James Comey confirms that NYT story on Russian collusion conspiracy was totally #FAKENEWS

Source: James Comey confirms that NYT story on Russian collusion conspiracy was totally #FAKENEWS

http://www.newstarget.com

By: JD Heyes

Date: June 12, 2017

One of the most under-reported aspects of fired FBI Director James Comey’s much-ballyhooed testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was the bombshell that much of the reporting on Team Trump and the White House by the disgusting “mainstream” media has been absolutely false.

As in, not even close to the truth. 

One such report by The New York Times on February 14 claimed in the headline, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence.” It was nothing but fake news.

As noted by Zero Hedge, under questioning from Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, Comey was asked:

OK. You had mentioned before about some news stories and news accounts. Without having to go into all of the names and specific times and be able to dip into all of that. Have there been news accounts about the Russian investigation or collusion about the whole event or as you read the story you were wrong about how wrong they got the facts?

Comey replied: Yes, there have been many, many stories based on — well, lots of stuff but about Russia that are dead wrong.”

He added, after further questioning from Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho):

The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, about writing stories about classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it. And we don’t call the press to say, ‘Hey you got that thing wrong about this sensitive topic. We just have to leave it there.

Here is the relevant exchange:

So in other words, Comey said directly what so many of us in the alternative media have suspected for quite some time: Much of what’s being reported by the shrillest of anti-Trump media — the Times, the Washington Post, CNN — is completely bogus, planted by Deep State types to impugn, malign and undermine President Donald J. Trump and ruin his presidency. And this is why we have regularly urged our readers to take that other stuff with a grain of salt.

So much “anonymous” reporting has also been a problem, and while reporters are trained to jealously guard their sources, sensational items being reported about the Trump White House were coming far too often to be legitimate. Plus, there was definitely a political nature to the leaks — everything was negative about Trump and his administration, which was a huge tip-off.

Even #NeverTrump reporter Chris Matthews of MSNBC was forced to admit that after the Comey testimony, the “Russian collusion” narrative completely collapsed.

“The assumption of the critics of the president, of his pursuers, you might say, is that somewhere along the line in the last year is the president had something to do with colluding with the Russians…to affect the election in some way. And yet what came apart this morning was that theory,” Matthews said on his network after Comey’s testimony aired.

Two reasons why: Comey said Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, whom he fired, “wasn’t central to the Russian investigation,” and because of that, it destroys the notion that Flynn could have been in a position to testify against the president. “And if that’s not the case, where’s the there-there?” Matthews asked. (RELATED: As Expected, The Disgusting Fake News Media Is Ignoring The Most Damning Of All Revelations Made By James Comey)

There’s more. CNN had to retract a story it published the day before Comey’s testimony, in which the network claimed “sources” said the former FBI director would refute Trump’s claim he was told multiple times by Comey that he was not the subject of any FBI investigation.

“Comey is going to dispute the president if he’s asked about it by the senators,” said Gloria Borger, one of four reporters who claimed Comey would refute it. “He will say that he never assured Donald Trump that he was not under investigation, that that would have been improper for him to do so.”

Turns out that Comey did say during testimony he informed Trump on multiple actions that he was not the subject of any investigation.

He also informed Congress of same. Funny though how that tidbit of information was never leaked.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

TheNationalSentinel.com

ZeroHedge.com

TownHall.com

TheBlaze.com

Christiane Amanpour Challenged By Russia To Interview Boy She Exploited For War Propaganda

Come on Chistiane, be a woman of honor and accept the challenge! She won’t because she and her organization are mere puppets of the US government. Pathetic disinformation.

It was revealed that the terrorists attempted to pay and otherwise coerce the man to allow Omran to be used as a stage prop for further propaganda videos.

Source: Christiane Amanpour Challenged By Russia To Interview Boy She Exploited For War Propaganda

http://www.activistpost.com

By Brandon Turbeville

June 13, 2017

Hyped and heaped with praise from establishment corners all across the United States, the heavily opinionated Christiane Amanpour has long promoted the line of the Military Industrial Complex whenever its methods come in the form of “humanitarian bombing” and war under the guise of “Responsibility to Protect.”

