What Happens When Kindness is Valued Above Truth?
This post is a continuation of Why I Voted For Trump.
My husband’s uncle is a retired Lutheran pastor who emails out weekly sermons to family and friends, which he attaches to an email that usually contains a paragraph or two of some musings about his life. I occasionally opened up his emails and scanned through them to see if there was anything notable going on in his personal life. While the Bible interests me, I only read his prepared sermons a few times because I found them dry and uninspiring.
In the spring of 2021, Uncle Pastor sent out a sermon with a paragraph praising his son for his work with the Department of Defense. Then juxtaposed his son’s heroic accomplishments with:
I did not like to hear it when our previous president made the statement, several times in several contexts, that he "didn't like military personnel who died in war. They are losers and suckers."
If I’d read this a couple years before, I might have nodded in agreement as it affirmed what I believed was common knowledge. It followed the popular Narrative that spun everything about Trump in a bad light. As I describe in my previous post, when I realized the extent that the media was lying, it became easy to see the manipulation. And one of the easiest hoaxes to spot was this claim that Trump called fallen soldiers losers and suckers. This claim came from an article in the Atlantic, which sited four anonymous sources, then referenced Trump’s contention with Senator John McCain to give it some authenticity. So this is basically gossip pretending to be serious reporting. This article was strategically published a couple months before the election. (Here is a follow up criticism of The Atlantic article, and it’s author Jeffrey Goldberg.)
I thought about letting this go. I tend to have an attitude of “I have my worldview and you have yours.” But after talking to another relative who had also read the email and was upset that Uncle Pastor was dropping false and politically divisive information, I decided to respond:
Dear Uncle Pastor,
A couple years ago I probably would have believed a story that claimed that Trump called military personnel who died in the war “losers and suckers.” After what he said about John McCain, it sounds somewhat plausible. And since he first ran for president, I bought into the never-ending stream of negative press about Trump because I believed if so much of the media was anti-Trump they must have a good reason for it. And like a lot of people I was just put off by the rough way he talked. But when I heard this story, I was 100% sure it was a lie.
All through Trump’s presidency, I kept hearing that Trump called white supremacists “fine people” or that he called all Mexicans rapists and bad hombres. I finally started to research these claims last fall, and it didn’t take that much time at all to find out that those stories were not true. All I had to do was look at what Trump said in full context. When I realized that those negative stories were lies and manipulations, I realized that our country is not the country I thought it was. It’s like I was blinded be a false sense of normalcy. I’m used to a certain amount of bias in the media, but what I see going on right now is narrative shaping propaganda, a systematic and very vicious demonization of one political party, and censoring and dismissing people that don’t follow the approved narrative. I even see people who were long time liberals taking a stand against the creeping totalitarianism coming from the Democratic Party and big tech and being dismissed as having becoming “right wing extremist.” I don’t want to sound over-dramatic. But I suspect that this is how most totalitarian governments start. I could say so much more about all the things that I see going on that I find alarming. But that would take up a lot of space. I just wanted to let you know that I believe this story you shared about Trump is not true.
Anyhow, I hope all is well with you and your wife. Thank you for sharing about your son’s job with the DOD. I imagine what he does is beyond value to many people.
I was disappointed the next day when Uncle Pastor responded:
I appreciate your opinion about Mr Trump and his opinions and the possibilities of misinformation. It happens, I know. I was watching a live event several months ago, when President Trump was still in office, and my quote was exactly what he said- as I was watching and listening to live Tv. He may have changed his mind since then, and I respect that and applaud it. It’s just that, as a Pastor and father of one who has shown me the depth of how important it is to put very high value on respecting the lost in US military action and lost in horrible and cruel wars, I cannot support any efforts to demean the dead, or the lost or the captured. I am just more desirous of kindness among human beings.
I responded again and asked for clarification: “Are you saying that you personally saw Trump on TV calling fallen soldiers losers and sucker?” He never responded. And I can tell you with certainty that Uncle Pastor never heard or saw Trump say those things on TV. He is making this memory up. And the veracity of this memory is of small importance, when Trump is bad and kindness is of highest value.
Uncle Pastor’s response only added to my sense that our country and our world was already on a committed path toward totalitarianism. The media has created such a simplistic and divided “good vs bad” Narrative, that they have weaponized common every day people to act as their flying monkeys of misinformation. This is a few steps up from the MK Ultra experiments done decades ago. (Cartoonist Scott Adams frequently discusses the modern day media mass hypnosis is his YouTube videos.)
Over the past year, I've tried to engage with a few people on social media and tried to challenge people to do a couple minutes of research to prove what they believe is true about President Trump. When I discovered that the media had been lying and manipulating, I was furious. I think other people should be furious as well to find out the extent that they have been manipulated. But so far I don’t believe that a single person has taken up my challenge to seek out the truth.
So there are two points that troubled me about this.
Point One: People are willfully choosing a lie and need a scapegoat
People have been lied to continuously and aggressively for several years. When I realized I was lied to, it made me angry at the system that lied to me. And I could see that this lie was part of a machinery that was leading myself and the country toward tyranny. But when I try to point out to others that they have been lied to, show them proof that they have been lied to and manipulated, I find that most people who believe the Narrative, particularly to the point that they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, are not interested in examining it for themselves. So I have to assume that they are getting something that they want or need from that lie. I’ll point out again that at the most basic level the lie creates a simplistic and polarized “good vs bad” Narrative, where Trump and Trump supporters are the scapegoats that the public that the masses can cast the sins of the world upon. For many there is a cost to seeking out the truth. Many people risk losing that scapegoat. And they risk losing their friends. (You can look through #Walkaway testimonials to see how people have been ostracized by family and friends over the past several years because they chose truth.)
Point Two: Kindness has been weaponized
When Uncle Pastor responded to my email by saying that he was desirous of kindness, I interpret that as “choosing kindness is more important to me that the truth.” I look at where we are in this world, and I think that the emphasis we put on kindness has been a part of Satan’s long con. As someone who has considered themself a Christian for their whole life, I have always valued kindness, meekness, turning the other cheek. But over the past several years, and after dealing with someone with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, I know these values of kindness and turning the other cheek are not always so straightforward. I have practiced kindness, love, forgiveness, empathy with a Narcissist, and came to the conclusion that those values amount to nothing more than enabling if they are not pared with truth. There is evil in the world. There are people who have evil hearts, and who know how to use the good intentions of others to put them in bondage.
As a Christian this brings up another question how kindness and good has been weaponized. I think a lot of Christians believe that Christ was crucified because he was such a nice guy. He was too kind of a man for such an evil world. But he wasn’t hated because he was nice. He was hated because he was a truth teller. He was hated because called out the lies and hypocrisy and the false “good” of the Pharisees.
“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” John 15:18-19