Our society was not founded upon lies.

It was founded upon truths so fundamental that they have withstood even our own failure to live up to them.

A society that believes in and defends truth can endure any number of other shortcomings. But our society has become infected with lies. Worse, these lies are perpetrated by some of the most visible people and institutions in our society. When those leaders create or perpetuate lies, millions of unsuspecting people are misled.

We were told that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russia to help “throw” the 2016 presidential election his way; that was untrue. We were told that the FBI had not abused its power to spy on private citizens.

We were told that there was no evidence to support the theory that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory in China.

We were told that the damning information on the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie.

We should be able to count on our journalists to do serious investigative work to expose those who are deceiving the public and hold them accountable.

Social media companies take this even further by shadowbanning, suspending or outright expelling from their platforms those who are doing investigative work and those who are trying to bring accurate information to the public’s attention. These Big Tech companies claim to be “fact-checkers” trying to prevent false information; instead, they help those who are disseminating inaccurate or deceitful information by blocking the public’s access to truth.

Our institutions of higher education should be ground zero for the pursuit of truth. Instead, our younger generations are being taught that America is a fundamentally racist country.

We see no more willingness to tell the truth about human biology. It is now considered an impermissible breach of social propriety to speak the truth that a child in utero is a human being; that only women can menstruate or bear children; that biological men have physical advantages; that “gender” is not separate from biological sex; and that men cannot become women and women can become men by sheer force of will.

But even before the transgender craze took hold, our society had been destroying the innocence of our children by exposing them to every conceivable sexual practice, encouraging sexual experimentation, glorifying promiscuity and normalizing abortion. This despite reams of evidence showing the correlation between sexual activity in young people and low self-esteem, self-destructive behaviors.

How can a society survive when truth is banned, when its government is corrupt, when its educational institutions preach falsehoods, when its adult members care more for public opinion and their own sexual gratification than they do the health of its children? The short answer is that it cannot.