Lying in politics has changed. Politicians used to lie in hopes of getting away with it. Now they don’t care. If you throw enough mud on the windshield, some of it will stick.

Case in point: Illinois Democrat Senator Dick Durbin’s use on the Senate floor of an obviously doctored image of immigration agents pointing a gun at the back of Alex Pretti’s head. One of the agents in the image is even missing a head. The picture is still circulating. Nothing dies on the internet.

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy.

If you want to provide an instance of a lie on the other side of the aisle, feel free. My point isn’t partisan.

Decades ago, one of my grad school teachers asked me, “Why do you think there is so much lying in politics today?” Too young for a real sense of history, I thought the question silly. Don’t people always think things were better in the old days?

But sometimes, some things do get worse. Truthfulness is taking it on the nose, and the virtue is even more endangered today than when my teacher quizzed me all those years ago. Ordinary people lie too, but the great masters of lying today are politicians — with this difference. A true master of a craft understands what he is doing. Habitual liars find it harder and harder to keep track of when they are lying and when they aren’t.

Some reasons for the increase in lying are pretty obvious. There are fewer consequences for lying. It is harder to bring them to bear. Honesty isn’t drilled into children as once it was. AI and social media have made it much easier not only to lie but also to organize in doing so.

Less obvious reasons involve advances in lying’s technique. Adolf Hitler promulgated the Big Lie: one so enormous that no one can believe you would tell such a whopper. Our version works not by size but by numbers: If you lie about everything, nobody can believe you would lie so much. Politicians who lie about everything also lie that everything their opponents say is a lie.

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The sun is shining? There you go again. I’m lying? You’re just trying to distract attention.

New techniques of lying get a boost from new technologies for making elites irresponsible to those whom they supposedly serve. The political organization of deviance. The whetting of tribal hatreds. The cultivation of a permanent crisis. The development of addictive social media.

Beyond advances in techniques are changes in the motives for using them. We are in a slow-burning constitutional crisis. Older politicians lied mostly to cover up things like graft, but newer ones lie to cover up attempts to subvert the political system itself. Once someone has lied on a grand enough scale, he acquires a motive to lie even more grandly, just to keep from being exposed. With enough lying, the very act of exposing lies is discredited.

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, in which huge numbers of people, on both sides of the spectrum, hold beliefs that are not just loopy, but harmful and contagious. In a recent book, I detail 30 of these delusions, but for the moment, let me focus on two that are especially relevant to political lying.

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One concerns the nature of right and wrong: Sometimes we just have to do the wrong thing. We think that to make things come out right, we may lie.

More and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better make them inexpressibly worse. We justify burning down neighborhoods “to advance racial justice.” We lie about political opponents “because they want to do bad things.” We give false testimony “because we just know” the accused person must deserve something bad. We unjustly penalize honest people “just to give others a chance.” We “solve the problem” of unwanted children by killing them all, telling ourselves that they aren’t really children unless we choose to believe that they are. We slaughter countless numbers so that no one will have a “poorer quality of life.”

We lie about all of it.

The other concerns the nature of reality: Things are whatever we say they are. It’s easy to be indifferent to the facts if you think saying something makes it true. One day in a university course I teach, we were discussing the nature of marriage. Some students were puzzled: How could marriage have a nature? As one said, “We can define things however we want.”

Many of their teachers would have agreed because “truth is whatever works.” Presumably, a belief “works” if it brings about what we desire. But a lie might easily do that, and by this pragmatist theory, a lie that works isn’t actually a lie. If you live in an echo chamber in which everyone says the same thing, it’s easier still to think it is true. And our echo chambers are very well organized.

There is only one real antidote to all these lies and delusions, without which no other reform can succeed: thinking clearly. The hard thing is that we may not want to think clearly. May God grant us the grace to start wanting to.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Opinion 

Much lore surrounds scripture’s mysterious “Antichrist” — the false messiah prophesied to come in the End Times as a supreme and final embodiment of rebellion against God prior to Christ’s Second Coming.

For centuries, Bible scholars have debated this climactic future figure; Christians have theorized about who it might be (often pointing to corrupt elites); and Hollywood has used the sinister being as horror movie fuel.

But this hyper-fixation on the capital-A Antichrist, says BlazeTV host Jase Robertson, can distract from another part of scripture perhaps even more worthy of our attention: There are already antichrists living among us.

No place in scripture is this more evident than in 1 John.

In 1 John 2:18, he warns that “many antichrists have come.” Two chapters later, he lays bare what an antichrist is: “every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus” (4:3). This kind of spirit, he says, is “not from God” and is “already in the world.”

In other words, the denial of Jesus’ deity is the spirit of the antichrist, and it’s lurking everywhere.

John’s words remain strikingly relevant today. The spreading of darkness, erosion of truth, and deterioration of morality are evidence that the spirit of the antichrist is alive and well.

It’s this reality — not a future singular villain, the Robertsons warn — that impacts our daily lives, and yet many Christians, perhaps to their detriment, obsess over who the Antichrist is or will be.

“Look, I’ve got a guy who I love dearly. He’s one of my best friends in the world, and he got to 2 Thessalonians 2 in his Bible study, and he’s never gone forward or backwards,” says Jase. “He wants to know who the ‘man of sin’ is, and he wants a detailed account.”

Second Thessalonians 2:3 mentions a “man of sin” proclaiming himself God, who many Christians and scholars interpret as a direct reference to the final Antichrist.

Jase believes his friend, and others who get hung up on pinpointing the Antichrist, is missing the bigger point.

“The one in us is greater,” says Jase, referencing 1 John 4:4.

“The ‘man of sin’ — I don’t need to know exactly if that’s one person. I see that in men everywhere,” he continues.

The question it ultimately comes down to, says Jase, is: “Are you in Jesus or are you anti-Jesus?”

“I think [antichrists] are people who are intentionally trying to persuade people and deceive people away from Christ,” adds co-host Zach Dasher, “and the reason why I say that is because in [1 John 2] verse 26, he says, ‘The reason why I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.”’

Even though John was writing in the late first century, his words hold just as true in our time.

Zach points to a story he heard recently about a young Christian whose faith was badly “damaged” after he watched a series of social media videos from a professor who was making “incredibly compelling cases of why the Bible’s not real, why Jesus isn’t who He said He was.”

Eventually, however, it was exposed that this professor’s arguments were “blatant lies.”

“I think that’s more the spirit of the Antichrist,” says Zach.

To hear more of the panel’s discussion, watch the full episode above.

Want more from the Robertsons?

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