Amanpour has long been a successful propagandist for the establishment, particularly when it came to Syria. However, it seems even Amanpour has stuck her neck out a bit too far now. After the picture of Omran Daqneesh (“Little Omran”) was paraded across Western television screens, Amanpour attacked the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with the image in order to browbeat him and claim that Russia was supporting a “butcher” in Syria who was killing civilians with abandon.

“What do you say to the civilians, who are simply asking for the right to not be bombed? That is a war crime, sir,” she warbled, while brandishing the photo. 

Yet, after Little Omran and his father resurfaced, Amanpour’s propaganda has fallen apart. This is because the boy’s father has revealed that the photo was nothing more than a clever photo op taken by the White Helmets for the purpose of demonizing the Syrian government. Furthermore, it was revealed that the terrorists attempted to pay and otherwise coerce the man to allow Omran to be used as a stage prop for further propaganda videos. The sharpest sting to Amanpour’s narrative, however, might be the fact that the boy’s family fully supports the Syrian government.

 

With these new revelations having made their way across the alternative and independent media, the mainstream has only offered scant coverage of Omran’s re-emergence. Amanpour has remained stone cold silent, however.

This has prompted the Russian Foreign Ministry to offer a challenge to Amanpour – simply interview the boy and his family and follow up on the story she once reported with such apparent conviction.

“She may have enough courage, journalistic professional ethics and simple human conscience to finish it. To go to Aleppo, to go to Syria, find the family of that boy and do a really honest interview with him, not a staged one, which CNN is so capable of,” said State Department Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

“You may ask some possibly difficult questions and produce a true report about this boy. About how the US media have been spinning his photo and his story and for years the fate of Syria as well,” she added.

Zakharova added that both the mainstream media and CNN specifically, “have been caught red-handed” with their use of the “Aleppo boy” image, and added that they should take responsibility for their reporting.

Editor in Chief for RT, Margarita Simonyan, offered to help facilitate the interview. “We could take Christiane Amanpour and anyone wishing to come with us next time. As long as they have the courage to talk to this boy Omran and his family,” she said.

So far, there has been no word from Amanpour as to whether or not she will accept the challenge. We somehow doubt that the allegedly courageous Amanpour will take Russia up on its offer. Instead, we suspect she will state (if she addresses the issue at all) that the offer is some nefarious Russian plot to justify killing civilians and destroy Western media credibility. Ironically, Amanpour and her ilk have pretty much accomplished both themselves.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President, and Resisting The Empire: The Plan To Destroy Syria And How The Future Of The World Depends On The Outcome. Turbeville has published over 1000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

The West Spreading New Wave of Feel-Good Movies and False Hopes

Source: The West Spreading New Wave of Feel-Good Movies and False Hopes | OffGuardian

off-guardian.org

Andre Vitchek, first published at NEO

June 4, 2017

The real slums behind the Slumdog Millionaire. Copyright of © Alex Masi.

Watch blockbuster movies from the “south” and chances are you will start to believe that the world is not really such a desperate place. Perhaps you might even get convinced that under the present imperialist and turbo-capitalist global arrangement things can always get better. If you live in a gutter somewhere in Sub-Continent or Africa, you could simply try hard, you could “believe in yourself and love yourself”, you could “listen to your instincts”, and everything may eventually fall into the right places. You could get acknowledged, rewarded and even catapulted from your misery into some plush pastures that are covering the tall green hills of success.

Think twice! Or…don’t think at all – just bury your head in the sand.

There were always books written and films produced just in order to please the Western funding agencies and propaganda machine. I described the process, colorfully, in my recent political/revolutionary novel “Aurora”.

Just think about Kite Runner written by an Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, or about all those bestsellers by Salman Rushdie or Elif Shafak, books about India or Turkey, but intended almost exclusively for a Western audience, and often despised in their native countries.

