The Post-Truth World

Just 10 days after Hamas attacked Israel, an explosion rocked one of the oldest hospitals in Gaza City. Hamas accused Israel of indiscriminately bombing al-Ahli Hospital and killing 500 innocents. Mainstream media outlets, including the Associated Press, cbs, nbc, the bbc, the New York Times and many others, rushed to publicize the claim as fact. When the story spread, many world leaders condemned Israel for the attack.

Within a day, evidence made clear that Israel was not the culprit. The blast had resulted from a rocket misfired by Palestinian terrorists. It had struck not the hospital, but the parking lot. It hadn’t killed 500, but likely fewer than a hundred.

The press’s eagerness to broadcast unverified allegations from Hamas as fact is just one item amid troves of evidence of their bias and unreliability. Because of such stories, the credibility of the press is tanking further. A Gallup poll in October 2023 found that a record low number of Americans—fewer than a third—trust the media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news fully, fairly and accurately. Nearly 3 in 10 trust the press “not very much,” while nearly 4 in 10 had “none at all.” A Statista poll in November found that Americans who have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers is an abysmal 18 percent, and for television news, 14 percent.

The press is hardly the only public institution in the doghouse. High-profile instances of corruption and deceit exposed in a variety of institutions have made the public suspicious, cynical and jaded. People know they are being exploited and lied to from all directions.

Every White House press briefing has reporters bringing up dismal facts about the American economy, an immigration disaster or foreign-policy embarrassment—and government officials insisting that everything it is doing is extraordinarily successful and wildly popular: The economy has never been better! Gas prices are low! You are actually spending less money on groceries! Little wonder that the same Statista poll found that only 26 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency.

The numbers show similarly low public confidence in other institutions: the medical system (34 percent); organized religion (32 percent); the Supreme Court (27 percent); Big Tech, banks and public schools (all 26 percent); the criminal justice system (17 percent); and Big Business (14 percent). An October report showed that 84 percent of Americans disapprove of how Congress is doing its job.

The sudden explosion in AI-generated text and imagery is exacerbating this growing and pervasive skepticism. Alternative facts, blatant lies, disinformation, fake news, misinformation and propaganda of all sorts swirl around us. The truth is under attack. The erosion of public trust is the inevitable, justifiable result.

The extent of the effects of this trend are impossible to measure. These institutions control a tremendous amount of the information fed to the public. What happens when the historic gatekeepers of truth are exposed as peddlers of lies?

Increasing millions of people are turning to alternative media outlets to understand world events. Many of these sources are proving effective at exposing commonly promulgated lies. But in many cases, they are not necessarily trustworthy either. Many are unabashedly partisan, and some push misinformation as blatantly as mainstream sources.

In this climate, many people, rather than seeking facts and working to understand reality, have begun to question the existence of reality itself. The concept of truth is being replaced by “your truth” and “my truth”—as if truth itself is fictional. Past generations viewed God as the beginning of truth and morality; surveys now suggest a majority of United States citizens believe truth is relative to circumstances.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries made the phrase “post-truth” the Word of the Year after it noted a dramatic increase in the usage of terms like “post-truth politics” over the previous five years. This phrase denotes a culture where facts are irrelevant and the only things that matter are opinions, feelings, hunches and politics. It describes the state the world has fallen into over the past decade. British journalist Melanie Phillips underlined the magnitude of this phenomenon, saying that Western civilization is entering the end of the Enlightenment era that began 400 years ago.

You probably hear politicians, pundits, co-workers and friends alike use terms like disinformation, fake news, information warfare and psyops. These terms attempt to describe the haze of deception that enshrouds our world. It is stunning how easily supposedly rational people adopt absurd, irrational, illogical, nonsensical and unreasonable ideas.

Government Censorship

Media bias is almost as old as humanity itself, yet information technology and mass media have amplified humanity’s ability to spread lies a thousand times faster than it could in the past.

