, but it’s important to believe that it happened without ever expecting it to be true.

This is the Doublethink state of our progressive Oceania. We are expected to believe a lie while remembering that it’s a lie and therefore never really fooled us or caused anyone any harm.

We were supposed to believe Obama’s assurances about ObamaCare while knowing them not to be true. We are supposed to believe Lena Dunham and Jackie and Gruber while disbelieving them. “The essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty,” Orwell wrote.

The conscious deceptions of the modern Doublethinkers depend on them telling a lie in the service of the greater truth. That pursuit of a greater truth built out of lies is what motivated a Rolling Stone article about fraternity rapists that even Mike Nifong would have turned his nose up at or Gruber’s arrogant truths about lying. The greater truth gives them the firmness of purpose and the complete honesty.

Lena Dunham in BuzzFeed, the apologists for ObamaCare and the activist cheerleaders for Rolling Stone, insist that the facts are a technicality that is obstructing the greater truth. And the greater truth is a worldview that is out of the reach of facts and can never be disproven.

Bill Clinton and his allies deconstructed the English language rather than admit a lie. Their successors deconstruct reality. They deny that objective truth exists or even matters. They didn’t lie because there is no such thing as truth. There are perspectives, some of which agree with Bill Clinton’s version of reality or Lena Dunham’s version of reality.

And then there is Obama’s version of reality.

Obama is the nexus of Doublethink. He is the man whom reporters have denounced as the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation and whom they compulsively defend with every possible lie. Why do journalists protect and serve the man who threatened them, bugged and even tried to lock them up? They too have long ago become unreliable narrators of their own profession.

In the absence of facts, there can be no reality. There is only ideology.

Obama doesn’t simply lie. He exists in a truth-free zone. He doesn’t stumble with any construction as clumsy as Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” He does not start with truthful facts. His starting point is in an imaginary territory. It ends in an imaginary territory. If the two imaginary territories are different, it scarcely matters because neither place was ever real.

When he came into office Obama insisted that we had to pivot to fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though it was no longer in Afghanistan. He went on claiming victory over an enemy that didn’t exist while dismissing ISIS as a jayvee team even when it was capturing entire cities in Iraq.

These weren’t mere lies. This was a foreign policy being conducted in an imaginary territory. It was Wag the Dog being played out in real life. But then again what is real around Obama anyway?

Bill Clinton lied. Obama tells stories. None of these stories have anything to do with reality.

Lena Dunham’s biography is a peek into a disordered mind that is incapable of grasping the concept of truth. In her world there are no facts, only stories that elicit emotional reactions. Obama’s entire career rests on the same technique of telling stories for emotional effect without any regard for reality.

ObamaCare was an ugly collectivist bureaucratic dinosaur clothed in imaginary stories. The stories about it, about the economy, about the war are still being told. Added to it are new stories about racism. The stories are passionate, compelling and appealing. They are also completely unreal.

Progressives don’t only live in a post-American world; they live in a post-Truth world. A world without facts and without truth is one in which the America that was cannot exist.

America had prospered because of a firm belief in a discoverable and exploitable reality. That was the country that could build skyscrapers and fleets in a year. Post-Truth America has little interest in big buildings because it’s too busy enacting a psychodrama in which the earth is about to be destroyed. And fleets, like horses and bayonets and facts, are 19th century toys that are much less interesting than the manipulation of people through lies and deceit.

Lena Dunham’s Barry and Obama’s Barry are both imaginary creatures. They are the sophisticated products of disordered minds and a disordered civilization whose leading figures lie as instinctively and as shamelessly as any pre-rational culture that could not distinguish between lies and truth.

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  • JayWye

    socialists targeted education in the early 1900′s;
    they’ve been working at it a long time,have been wildly successful at gaining control of it,and now we’re seeing the effects of that,all across our society.
    Legislators,JUDGES,doctors,scientists,MEDIA,teachers,etc,all a product of a socialist education system. All indoctrinated in socialism,and applying it in their everyday lives.
    Never forget that the socialists have a dominance at nearly every university,and at most every public grade school.
    socialist indoctrination begins at an early age and continues throughout high school and college.
    THAT is what is really hurting America,and I’m not so sure we can overcome it,it may already be too late. it took a long time for the commies to become entrenched in education,and it will take a long time to weed them out,if it can be done at all.

  • usmcmailman

    The America that “was” is long gone !

  • Expat99

    This is a decent article but to think that only the left lives in a “post-truth” society is also a lie. One good thing about living under a communist government, as I do, is that everyone knows the government is lying. In America, people are still suffering from the delusion that only the other side does it. And dare we even look at the psychopathic world of big banking?

  • frodo

    Glass houses. Nixon, so long ago, broke the truth in far more profound and damaging ways that Bill Clinton did. This is not to defend self-protective deceit, but to suggest that this outrage is selective and misplaced in being so narrow.

