People lie or obfuscate when they don’t have a good argument.
I am humbly and thankfully not perfect. The summer before my first year of high school, I took a year of biology. Being the only one dumb enough to waste his summer studying biology instead of having fun, I found myself as the only freshman who had an official grade point average before we started in the fall. I told a friend of my brother that I was number one in my class. He said, “That’s good. You only have one direction to go, namely down.”
There are times in more than 600 Townhall articles that I have made mistakes. Just last week, I incorrectly identified the last great American general as Arnold instead of Norman Schwarzkopf. I apologize for that and any other errors. When they are pointed out or when I find them, I write to the Townhall staff and ask that they correct my error. Other mistakes do not involve the technical but rather the historical. I wrote that 85 Israelis had been killed in the 12-Day War with Iran. A friend asked if my number was right. A quick check showed that the actual dead were 28 in number. Nobody’s perfect, and I do my best to make sure that my articles are accurate, backed up by facts, and grammatically in order.
One thing that I always do my best is not to twist data or details to my benefit. I do my all to present cogent arguments based on reliable public information or conclusions based on logical thinking. There are many ways to lie, and one of them is to present partial data. “All people over six feet tall die before age 110.” Well, all people under six feet tall pretty much do the same. There are many ways to cherry-pick facts so as to make them fit into a predetermined narrative. This is generally the crux of “fake news.” They won’t say that Donald Trump is 10 feet tall because that claim is easily debunked. They will rather say that Trump is an antisemite, while ignoring his Jewish daughter and grandchildren, affection for Jews, support for Israel, and pro-Jewish statements. One thing that brought me to Townhall.com long before I ever submitted my first article was the feeling that I was reading the unvarnished truth. There are not many such sources, for all of the mass of information available on our screens.
The reasons I write the above are that, periodically, there are comments that accuse me of being a liar. I don’t mind if people call me stupid, short, fat, dumb, or slow. We can debate those points. But when they do call me a liar, I ask them to list the specific lies in the article to which their comments are appended. In every case, they have gone for the personal attack and never listed one sentence, a single quote, or a point mentioned in the work in question. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me, and I enjoy good reasoning or people bringing up points I missed or reinterpreting them in a good-faith manner. But if you want to call me a liar, bring the specific statements that are intentionally false. I hope that I am honest enough to say, “Yup, you got me. That’s a big fat lie, but you know, it made my entire argument so much better.” To date, I have only received insults, but no specific statements that were cited as intentionally false.
When one looks at the Left and the kooky Right, he sees that they are experts at lying and obfuscating. Tucker Carlson has claimed that Israel made a genocide in Gaza, though the U.S. ambassador to Israel said that there was none, the number of Gazans went up over the war years, and Israel warned civilians where it planned to bomb—a very strange approach to wiping out the entirety of the Gazan people. The Left lives for and by lies. Nearly everything they say about Donald Trump or the United States is a lie. They claim that ICE agents are acting illegally, though they are actually enforcing immigration laws. They claim that there is a climate emergency, though virtually nothing unusual has been seen in climate matters. They claim that people, including children, can change “gender,” though sex never changes from birth and cannot be changed, just masked through drugs and surgeries. They say that Donald Trump is a dictator, yet he relies on Congress to pass laws and respects the rulings of the judiciary.
The internet and now AI have led to an explosion of information. That said, much of the information is downright false or true but incomplete. All AI programs are based on sources of data like Wikipedia that are skewed in a direction that is not parallel to the truth. Any subject that is near and dear to the Left will have a conclusion conducive to their ideology. I have previously mentioned that I modified the Wikipedia entry for terrorist Marwan Barghouti to include military indictment material related to the bombing in which my son and I were injured. A day did not go by before a super-editor removed my addition. Why? They wanted to portray Barghouti as a man of peace, a veritable Nelson Mandela. Pointing out that he paid the terror cell behind the March 21, 2002, Jerusalem suicide bombing $600 would sully his name and possibly let users know that he was a terrorist. So poof. Now take the same approach to thousands of subjects, including “trans,” “climate change,” Donald Trump, the Obamas, and more—all of them are slanted to give a predetermined opinion far removed from the truth. AI uses the defective data as its base for analysis and data presentation. Try to get any AI program to give you the ranking of ethnic groups by IQ. None will except Musk’s Grok. They cannot allow their program to show that blacks have lower IQ averages than other groups, as such a result—even if true—would be considered racist. Musk himself has noted that all programs other than Grok would rather start a nuclear war than misgender Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner. Put “Bruce Jenner” into Google, and you will get “Caitlyn Jenner” as the actual search term.
As I do look at the comments, I would encourage users to suggest topics of interest to them. I can’t promise that I will write on all of them. I don’t feel comfortable writing about topics of which I know nothing. Also, if the subject is not of some personal interest, I will never get past 500 words. So, if there is something of which you would like to see this author write, please put it in the comments. If I do write about your suggested topic, I will give it my all, and I will not add anything that is incomplete or wrong intentionally in order to win some kind of argument.
We once had an amazing rabbi, who passed away a few years back. He told me that he wished that someone could convince him that there was no God, as it would save him a fortune on kosher food and free up his Saturdays to go to the beach. Until his dying day, nobody ever succeeded in convincing him that there is not a God who made everything in our universe. He always sought out the truth, and when I once found a source for a certain Jewish law, he admitted that he did not know the specific reference and thanked me for bringing it to his attention. If you seek truth, then you may well find God. There is no other way to get close to Him.