A recent survey published by Gallup and the Knight Foundation indicates that roughly half of Americans believe the media is deliberately trying to deceive them. In many cases, these citizens are right about journalists knowingly lying.

The corporate media in the United States began to lean left in the 1960s and 1970s as news pundits graduated from Ivy League universities that leaned left. Yet media bias kicked into hyperdrive after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election. The media claimed that there was a 90 percent chance that Hillary Clinton would be elected. When this didn’t happen, they began reporting that Russia interfered in the election.

The resulting hoax may have been the greatest political scandal in U.S. history, and you don’t have to be a conservative to believe that. Regardless of what you think about Trump, there is no evidence that he colluded with a foreign power to steal the election. Yet Barack Obama’s intelligence officials conspired with the media to manufacture fake stories claiming exactly that.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation leaked stories to Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff. He published the information in a Sept. 23, 2016, article, which the fbi used as corroborating evidence to get court permission to spy on the Trump campaign. In other words, the fbi used the media to manufacture evidence. Law enforcement and the media formed an echo chamber that at least some media officials must have known about. The goal was not journalism; it was political prosecution.

And it did its job. The allegations gave the Obama administration a pretext to sign the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act into law on Dec. 23, 2016. With the stroke of a pen, a censorship industrial complex was born.

The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act authorized the U.S. State Department to take action against propaganda through an interagency panel. It authorized $160 million in funding over a two-year period and empowered the U.S. Global Engagement Center to shift its primary focus from countering Islamic propaganda to countering Russian propaganda. Over the next few years, the federal government spent billions of dollars creating a counter-disinformation machine with influence over public and private sectors alike.

But this money did nothing to defend Americans from lies and misinformation. It allowed the government to accuse scores of innocent people of being Russian stooges without evidence.

That is a stunning statement, but it is provably true. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Oct. 27, 2022, allowed journalists to see documentation proving collusion between the fbi and Twitter. Anyone who has examined the Twitter Files can easily see that, before Musk bought it, Twitter was operating like an arm of the federal government.

On March 2, 2023, Matt Taibbi released a 50-tweet thread, labeled Twitter Files 17.0, exposing how the Global Engagement Center worked with the Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research lab to censor thousands of Twitter accounts associated with Russian and Indian nationalists. Yet e-mails between the Atlantic Council and former Twitter head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth show that the Atlantic Council’s blacklist was full of ordinary Americans with no connection to India or Russia.

The censorship industrial complex was muzzling the conservative Americans who opposed them.

Alternative Media

Americans are dealing with more than a leftist media: They are subjected to a cartel controlled by the “deep state.” This is an existential risk to personal freedom.

Understanding this risk, Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, privatize it, and turn it into a bastion of free speech. Other conservatives are following his example.

Across the nation, alternative media sites are proliferating as free-speech advocates fight back against the censorship industrial complex that has hijacked the Western world. Yet as important as free speech is to any democratic republic, there is also a danger in the proliferation of news sites: Truth is the first casualty of war, and this fact is especially true in information wars.

Many alternative news outlets can be likened to guerrilla groups trying to fight back against the leviathan that is the censorship industrial complex. Yet just because your enemy is a liar does not necessarily mean you are a truthteller. Many alternative media sites spread alternative facts, blatant lies, disinformation, fake news, misinformation and propaganda of their own variety.

An example of this phenomenon is the idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to stop U.S. biolabs in that country from creating new varieties of the covid-19 virus. This is a theory about a conspiracy that has gained traction on many alternative media sites. And it is a documented fact that the U.S. government sends money to medical research facilities in China, Ukraine and many other nations. It is also a documented fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was using gene-splicing techniques developed at the University of North Carolina in its coronavirus research. So it is highly likely that covid-19 was developed at the Wuhan University of Virology using American gene-splicing techniques. But there is no evidence that Ukrainian biolabs were working on that particular gene sequence before the covid-19 outbreak. Those media outlets who report otherwise are not objectively reporting verifiable facts.

