Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies, by Victor Davis Hanson.
Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.
Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.
In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda.
The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.
Well that’s an interesting link between Hillary’s lies and Hitler. Postmodernism is very common in our current globalist elite.
[R]eality was socially constructed and arbitrarily defined by the language of those in power.
In fact, “truth” for a postmodernist is supposedly what those who control us say it is, largely in efforts to perpetuate their own race, class, and gender privilege. You can see how thoroughly popular culture has picked up this mostly banal relativist observation and transformed it into “the Truth” — and why today we assume that lying is simply a narrative, not a window into one’s character.
Some examples:
Gender is now defined not by biology, but by culture or suspect patriarchically constructed norms.
“Undocumented migrant” replaces “illegal alien” even as those who crossed illegally into the U.S. never had any documents to begin with, were foreign nationals, and were migrants going into the U.S., not mere directionless travelers.
Both Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill are Native Americans because they say they are. To question them on the basis that neither has any proven Indian ancestry is simply to offer a competing narrative, and one driven by racism, not their sort of altruism.
If Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King reconstruct themselves as black Americans, then their “stories” are as legitimate as any others, given their progressive agendas and their antitheses to the white male power structure. …
This is what we are up against:
The [postmodernists] claim there is no such thing as “truth,” as assertions gain credulity only by the degree of wealth and influence behind them (white, male, Christian heterosexuals usually are the bogeymen who establish self-interested “standards” of accuracy and fidelity). So fables in service to a progressive cause are not lying, as they would be if in league with reactionary forces.