The works of Rushdie and Shafak can at least qualify as “literature”. But now both the Western markets and mainstream media are demanding more and more of ‘feel good’ rubbish books and movies from poor countries, more and more of those simple, picturesque and ‘positive’ stories that are actually confusing and give false hopes to the local population of many poor countries.

Do you still remember Slumdog Millionaire? How realistic a scenario was that? First of all, it was not even an Indian film; it was a 2008 British movie, directed by Danny Boyle, who also had directed Trainspotting. It took place in the Juhu slum of Mumbai.

In 2011, I filmed in the same Mumbai slum where the movie was produced. I asked many, how likely was such a ‘success scenario’ in that filthy and hopeless neighborhood? The dwellers of the Juhu slum just dismissed the entire charade with derogatory gestures; why even waste precious words?

Now more films are coming – more and more… and more! Feel good; feel very good about the world! Drop a few tears as you are departing from the cinema. Utter under your breath: “Everything is possible.” Collaborate with the establishment. Forget about the revolution, think ‘positively’ (the way the system wants you to think) and above all, think about yourself!

A film about a real Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi, created by the Indian director Mira Nair (Fire, Water among her other work), Queen of Katwe, is a tour-de-force of true individualism. And again, if you think you are actually watching a Ugandan or even Indian film, you are squarely wrong: it is supposed to feel like an African one, but it is a US movie, produced by Walt Disney Pictures. And it is actually intended and even proudly promoted as a “feel good movie”.

The plot is simple and predictable: a little girl grows up in total misery, in one of the toughest slums of Africa – Katwe, at the outskirts of Kampala. Her father has already died of AIDS, her mother is unable to pay the rent, and her older sister is barely surviving as a prostitute. Phiona, just 10-years old, is forced to drop from school.

Her life is approaching total collapse. But then, suddenly, a miracle! Hallelujah!

Phiona enrolls in a state-sponsored chess program. She is talented. She climbs and climbs, soon travelling to Sudan by a plane, and few months later, even to Russia.

It is supposed to be a ‘true story’. And yes, there was a poor girl, growing up in a Ugandan slum. She was talented although she never reached the zenith, and never won any gold medal. In the film, she wins tournaments, makes loads of cash, and buys a villa (looking like a palace), for her family.

Is this what young poor girls watching the film in the Katwe slum should be aiming at? Would such a dream be realistic, or is this an absolute mirage?

I also filmed in Katwe, for my damning documentary Rwanda Gambit. And when I was a young kid, I could pass for a talented chess player, taking part in several tournaments and competitions. Somehow, the film – Queen of Katwe – did not make any sense. To become chess champion takes much more than some luck and zeal. Like a concert pianist, a chess player has to spend years and years of hard training, literally killing himself or herself, to play at a certain level.

When I was a kid, my father, a scientist, was obsessed with turning me into a champ. Frankly, I was not too interested, although I worked hard, for years. I won a few medals, but never went further. Could Phiona, hungry, almost without a roof over her head, become a grand master, just after few months of unhurried coaching?

I wish she could. But I doubt it, knowing Uganda, knowing its slums, fully realizing how merciless their reality really is, and of course, knowing chess.

Who benefits from such films? Definitely not the poorest of the poor, and definitely not Indians or Africans!

It appears that the only beneficiaries are those people who are trying to uphold the status quo, in the West and in the colonies. They don’t want people to realize: that there is almost no hope left, and only some radical change, a revolution, can reverse and improve things in their plundered countries.

A revolution is a ‘communal’ event. It is never about one person suddenly advancing, or getting ‘rescued’ or ‘saved’. It is not about one person or one family ‘making it’. It is about an entire nation fighting for its rights, for progress, and it is about social justice for all.

Little ‘success stories’ actually divide communities, offering false hopes.

Phiona’s story coming from pro-Western, turbo-capitalist Uganda, has nothing in common with the great communal projects in Venezuelan slums: like the classical Youth Orchestras, or cable cars, childcare centers, public libraries, community learning centers, and free medical posts.