Under normal circumstances, people would be skeptical of outlandish claims coming from fringe news sites. But the fake news coming from the mainstream media has become so bad that many fall for the fallacy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and start believing unverified theories.

People become anxious when they don’t know whom to trust. That creates a craving for a more ordered world. Demagogues from across the political spectrum will exploit such a craving.

Civilization depends on a populace that is able to distinguish fact from opinion and logically analyze the world around them. This is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Rational Universe

Many public figures have become so nonchalant about lying that they deliberately lie even when they can be easily fact-checked. In a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in August 2023, Joe Biden told people that he had reduced the national debt. You don’t have to dig into federal search warrants or ice core data to see that this is false. Anyone with Internet access can see the U.S. National Debt Clock, which shows that no one has reduced the national debt in over 20 years. Yet Biden will say he did because he knows a large segment of society does not care about truth.

When businessmen, journalists, politicians and scientists can get away with such blatant lying, it shows that society is on the verge of collapse. We are approaching a point where not only do people not know what is factually accurate, they don’t even care all that much about factual accuracy.

Most people struggle to distinguish objective fact from subjective opinion. Melanie Phillips makes an insightful point in her book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power. She notes that the ability to think rationally comes from God.

“For the development of science, monotheism was essential,” she writes. “Western science grew from the novel idea that the universe was rational; and that belief was given to us by Genesis, which set out the revolutionary proposition that the universe had a rational Creator. Without such a purposeful intelligence behind it, the universe could not have been rational; and so there would have been no place for reason in the world because there would have been no truths or natural laws for reason to uncover. Atheism, by contrast, holds that the world comes from a random and therefore irrational source, so that reason is an accidental byproduct.”

In other words, truth is known to and revealed by the Creator. When humans reject this truth, they form and worship their own opinions—often calling them “truth.” When this thinking becomes entrenched, they stop caring about the difference between true and false, and society enters a post-truth period like the one America and the rest of the world are in now.

Every person believes in something. When people do not believe in the revelation or even the plain physical evidence of their own Creator, then they believe in their own physical senses, their own thinking, their own opinions and their own will—which is easily swayed by any number of religions and ideologies that bend facts and fail to explain the physical and spiritual laws of the Creator.

This is why the Apostle Paul wrote that those who do “not like to retain God in their knowledge” are given “over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient” (Romans 1:28).

Reject the revelation of the Creator contained in the Bible, reject the very existence of the Creator, and before long you begin rejecting the laws governing the universe as well. The Apostle Peter expanded on this truth when he wrote that those who “walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness” become as “natural brute beasts” (2 Peter 2:10-12). The Greek word for “brute” is alogos, which, depending on the context, can mean absurd, irrational, unreasonable, or even, against the Logos.

The Word (Logos) is the Being through whom God (Theos) imparted rationality to the physical creation (John 1:1-3). Rebelling against God and His Word can cause a person to lose the ability to think rationally, giving him or her the limited reasoning skills of a “natural brute beast.” This is why so many people believe socialism works, your biological sex is fluid, transgenderism is healthy, and the world is going to end in a decade unless everybody gets an electric car. They no longer care about logic, facts, evidence or truth. They are fixated on their own feelings, opinions and passions.

Finding Truth

Whom can you trust? How do you know what is true? There is a way! You can know.

When you wake up in the morning, you find that you and the universe around you are real, that everything functions according to interconnecting laws, and that those laws were designed with intent and for the benefit of human beings. Unless you are so willful as to shut your eyes to reality, you understand that this requires the existence of a Creator with panoramic intelligence and power—and with a direct connection to His human creation.

Acknowledging reality also means acknowledging the existence of a powerful force for deceit and destruction.

Acknowledging reality also means recognizing that in human history, nothing makes such strong claims and provides such strong evidence as the communication from this Creator recorded in the Bible. Proving the authenticity and authority of the Bible must be an individual choice by each person.

