Is Truth Irrelevant?…It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong

Loading


 
by Thomas Sowell

…when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.

For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars.

Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media — and in much of academia as well.

One of the most grotesque distortions growing out of this carelessness with the facts has been a removal of Abraham Lincoln’s name and statues from various places, on grounds that he saw black people only as property.

Such criticisms betray an incredible ignorance of history — or else a complete disregard of truth.

As a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln knew that there was nothing in the Constitution which authorized him or any other president to free slaves. But he also knew that a military commander in wartime can legally seize the property of an enemy nation. Defining slaves as property gave President Lincoln the only legal authority he had to seize them during the Civil War. And once they were seized as property, he could then free them as human beings.

But, if the Emancipation Proclamation had based its action on defining the slaves as human beings, with a right to be free, the Supreme Court of that era would undoubtedly have declared it unconstitutional.



Millions of human beings would have remained slaves. Would ringing rhetoric be worth that price?

As for the claim that Lincoln did not regard black people as human, he invited Frederick Douglass to the White House!

Gross distortions of history, in order to get Abraham Lincoln’s name removed from schools tells us a lot about what is wrong with American education today.

Many schools are closed because of the coronavirus and the teachers unions. And many schools in minority neighborhoods failed to teach children enough math and English, back when they were still open. So it is incredible that school authorities have time to spend on ideological crusades like removing names and statues from schools.

Unfortunately, too many American educational institutions — from elementary schools to universities — have become indoctrination centers. The riots that swept across the country last year are fruits of that indoctrination and the utter disregard for other people’s rights that accompanied those riots.

At the heart of that indoctrination is a sense of grievance and victimhood when others have better outcomes — which are automatically called “privileges” and never called “achievements,” regardless of what the actual facts are.

Facts don’t matter in such issues, any more than facts mattered when smearing Lincoln.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

What’s really amazing is that Dems don’t suffer debilitating headaches from carrying around opposite views in their heads. One view if a Dem did it an opposite view if a Republican did it.
I mean, why a 120 mile limit on travel in CA?
Newsome needs that many miles to get to his winery.
You, otoh, don’t need to get to a relative’s house.
Why were only Dems briefed about the danger to the Capitol by lefty inciters before Trump’s rally while Trump, himself, was not briefed even tho he might have changed his plans had he been?
Dems intended to USE this ”attack” on their offices as yet another excuse to “get Trump.”
But Dems were opposed to Trump stopping blm attackers from destroying the fence and gaining entry to the White House only a few weeks ago!

has been irrelevant in America for most of the last 62 years.Grishams Law in news, “FAKE NEWS drives out the truth!”!