No matter how ‘lovely’ is Mira Nair’s cinematography, winning the lottery, or getting lucky here and there, is not going to change the entire country. That is exactly why those small individualist acts and triumphs are being celebrated and glorified in the centers of Western imperialism. There, no real change is ever welcomed, whether it takes place at home or in the colonies. On the other hand, all selfish little victories are treated as sacred. One should live for himself or herself, disregarding the context.

How many other deeply ‘positive-thinking’/ unrealistic/ ‘feel-good’/ ‘false-hope’ films have I seen, lately? Many. For instance Lion, a 2016 Australian/UK co-production, about a poor Indian boy who jumps on a train, loses his hometown, and eventually gets adopted by a loving and dedicated Australian family.

It looks like a downpour, an avalanche of similar films and books and news stories. It looks like some kind of new wave of ‘positive thinking’, or ‘there is nothing really too wrong with our world that couldn’t be fixed by some personal luck and individualism’ dogma. Most of the stuff is somehow connected to the epicenter of Western ideological indoctrination – the United Kingdom (a country, which is successfully nullifying all revolutionary zeal of its own citizens, of the immigrants arriving from desperate and colonized countries, and even those people who live in despair in various far away places).

The West is busy manufacturing ‘pseudo reality’. And in this grotesque pseudo-reality, several deprived individuals like starving chess players, street vendors and slum dwellers are suddenly becoming rich, successful and fulfilled. Millions of others, all around them, continue to suffer. But somehow, they don’t seem to matter much.

There is a new celebrity group in making – let’s call them the ‘glamorous poor’. Those ‘exceptional individuals’, the glamorous poor, are easy to digest, and even to celebrate in the West. They are swiftly and cheerfully integrating into the ‘mainstream’ club of the global ‘go getters’ and narcissist rich.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world.

Monsanto Employing Troll Army To Silence Online Dissent? (7 min)

May 15, 2017

SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=22712

New court documents allege that Monsanto is employing an army of internet trolls to literally “Let Nothing Go”–no article, no comment, no social media post is to be left unanswered by these third party proxies. Find out about the court case from which these documents have emerged, the history and context of the accusations, and what it all means in today’s thought for the day.

Cannabis Prevents Brain Aging

This post is dedicated to doofus British Prime Minister May who apparently does not understand the concept of science. (See previous post) This old fart is a prime example of someone who should be consuming cannabis on a daily basis.

Yo, Mrs May, “Cannabis should not only be legalized, it should be mandatory.”

“THC imitates the effect of cannabinoids produced naturally in the body, which fulfil important functions in the brain. “With increasing age, the quantity of the cannabinoids naturally formed in the brain reduces,” says Prof. Zimmer. “When the activity of the cannabinoid system declines, we find rapid aging in the brain.”

Source: Cannabis Prevents Brain Aging

With permission from

preventdisease.com

Marco Torres

May 17, 2017
Memory performance decreases with increasing age. Cannabis can reverse these aging processes in the brain. Low doses of the active ingredient in cannabis, THC, has the opposite effect on the elderly, reversing brain aging and restoring learning and memory.

This was shown in mice by scientists at the University of Bonn with their colleagues at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). Old animals were able to regress to the state of two-month-old mice with a prolonged low-dose treatment with a cannabis active ingredient. This opens up new options, for instance, when it comes to treating dementia. The results are now presented in the journal Nature Medicine.

* 5 Diseases Proven To Respond Better To Cannabis Than Prescription Drugs *

Like any other organ, our brain ages. As a result, cognitive ability also decreases with increasing age. This can be noticed, for instance, in that it becomes more difficult to learn new things or devote attention to several things at the same time. This process is normal, but can also promote dementia. Researchers have long been looking for ways to slow down or even reverse this process.

Scientists at the University of Bonn and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) have now achieved this in mice. These animals have a relatively short life expectancy in nature and display pronounced cognitive deficits even at twelve months of age. The researchers administered a small quantity of THC, the active ingredient in the hemp plant (cannabis), to mice aged two, twelve and 18 months over a period of four weeks.

