We Can Handle the Truth

The 1992 military justice drama, A Few Good Men, explores a fictional hazing incident involving the U.S. Marines. The main question posed by the film is whether there is a place for unwritten rules and customs, which may technically violate regulations, but may prove necessary for a unique institution like the military to accomplish its mission.

In determining whether the hazing was ordered from higher up, the defense counsel, played by Tom Cruise, cross examines the defendants’ commander, a no-nonsense Marine colonel played by Jack Nicholson. When the attorney insists that he deserves the truth, the colonel angrily responds, “You can’t handle the truth!”

While the colonel is made out to be the bad guy, many of the distortions, omissions, and outright lies from the managerial class are informed by the same ethos, and they think of themselves as the good guys. This type of “noble lying” arises from the governing elite’s belief in its own sophistication compared to the rabble, who would overreact to the truth.

This self-serving justification obscures that officials engaged in narrative control are often more concerned with avoiding embarrassment and accountability than any broader social goal.

Political Correctness Distorts Facts About New Orleans Attack

A few recent events illustrate this phenomenon quite clearly. A man with an ISIS flag on his truck committed a terrorist attack in New Orleans. He ran over pedestrians and then shot it out with police, having earlier announced his intentions on social media. At least 14 people were murdered in the attack.

A third-grade kid could figure out it was Islamic terrorism. Yet agent nose-ring from the FBI and the clownish local police chief would not describe the attack as terrorism in their initial press conference. The media interviewed some of his family but kept calling him American-born and emphasizing his U.S. Army service, lest we think there is anything unusual about an American named Shamsud-Din Jabbar.

Based on photographs, the killer’s appearance sometimes looked African-American and at other times Middle Eastern. When combined with the nature of the attack, this led to a lot of speculation he was Somali or Pakistani.

In multiple stories from the mainstream news, it was impossible to find out if his family had foreign origins or if they had ties to a terror-supporting country. It looked as if the media was trying to hide something, which we have seen many times before.

A local Louisiana paper was the only one to answer this completely natural question. It turns out his parents were natural-born Americans of Louisiana Creole descent, whose father converted to Islam. The father changed his name, presumably to signal commitment to his new faith, and all of his children had similarly foreign-sounding names.

Why the avoidance of facts by the press? Most people know that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists and that not all of those who become terrorists are foreign-born, as was the case with converts John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla.

Scrutiny about names and origins arouses liberal sensitivities because such inquiries remind us that Islam is a recent and foreign import. Even when its votaries happen to be born here, this foreignness manifests in many lesser ways than terrorism, which exposes real flaws with the dominant ideology of multiculturalism.

Not limited to hiding facts, in New Orleans and in similar attacks, before we are even allowed to be angry, the media repeatedly bludgeons us with stories warning about the dangers of “backlash.” Victims are blamed before they can mourn.

After the Fort Hood attacks by mutinous army officer Nidal Hassan, the general in charge of the U.S. Army said insultingly, “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

In spite of these warnings about stereotypes and backlash, there has been almost no significant backlash against Muslims in the United States, even after the 9/11 attacks.

The U.K. Is Similarly Handicapped By Ideology

There has been an even more aggressive media blackout in response to the horrifying rape gangs in the United Kingdom. For years, not only the media, but police, politicians, social workers, and other authorities downplayed the reality of these attacks, blamed victims, and did little to stop the rape of young, native British females by Pakistani immigrant gangs.

The story was back in the news after multiple tweets by Elon Musk about the need for the British government to investigate these matters. As was the case when these stories first came to light in 2014, the media and politicians have been loudly expressing concerns about backlash.

Defending the authorities’ atrocious handling of the matter, British writer Tom Holland said: “The true nightmare of #Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.”

In his words, “It wasn’t the indifference that was noble, but the concern not to demonise a minority. Caring for the weak. The Christian thing . . . I think they genuinely didn’t want to give succour to racism against a minority – which was a noble principle.”

There are, in fact, things worse than developing prejudices, not least among them failing to prevent actual child rape. But, in the modern West, whether in the United States or the United Kingdom, authorities are more afraid of being accused of racism than stopping terrorism and child rape. Fear of being accused of racism even contributed to the 9/11 attacks, lest we forget, because the gate agent didn’t want to stereotype the Arab men carrying box cutters.

Real racism has certainly led to abuses, particularly a generation or two in the past. But the left’s mélange of misplaced compassion, anti-working-class prejudice, and social experimentation in the pursuit of anti-racism has done much more harm to everyone in recent years, not least by contributing to the victimization of innocents when the perpetrators are minorities.

Free Speech and Democracy

Under the emerging ethos of safety, authorities treat information and speech as things that must be curated and controlled to prevent the dangers of prejudice. The dominant ideology conceives of the public as parochial, tempestuous, and easily seduced by bad speech. Instead of calling regulated speech what it is—simply ideas they disagree with—censors in the government and the compliant media ominously label it “hate speech” and “disinformation.”

Self-government is not possible if the people are deprived of facts from authorities. Democratic self-government does not even have any obvious value if we also think the voters are too stupid, easily misled, or prone to spasms of emotional hatred to govern themselves.

Far from hateful, Americans, Britons, and westerners in general are remarkably fair-minded. Because of a deep-seated tradition of individualism, we are averse to judging others as part of groups and mistreating them because of the crimes of their coethnics. It is the British Empire, after all, that abolished slavery around the globe, and it is the West that developed the ideals of limited government and the rule of law, which together protect individual rights.

The emerging managerial elite has weaponized this generosity to import maximally alien foreigners in order to increase social conflict; this, in turn, provides support to illiberal and authoritarian plans of social control and social engineering.

The leadership class has no respect for the West, its history, or its people. This is evidenced by their consistent desire to hide the truth and subject our most vulnerable citizens to horrific violence, lest we all “get the wrong idea.” They have forfeited their authority to rule because of their repeated refusal to treat us with candor and protect our most vulnerable citizens.

Contrary to their prejudices, we can handle the truth.

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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.