Trying to Dodge the Truth

Influential Americans get a dose of hard reality.

This morning I woke up to four e-mails containing the following:

1) Dr. Peter McCullough’s Substack post of this morning, titled Public Has Lost Trust in Scientific Manuscripts from Vaccinated Authors or Institutions that Promote or Mandate COVID-19 Vaccination.

2) A link to Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation letter.

3) A link to a report on the U.S. national debt hitting 34 trillion dollars.

4) A link to a video showing female champion boxer, Claressa Shields, getting knocked out in a sparring session with a virtually unknown male boxer.

I found 4) especially intriguing. The video was shot in 2018, and its owner kept it to himself for five years. He only chose to publish it after he’d had enough of Claressa’s frequent boasting that she could beat male professional boxers such as former welterweight world champion Keith Thurman or junior-heavyweight, Jake Paul.

After the video was released, Claressa claimed that—at a sparring session few days earlier—she had humiliated the same fighter. This, she claimed, inspired him “to take revenge” at the sparring session captured on video by “removing the padding from his glove.” This assertion has been challenged by her opponent’s well-known trainer, who has a sterling reputation. Moreover, the video reveals her obviously dropping her guard and failing to keep her chin down, thereby exposing herself to her opponent’s left hook. Instead of simply admitting that she got caught, she fabricated an elaborate and defamatory lie.

While seemingly random, all four of the above stories are examples of how influential Americans in a range of professions have developed a bad habit of trying to dodge hard truths about the human condition. These include:

1). Scientific fraud will eventually be detected and it will cause the authors of fraudulent papers to lose their credibility.

2). Plagiarism will eventually be detected and it will cause plagiarists to lose their credibility as academic researchers and authors.

3). Assuming out-of-control debt instead of living within one’s means is unsustainable and will eventually result in financial ruin.

4). Even extraordinarily talented outliers like Claressa Shields cannot compete with former champion male boxers such as Keith Thurman, who would badly hurt or kill her in the ring if he accepted her challenge to a true fight.

We Americans need to make a New Year’s Resolution to have greater respect for reality and to start telling the truth about it. Being totally ridiculous is no way to go through life.