West Point’s new motto is just one more attack on truth in America

English is a difficult language for many to learn and master. Words spelled alike have different pronunciations and vastly different meanings (e,g, we “lead” a horse to water, but use “lead,” a metal). Combine idioms, slang, regional colloquialisms (“coming up a cloud” means it is going to rain), and accents and an interpreter could be reduced to tears of frustration.

Then there are the analogies. “More nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs” or “madder than a wet hen” provide humorous word pictures. Sometimes, they communicate; sometimes, they merely confuse.

Language aside, my colleagues and I have become more concerned recently about another word and its diminishing presence in the National Discourse: “TRUTH.” We miss it.

In TRUTH’s place today, we find instead its antonyms: gas-lighting, obfuscation, gaffes, dissembling, mendacity, spin, deceit, and—more recently—press briefings, Sunday morning talk shows, perjury in courtrooms, Op-Eds, and pearl-clutching politicians. Lies and liars, because the definition of all these words is simple: “something less than the truth.”

And now comes the news that the US Military Academy is removing “Duty, Honor, Country” from its motto. That, too, is a diminution of the virtue of truth, which underlies each of those ideas.

Image: A liar by borjandreu.

The victims are all of us because none of us know who to believe anymore.

From the dissembling of John Kirby to the viciousness of Adam Schiff, (along with all the personal Biden mendacity adventures), the Biden administration has abdicated TRUTH so much that it no longer has any credibility.

Toss in the utter incompetence of players like Yellin, Jean-Pierre, Granholm, Buttigieg, and the despicable Mayorkas, and you have the Perfect Clown Show. All are buttressed by their version of TRUTH, which has nothing to do with the meaning once ascribed to the word.

In 1946, as post-modernism and the abandonment of truth began to take over society, Bernard Baruch gets credit for saying, “Every man has the right to an opinion but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts. Nor, above all, to persist in errors as to facts.” By the early 1980s, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had made a variation of the saying his own. These words were a battle cry in an increasingly post-truth world. Now, though, it seems that, as far as the Democrat party is concerned, the battle is over, and it has won.

However, we who were raised to love our country, serve it as warriors and even to die for it, still despise “something less than the TRUTH.”

Abandoning TRUTH means that we are collectively poorer as a nation. A country without the anchor of TRUTH is as adrift and liable (metaphorically) to hit a bridge as the ship in Baltimore did.

And without truth as our foundation, our country will collapse just like the bridge did.

PFB is a pseudonym.