Finding Freedom In Truth

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Something is happening – it is in the water right now.  Sure, it’s August – the political “silly season” when there is no “genuine” news.  But the stories that are emerging – some of them non-stories in a busier time – are joined by a strand that is far more important than any normal news story.  Truth is winning – even if it has taken a while. Let’s dive in.

I’ll start with Fauci, even though I have sworn to leave it alone after writing about his contemptuous Senate appearance so much – but the hits keep coming.  Fauci’s former Chief of Staff has plead guilty to cover-up charges.  Where there is smoke, there is fire.  At this juncture, I am willing to believe Fauci is guilty of some sort of criminal activity.  But that is not the heart of Fauci’s lies.  The entire public health infrastructure lied about what they knew, and more importantly, about what they did not know concerning covid.  The ramifications were horrific on so many levels.  Slowly but surely the debacle that was the covid response, in this country and internationally, is being revealed.  We can only lie to ourselves for so long.

Democrats have been nominating a string of brutally unqualified and unworthy candidates this nominating season.  And one by one those campaigns are falling apart as the falsehoods on which they were built are revealed.  Much of that is owed to the fact that the internet makes it much easier to lie than ever before.  But conversely, it also makes it easier to uncover those lies. In the end; however, it is not the mechanism that is at issue, it is the lies.  Lying does not pay.

Then there is the sad, sad tale of Jason Arday.  This man fabricated so much from whole cloth and when some try to defend him, the only defense they have is more lies.  Consider:

Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press. Alive, he had become an embarrassment—in the Guardian writer Hirsch’s words, “the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality.” Dead, all his faults can be forgiven. He can be, once again, the high-flying black scholar who defied the obstacles of structural racism and his own disabilities. His reputation is restored. All the difficult questions he represents about university recruitment, educational standards, and general gullibility can be gratefully set aside.

In this case, there is no equality because the man never achieved what he claimed to have achieved.  He was a cheat and a liar – end of story.

These are three currently high-profile stories and the thread that ties them together is the inherent amorality in each.  To lie so repeatedly, so boldly, and so consequentially demands that one not merely have a broken moral compass, but that said compass be totally and completely absent – replaced instead by a pathological level of narcissism.  The biggest lie of all is that people are fundamentally good.

Jesus said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  This oft quoted utterance of His comes in the context of a great theological debate with the religious authorities of His time.  I don’t want to unpack that debate in this post.  Rather instead, what needs to be noted is that those officials exercised undue power over the Jewish people – just as public health officials sought to do during covid – just as the incredibly flawed Democratic candidates wish to do – just as the DEI movement that held Arday as a poster child was trying to do.  In each of these cases, as the lies are exposed, the power fades, and those they wished to lord over are freed.  Jesus, it seems, knew what He was talking about.

We seem to be in a season of shedding lies.  Would that we were in a season where the lying simply ceased.