When I was growing up, if you called someone a liar, that was the start of a fistfight. If you call someone a liar now, it’s more likely the start of a conversation about how different people have different perspectives, and we need to be broadminded and tolerant, blah, blah, blah. The idea that there’s truth out there, and that we can and should find it and then conform to it, has just disappeared. As I noted, along with Paul, our culture’s now-routine acceptance of dishonesty does incalculable damage, and not just because it makes trust impossible. Before long, it makes communication itself impossible. When words can mean anything, when they have no anchor in real world definition, you get all the genuine communication you get with animal noises.

In few places has the triumph of dishonesty been more costly than in K-through-12 education, since that’s where we shape the minds that will determine our future. It’s bad enough when we start teaching our kids that boys can be girls (or cats) and vise versa, all depending on how you “identify.” This undermines kids’ trust in their teachers, and that’s bad, but I doubt it does much long-term damage, because even children know it’s complete hogwash. …

More dangerous is the abandonment of honesty in higher education, where normal common sense won’t necessarily bail you out. Much of the abandonment has been done in the name of replacing education with Wokey propaganda — much but not all.