    To talk about Clinton’s lie about Monica Lewinsky as the origin point for a post-truth America is simply false and misrepresents just how pervasive a problem it is.

  • laura r

    daniel, what ever happend w/lena dunhams lawsuit against truth revolt & ben shapiro? did they back off?

  • hiernonymous

    “I would settle for the non-violent overthrow of the Obama regime in an instant. ”

    That’s called an “election.” Unless you are suggesting that we model ourselves on Egypt?

  • Daniel

    DanielG,, my boy, you are the best commentator on the Internet.
    And I would like to recommend something to you.
    When Ronald Reagan was in full battle mode against the Soviet Union in his attempt to finally subdue the Evil Empire…….he would turn to one guy for inspiration and rhetorical ammunition against the Soviets:
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
    He was truly the anti-matter to the USSR’s matter.
    In all matters anti-Communist, Solzhenitsyn can never be equaled.
    Study his method. Learn his arguments.
    But most importantly……subsume his spirit. And you will prevail.
    His classic speech to Harvard in 1978- “A World Split Apart” is regarded by Harvard as the most infamous commencement address ever delivered in the university’s 300 years.
    And his Nobel Prize speech of 1970, where he builds onto Dostoevsky’s idea to transmit to us:
    “One word of Truth………outweighs the World.”
    Use it for the weapon that it is.

  • http://facebook.com/AnnInquirer Ann Inquirer

    I keep saying the world is upside down. Now I’m told its a Post-truth world. I have also been slapped in the eyes with Postmodernism, a word I know not to be true because any furniture store one goes into looks exactly like your mother’s or grandmother’s living room in the 50s or 60s, including the sputnik clocks. Since Postmodernism ain’t true, I am going to assume Post-truth ain’t real either. I’ll just go back to upside down.

  • CowsomeLoneboy

    Even Ike was caught in a lie while president, although his stature as one of the best is still deserved, and the grand tradition of lying by occupants of the Oval Office was certainly continued with Kennedy. Then there was Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin travesty, among others.

    That Daniel could omit Nixon–”I am not a crook!”–doesn’t surprise me, because of course that doesn’t fit his tightly crafted and mendacious narrative. We can skip over Ford and Carter, because both men were really too honorable to be in the dirty business of presidential politics, and thus were none too successful at them.

    Why was Reagan the Magnificent omitted from this discussion? Iran-Contra was only one of many deceits that he was complicit in (although, in fairness, we have good reason to doubt that in his second term Ronnie understood that he was wrapped up in prevaricating.) How about Bush, who succeeded Ronnie, and swept into office on the “plausible deniability” that he hadn’t been a participant in the whole Iran-Contra mess?

    And we don’t have to talk about just the presidents, but can also mention their eagerly enlisted henchmen, such as Lee Atwater, who didn’t know a salacious falsehood that he wasn’t willing to peddle.

    When your article is only half truths, it’s pretty hard to argue that you’re big on “the truth.” This isn’t post-truth America. It’s just post-honesty America, starting with all the opinon-mongering blogs.

  • WW4

    Agree critical thinking and the ability to parse out truth from spin or ideology is crucial and can be difficult given the amount of info out there. Disagree that it is only endemic to the Left: everyone in power manipulates truth. People tend to align with the “truth” that comports with their ideology. We give the benefit of the doubt to our guys and demonize the other guys.

    I know a minister who says: When God hates everything you hate, you may be guilty of idolatry.

  • http://JudeoChristianAmerica.org Alexander Gofen

    BIZARRE ABUSE BY REFUSE TO USE free speech – this is what this article on a “post-Truth world and a truth-free zone” exemplifies…

    Even in writing about the party “approved” topic of impeachment of Clinton, the author fails to mention that of all pending crimes like China-gate, browning of Brown, and fostering of Foster, the already then treasonous party chose a salacious item of perjury on stain dress of an intern!

    Yet more importantly – again: Even in such article like this, no mentioning of the UFO (Unidentified Foreign Operative) in the White House (see details in my other posts) is bizarre if not indecent.

    I grew in the former USSR, where people longed for and dreamed about freedom of press and truthful information. Now here in this supposedly freest of the worlds, for 6 years Front Page and all their authors VOLUNTARILY maintain a taboo on the most grotesque untruth and disaster ever visited upon this nation: Just in order to please their handlers. And it is not merely a sin of keeping a silence (when screaming the truth was a duty). Their silence sounds no less loud than Goebbels propaganda, because their silence equates the real disaster to something like “no-moon-landing” tale in sick minds of this nation. Like the rest of the totalitarian media, Front Page is an accomplice of this crime, while the author shoots his own foot – if not takes the readership for idiots.

  • RMThoughts

    Post truth political life is neocon