Circulating around X, formerly Twitter, several weeks ago was a two-minute except from a TED Talk given by the person responsible for the content of publicly funded radio. Most of it is difficult to follow circular-speaking gobbledygook. With the bulk of the talk serving as preamble and support for her key point, NPR CEO Katherine Maher managed to distill down the fundamental principle of today’s political left into seven words: “…we acknowledge there are many different truths.” Not only did she make such a declaration, but she also credited these multiple truths with creating “glorious chronicles to the human experience”. Even in full context it is difficult to understand just exactly what that means. That might be the point though. As WC Fields once said…” If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” This clip is the left in a nutshell.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher tries to explain truth: pic.twitter.com/ACrEs0VvhI
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) April 17, 2024
Two months have passed, but as we exit Pride Month, this retains its relevance. This concept provides the framework for why a man can be a woman, for why 1 can equal 2, and why the Canadian Cancer Society has, with apologies, decided to rename the cervix the “front hole”. Not following the science, the pandering even eschews basic biology because the cervix is not the vaginal opening, regardless of whether it comes naturally to a person or is a recent mutilation to a male body.
In nods to political correctness, or make believe, other recent examples of glorious chronicles to the human spirit include a morbidly obese young woman being crowned Miss National American Alabama 2024, and a dude winning the title of “Miss” Maryland 2024.
On a macro scale, abandoning objective truth as a baseline upon which we all agree, comes second only to the erasure of our southern border as a challenge to the continued legitimacy of this country. The insistence of the political left to unmoor existence from reality brings into doubt our national sanity and our ability to rely on reason and sound judgement. This truth divide is a philosophical, spiritual and political struggle. Abandoning reality allows anything. Stressors to accuracy and precision bring everything into possibility. We find now that uncontrolled immigration is beneficial to the US, that Ukraine -and endless war in general – is of vital importance to the US, that narratives in complete contrast to truthfulness can be spread with impunity about the use of Ivermectin, the Covid vaccine, two weeks to stop the curve, and closing down schools and churches. Voters cannot, now, be trusted to believe their own eyes about the physical deterioration of our President. Though one struggles to find any metric; foreign, or domestic, in which the Biden administration has performed well for middle class Americans, the left continually parrots the opinion that Trump is bad, and Biden is good. From the pages of Orwell, there are now government and media departments of misinformation and disinformation. The acceptance of truth binds society. Holding to our own individual truths, as it were, leaves us in a condition similar to that around the Tower of Babel. When truth, and by extension, words lose their meaning, we run around talking gibberish. Catholics have been taught, at least until recently, that the evil one lurks in the subjective shadows. When that principle is abandoned, we find ourselves using contorted language to debate issues that were outlandish a generation ago: Minor-attracted persons, non-binary, gestational-carrier, spontaneous blessings of people in irregular situations.
This is where we are now as a collective people. But it redounds as well to the personal level. As Father Felix Sarda Y Salvany wrote in 1886, “Liberalism in the intellectual order becomes license in the moral order.” The TED Talk video from above called to memory Fr Felix’s very short and powerful book called El Liberalismo es Pecado, “Liberalism is a Sin”. The book proves the long standing (in fact eternal) nature of the current debate. Is there objective truth? That there is one objective and knowable truth is a very Catholic concept. It is also the opinion which has formed social convention since the creation of man. Meanwhile, the modernist subscribes to the subjective nature of truth. Pius X described Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”. Those afflicted with Modernism wrest from God the authority to define the meaning of the world. Modernist Leftism is defined by the desire to empower the individual with absolute authority. Perfect Christianity is the subjection of the individual to the revealed law of God, so these are diametrically opposed concepts. Not unlike the French Revolutionaries, those who take on the affectation of modernism claim sovereignty over God by the redefinition or dissolution of truth. At the personal level, it is the garden all over again. It is the same fall and the same folly. “Surely, we will not die.” Lest we forget, the month of The Sacred Heart has been deposed by Pride Month. As in Eden, pride still leads to disobedience and death. To call bad that which is good, and to call good that which is bad is a sin against the Holy Ghost, and it is to deceive and delude ourselves.
Though insidious, to the political left this been a successful stratagem. The modern left has created a phalanx of loyal supporters looking to build their own personal realities. This is the prism through which they view the world and this is why they take politics so seriously. To disagree with a policy is to attack not their opinion, but their very being. Politics has become their religion. When truth is allowed to be personally defined, then any disagreement on that perception of truth is a personal attack and the offended person responds accordingly. This fervor has served leftism well. But this view is limitless in its scope, and leaves the world in disorder
To paraphrase Fr. Dwight Longenecker, and other similar concepts, up until now the campaign of the left has been to ask for tolerance, then permission, then approval, then preeminence. These last couple of demands are where they go too far. Had they stopped at tolerance and euphemism, the knee jerk reaction would have created neither the political climate, nor the equal and opposite reaction required for society in general to object. But they push too far. “Tuck friendly” underpants shock people into action. The celebrity of Dylan Mulvaney and that creepy Jeffrey Marsh was ubiquitous, for a while.
Stubbled men in the same restrooms as little girls are just tough to get behind. These are all parts of the same disfigurement and they lead to the next pushback and the next. As the pendulum swings back toward sanity, doesn’t it seem that this June is a little more demure than last year? The reactions to Bud Light and Target awoke those who don’t really buy into the lies, but were looking for gimmicky profits. The relatively dim rainbow of Pride Month 2024 shows that there may be hope for the future among the lies.
Louis Biad has been writing on the intersection of politics and religion since 2017. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and five children.
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