Afterwards, they tested learning capacity and memory performance in the animals – including, for instance, orientation skills and the recognition of other mice. Mice who were only given a placebo displayed natural age-dependent learning and memory losses. In contrast, the cognitive functions of the animals treated with cannabis were just as good as the two-month-old control animals. “The treatment completely reversed the loss of performance in the old animals,” reported Prof. Andreas Zimmer from the Institute of Molecular Psychiatry at the University of Bonn and member of the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation.

Years of meticulous research

This treatment success is the result of years of meticulous research. First of all, the scientists discovered that the brain ages much faster when mice do not possess any functional receptors for THC. These cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptors are proteins to which the substances dock and thus trigger a signal chain. CB1 is also the reason for the intoxicating effect of THC in cannabis products, such as hashish or marihuana, which accumulate at the receptor. THC imitates the effect of cannabinoids produced naturally in the body, which fulfil important functions in the brain. “With increasing age, the quantity of the cannabinoids naturally formed in the brain reduces,” says Prof. Zimmer. “When the activity of the cannabinoid system declines, we find rapid aging in the brain.”

To discover precisely what effect the THC treatment has in old mice, the researchers examined the brain tissue and gene activity of the treated mice. The findings were surprising: the molecular signature no longer corresponded to that of old animals, but was instead very similar to that of young animals. The number of links between the nerve cells in the brain also increased again, which is an important prerequisite for learning ability. “It looked as though the THC treatment turned back the molecular clock,” says Zimmer.

Next step: clinical trial on humans

A low dose of the administered THC was chosen so that there was no intoxicating effect in the mice. Cannabis products are already permitted as medications, for instance as pain relief. As a next step, the researchers want to conduct a clinical trial to investigate whether THC also reverses aging processes in the brain in humans and can increase cognitive ability.

The North Rhine-Westphalia science minister Svenja Schulze appeared thrilled by the study: “The promotion of knowledge-led research is indispensable, as it is the breeding ground for all matters relating to application. Although there is a long path from mice to humans, I feel extremely positive about the prospect that THC could be used to treat dementia, for instance.”

The Cannabis Frequency

Fun with Disinformation: The Russians Did It: ‘Massive’ Macron email leak just hours before election silence (3 min)

“France will be led by a woman, either Merkel or me.” Marine le Pen

May 8, 2017

Macron’s campaign team was apparently the target of a massive hacking attack on Friday night – but no one could talk about it until voting closed.

What eastern bloc dissidents can teach us about ‘living in truth’

Andrei Sakharov: “[A man] may hope for nothing, but nevertheless speak because he cannot, simply cannot remain silent.”

As Solzhenitsyn saw it, simple truths are always a threat to totalitarianism.

Source: What eastern bloc dissidents can teach us about ‘living in truth’

theconversation.com

Philip Boobbyer

Reader in History, University of Kent

May 3, 2017Gone but not forgotten: Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s funeral, 2008. EPA/Yuri Kochetkov

“Fake news” may be getting lots of headlines, but it is as old as the hills. Propagandists have relied on false evidence for centuries. Of course, not all propaganda campaigns are dishonest; indeed many efforts at persuading people of things are laudable. But the phenomenon of fake news and the “post-truth” culture in which it thrives are clearly a threat to democracy, and to the public sphere that democracy depends on to survive.

Everyone has a part to play in pushing back. Most of us probably assume that only other people fall prey to false or exaggerated news stories. This is complacent. Media historians emphasise that propaganda often exploits already-existing trends rather than creating new ones, making subtle use of half-truths as well as outright falsehoods – and it can be much harder to unpick half-truths than to demolish lies.

Fortunately, a few decades ago, matters of truth-telling and lying were a major concern for Soviet and Eastern European dissidents living under communism, where propaganda was all-pervasive. Their ideas have long outlasted their times, and today they should interest anyone seeking to challenge dishonesty or speak truth to power, or even simply to live truthfully.