The purpose of the Bible is to provide human beings in a world of lies the pathway to the truth—historical, prophetic, governmental, biological, physical and spiritual. It does not claim to contain all knowledge, but as Herbert W. Armstrong explained in Mystery of the Ages, it contains the “foundation of knowledge.” It contains truth from the Creator otherwise unknowable to the human beings He created. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10). This is why the best journalists believe in a rational Creator. In a post-truth society, you hear all sorts of self-contradictory statements about family, gender, sex, politics and a myriad of other topics. But those who at least acknowledge a Creator, the laws of reality and the rational nature of the creation know it is impossible for two truths to contradict each other. Therefore, if you read a self-contradictory statement, you know your search for truth isn’t over.

Proverbs 25:2 communicates that this search is a challenging one: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” It takes effort.

It also requires humility. Jesus said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matthew 11:25). Isn’t this true? Those with the most sophistication, intelligence, wealth and power are not the ones with the most truth! Those with the most truth have a relationship with the Creator who possesses the truth and have a reverential, submissive attitude toward Him. Finding the truth does not mean being a gullible or naive follower, but it does require avoiding one of the worst obstacles preventing you from finding the truth: believing that you already have it. A rational person admits what he or she does not know and humbly seeks a reliable source to provide true knowledge. And even if you find the truth, you will fall back into “your truth” or someone else’s “truth” unless you act on it (“What Is Truth?,” page 35).

Both Moses and Paul confirmed that truth should be established “at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses” (Deuteronomy 19:15; 2 Corinthians 13:1). This is an often-overlooked principle in journalism that could have stopped the RussiaGate hoax before it started. A former MI6 agent made numerous allegations against Donald Trump in an unverified dossier, but the claim that Trump colluded with Russia lacked corroborating evidence.

Paul warns us, “[E]vil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33). When a news source lies, hold it accountable! You must prize the truth highly. All news publications make occasional mistakes, but news sources large or small, mainstream or alternative, conservative or liberal that prove themselves to be corrupt don’t deserve your readership, your viewership, or your trust.

The post-truth age is part of a prophesied time of “strong delusion” where those who do not love the truth will be deceived (2 Thessalonians 2:9-11). God deliberately makes the truth hard to uncover in many instances because He wants us to love truth and fight for it!

‘Cast Truth to the Ground’

There is a source of truth, and there is a source of lies. “… He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).

A devil, despite the fact that many people are blinded to him, exists. This is the reason for the extensive amount of intelligence and intent that coordinate so many of the lies.

“Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practised, and prospered.” This prophecy in Daniel 8:11-12 is for the end time (Daniel 12:4, 9) and describes devil-inspired people in God’s one true Church and in the nations that descended from ancient Israel, particularly the United States.

The host is an army of evil men inspired by the devil and other fallen angels who help a leader in the Church and a leader in the U.S. to “cast down the truth to the ground.” As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains in his book America Under Attack, the most anti-Bible president in U.S. history, Barack Obama, fulfills the latter role. He is out of office, but he and his agents have been working hard in the censorship industrial complex to overthrow the United States. Deceptions committed by other people, including conservatives and the alternative media, also come from the father of lies, but he primarily works right now through this political leader.

In God’s Church, the father of lies used a top leader and his host of supporters to cast biblical truth to the ground. Now a host of bureaucrats, military leaders, intelligence agents, media moguls, tech entrepreneurs, financiers and spies are helping Obama cast constitutional, moral, biblical, historical and even scientific truth to the ground.

There has never been so much on the line. All of us have been guilty, to some degree, of not loving the truth and not acting upon the truth; and all of us are in danger of losing the truth that we once took for granted—even the most fundamental, basic, beautiful truths! The Creator of the universe and the Source of truth is exposing the lies in our nation, our churches, the one true Church and in your own life. Why? To give us and our nations a chance to repent of our own lying, “will worship” (Colossians 2:23) and lukewarm attitudes and to instead become humble, obedient, believing and passionate for the truth!