Laura Hollis groused in her Feb. 21 WorldNetDaily column:
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio created quite a stir at the Munich Security Conference last week. Rubio’s speech emphasized the shared heritage, history and culture of Europe and the United States – described broadly as “Western civilization” – and called upon the nations of Europe to defend and be proud of that heritage and to preserve it.
Rubio mentioned just a few of the great contributions Europe has made to America and the people of the world, including “the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution.” He credited Christianity as the foundation of Western civilization, referring to the Christian faith of America’s founders and first settlers as “a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”
One thing Rubio did not mention specifically, but which is inherent in every point he made, was that the greatest achievements of Western civilization are grounded in the pursuit, protection and promotion of truth.
Europe’s and America’s great universities were created for the pursuit of truth and to convey those truths to future generations. The scientific method is designed to uncover truths through investigation and the rigorous testing of hypotheses. Among the primary purposes of a fair legal system is to discover the truth. A free press should aggressively search for the truth and expose it to the public. And a just government should protect the truth and those who seek to bring it to the public.
This is not the situation in which we find ourselves today, either in Europe or in the United States. In fact, the countries that appear to be most at risk of imploding or losing their cultural identities are those that have departed the furthest from the principle of truth as a foundation of their society. Cultural practices and government policies that are built upon fundamental untruths are inevitably societally corrosive.
Examples are legion.
Hollis’ examples are the predictable right-wing ones, including abortion, welfare, the idea that “all cultural practices are equally conducive to human flourishing” and that a person can change gender. She could have just as easily included the publisher of her column. As we noted the last time a WND column unironically made a similar complaint, WND has a long history of spreading falsehoods and lies, most egregiously paying a still-undisclosed sum of money to Tennessee car dealer Clark Jones, whom WND falsely portrayed as a “dope dealer.”
Still, Hollis went on to grouse:
Americans who tried desperately to obtain accurate information about the origin of COVID-19 and the actual risks of the mRNA vaccines were accused of spreading “misinformation,” silenced and censored. Many lost their jobs.
She didn’t mention that WND also has a history of spreading misinformation about COVID and its vaccines.
Hollis’ column was also published at Newsmax — even though it too has problems telling the truth. Most notably, it reached settlements with voting-tech companies Dominion and Smartmatic after they sued Newsmax for defamation after it falsely accused them of skewing vote totals.
If Hollis won’t hold the publishers of her column to the same standard of truth, her column rings hollow.