They are all the more relevant because the propaganda techniques currently used by Moscow have roots in the Soviet era, and it is valuable to know how people sought to respond to them then. But their ideas have a relevance well beyond Russia; after all, no country, group or person is immune to half-truths or disinformation.

Reality itself

On these issues, the thinking of Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of Soviet communism’s most trenchant critics, deserves special attention. When Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, he built his Nobel lecture around a Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world”. Simple truths, he argued, are always a threat to totalitarianism.

In his 1974 essay, Live Not by Lies, Solzhenitsyn suggested that to end repression, people needed to resist lies and learn to live “by truth”. “Never knowingly support lies,” he declared. While he acknowledged that that could be risky, to put it mildly, he saw it as a kind of minimalist strategy, one within everyone’s reach.

Dissidents and reformers alike read Live Not by Lies as a vision for a different kind of society. One man impressed with Solzhenitsyn’s thinking was the Czech dramatist and future president, Václav Havel. In his 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless, Havel suggested that people “need not accept the lie”. He imagines a greengrocer who stops putting up slogans he disagrees with and voting in fake elections, and starts to say what he really thinks at political meetings – breaking the “rules of the game” that underpin the system. In finding the strength to follow his conscience, Havel suggests, the man makes an attempt to live “within the truth”.

Remembering Václav Havel in Prague. EPA/Filip Singer

The notion of “living in truth” points to the idea that being truthful isn’t just a matter of uttering true statements, but also about becoming a truthful person in the fullest sense. Truthfulness and integrity are entwined; religious thinkers sometimes talk of the “spirit of truth” at work within people. The Russian philosopher Semyon Frank, writing from a Christian humanist perspective, once wrote that truth is ‘not a judgement about reality, but the living presence of the reality itself”.

Another relevant text is Fear No Evil, a 1986 memoir by Jewish refusnik Nathan Sharansky. Sharansky was imprisoned for his involvement in the Moscow Helsinki Group, set up in 1976 to monitor human rights abuses. He used to prepare for interrogation by reflecting on the Psalms of David and having imaginary conversations with characters from literature. He was conscious that if he did not develop a rich inner life, he could easily be drawn into compromises he would later regret.

Again, this speaks to our own time, where it is so easy for people to get caught up in the latest news story or media-driven discussion. When we lose our “inner freedom” – another term popular in dissident circles – we become open to manipulation by political, commercial and cultural agendas of all kinds.

Truth for its own sake

Truth-telling is not easy in times when the very concept of truth has been brought into disrepute. Lenin named the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, which is Russian for truth. In practice, this meant the politicisation of truth – identifying as true whatever policy or idea the Communist Party chose to promote. Unsurprisingly, there was widespread disillusionment when the Soviet regime failed to deliver on its promises.

It is hard not to be cynical about people who loudly claim to speak the truth, and understandings of what truth even is have certainly changed over time. But to move from that insight to saying that everyone has their own truth is a step too far. No university would survive on a principle like that, even if the “post-truth” culture, with its implicit connections to postmodernism, has some of its roots in the academy.

Truth: Pravda’s masthead. Wikimedia Commons

Truth is more than a means to an end. There are times when truths need to be expressed, whether or not a positive outcome will be the result. As Anatoly Yakobson, editor of Soviet human rights journal The Chronicle of Current Events, once declared: “One must begin by postulating that truth is needed for its own sake and for no other reason.” Or in the words of famous physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov: “[A man] may hope for nothing, but nevertheless speak because he cannot, simply cannot remain silent.”

Living in truth doesn’t mean speaking out unthinkingly on every issue. It matters not just what we say, but how we say it. It’s all too easy to become strident or pedantic, forgetting that truths expressed well have the power to unlock hearts and open up conversation. Besides, truth and untruth are often mixed up, and it can take time and care to separate the two.

In these times as much as ever, we must live in truth, and learn to tell the truth in constructive ways. This may seem obvious, but in practice it’s no small task – and democracy depends on it.