Because right matters and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.

If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves, if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right. That’s what they do in the old country, that Colonel Vindman’s father came from. Or the old country that my great grandfather came from, or the old countries that your ancestors came from, or maybe you came from. But here, right is supposed to matter. It’s what’s made us the greatest nation on earth. No constitution can protect us, right doesn’t matter any more. And you know you can’t trust this President to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. This is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.

Congressman Adam Schiff

What rational person would disagree with the two sentences Adam Schiff so wonderfully closed with in front of the Senate last night?   Right matters, the truth matters?   

The answer to that is anyone who then rejects the idea that lies have no right to be told by those who want to lie, who want to broadcast them to be sold to an effective percentage of the general public, the buying ad the voting public.  That would be the United States Supreme Court, the civil liberties industry, the ACLU, most everyone who has been sold through the media as a "civil libertarian" even people I hold in enormous affection and who I have some, though not unreserved respect for who declare themselves "First Amendment absolutists" "free-speech absolutists"   I can name,among those the late so often great Molly Ivins, the still living Noam Chomsky.  

If you really believe that "right matters" especially in so far as it is important for egalitarian democracy, the rule of law, and other such important public matters, you must agree that the effective prevention of wrong matters at least as much because due to the nature of human events what is right succeeding is often entirely depending on it defeating the enormous power and strenght of those who want to do wrong. 

If you want an example of that, it's on trail for impeachment and removal in the Senate this week, the virtual guarantee of that removal part of it failing due to the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate determined to ignore the truth to let the crime spree of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani to continue to whatever disaster will come, being a second great example of active wrong with every hope and prospect of defeating right fueled by the power of lies in the media, FOX, Sinclair, hate-talk-shock-jock radio and online media.  

The refusal to take the responsibility to assert the right and the true on the excuse that those can't be defined scientifically to the same standard of reassurance that is asserted for pure mathematics is one of the greatest of the many moral failures of modernism, starting in the late 18th century and reaching ultimate and repeated rot, repeatedly in the 20th and now 21st centuries.  As Marilynne Robinson pointed out, modernism is a failed project.  That the desire of modernism, starting with Descartes, was to arrive at that level of reliable knowledge rather quickly turned to the irresponsible pretense that the right was either relative or not reliably determined even by judges who otherwise had no problem ruling definitively on such matters - especially when there was money in the balance - is a rather definitive condemnation of the ideology, that is if you care enough about the right to tell the truth about that. 

When, as it is so often in academic, scholarly assertions about such things, it devolves to two things, a. cowardice to choose the right and the true often due to a fear of criticism, b. the fear of such criticism making them an outcast on the basis of violations of the current fashions of modernism as enforced in the common culture of educated people.   I think that has a lot to do with that cynical cowardice of the lawyers and lawmen I pointed to as compared to such courageous diplomats and soldiers who were those who disobey'ed Trump's orders to testify to the right and the truth to Adam Schiff's committee.  Lawyers collect their fee and go home after their cases are disposed of, front-line diplomats and soldiers face the real meaning of what happens when wrong and lies win.  Academics in Western countries seldom face the real meaning of their breezy assertions about the relativity of morality and the fungibility of truth.