When Did Lying Become Okay?

At 14, I Learned Lying Has a Price. The President Never Did

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” —Martin Luther King, Jr

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Watched by Millions. Seen by Few.

I have been writing on this Substack long enough to know when a piece is different. This is one of them.

Thursday night, millions of Americans watched the same speech. By Friday everyone had rushed to argue the same surface, the policy and the talking points and the usual back and forth. Almost no one stopped on the thing sitting directly underneath it. The thing that actually decides what this moment costs you, your family, and every ordinary American who listened to the words coming from that podium.

I spent the last two days making sure I had it right. I traced it back through two thousand years of how societies hold themselves together, and I brought it forward to a ranch I grew up at in Arizona where I learned the lesson firsthand at fourteen years old. What I found reframes everything you think you watched on Thursday, and once you see it you will not be able to unsee it.

Most people will keep scrolling. They will stay busy debating the noise and miss the signal entirely. You are still reading, which tells me you already sense there is more here.

Here is what I am about to show you, and why it may be the most important piece I have published on Uncensored Objection.

So let me take you there.

The Lies

Turn on your television. Open your phone. Watch the President of the United States look straight into a camera and say things, over and over, he and his team know are false.

Then watch his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, step to the podium and do the same thing with a straight face and a steady voice. This happens on an ordinary Tuesday. It happens again on Wednesday. By Friday most people have stopped counting.

These are not white lies. Many of them reshape policy and put families in this country at risk. Some of them ripple out to every person living on the planet. And the response from far too many corners of American life is silence. Crickets.

Nobody voted to make this normal. It happened quietly, one unanswered lie at a time, until the whole country stopped flinching. I want to talk with you about how that slide happened, and why pulling out of it matters more than almost anything else on your feed.

What My Dad Taught Me On The Ranch

I grew up on a ranch 17 miles outside of Tucson, Arizona. In our home, telling the truth was the floor you stood on. My mom and dad built everything on it.

I learned that lesson the hard way when I was fourteen. I worked all summer to buy a new dirt bike, and my dad laid down one rule before I ever kicked it over. Do not ride anyone else around on the back. It is a liability. He did not want to get sued if someone got hurt, and he meant it.

A few hours later I had my neighbor Paul on the back, tearing around the desert, having the time of our lives. That evening another neighbor mentioned to my dad how much fun it looked like we were having out there, racing around with Paul hanging on.

My dad asked me about it. I looked at him and lied. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.

When the truth came out, there were consequences. My mom and dad sat me down, and I still remember the weight in the room. They talked about the sacred bond of trust that holds a family together, and how I had broken it. My dad told me he was disappointed I ignored the rule we agreed to. Then he said the part that stayed with me for life. What cut deeper was that I looked them both in the eyes and lied. So my dad put me to work until I learned my lesson, and that stretched into weeks. I spent the end of summer digging ditches, cutting walkways through thick cactus patches, and laying brick for a workshop we were building while my friends enjoyed what was left of the break. I was miserable the entire time.

Looking back on that early life lesson, here is the part that stayed with me, especially after watching Trump on Thursday. I was fourteen years old. I was not the President of the United States. I was not standing at a podium paid for by taxpayers. I was a kid on a dirt bike, and there were still consequences serious enough that I remember them clearly decades later.

Truth Is The Oldest Load-Bearing Wall We Have

The idea that a society runs on honesty is not something we invented for cable news. It is one of the oldest commitments in Western thought.

The Greeks treated truthfulness as a matter of character. Aristotle placed truthfulness among the virtues, a habit a good person builds over time rather than a mask worn for the moment. Socrates accepted death rather than abandon the honest pursuit of truth he had committed his life to. Plato, writing in his voice, attacked the Sophists of his day for teaching people how to win an argument instead of how to find what is true, and he warned about the rot that sets in when a city rewards persuasion over honesty.

The Romans built a civic identity around a single word, fides, meaning good faith. In his writings on duty, Cicero treated fides as the foundation of justice and held that trust between citizens and the people who govern them is what keeps a republic standing. Break that trust, and the whole structure loses its footing.

Centuries later, German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, took an even harder line. He argued that a lie is a wrong against humanity itself, because every lie eats away at the mutual trust that makes agreements, cooperation, and society between human beings possible.

Notice the through line across two thousand years of hard-won human wisdom. Truth is the load-bearing wall. Pull it out, and everything resting on top of it comes down.

Why Leadership Raises The Standard, Not Lowers It

Every honest relationship you have runs on the same principle those philosophers described. You trust your doctor to tell you what the scan actually shows. You trust your kid’s teacher to tell you how your child is really doing. Strip the truth out of either relationship and it stops working.

Now raise that principle to the highest office in the country.

A President does not speak only for himself. He speaks for the United States. When he makes a claim from behind that seal, allies plan around it and families make decisions based on it. A press secretary carries that same weight by proxy. Karoline Leavitt does not stand at that podium as a private citizen sharing an opinion. She stands there as the official voice of the government of the United States, paid by the very people she is speaking to. JD Vance carries a version of that same duty every time he speaks as Vice President.

The higher the office, the more people absorb the words as fact and act on them. A lie told from the top of the government is a public act with public victims.

The Line Between a Mistake and a Method

Let me be fair, because fairness is the whole point.

Every human being alive has said something untrue. Sometimes it is pressure. Sometimes it is undue influence from people who should not have it. Sometimes it is the simple fear of looking foolish in front of a room. Sometimes it is a bad call made fast. None of us is perfect, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. A person who makes a mistake, owns it, and corrects it is behaving the way an honest person should.

What we are watching now, and what we watched Donald Trump do Thursday night, is different in kind. A stumble happens once and gets corrected. A method runs on repetition and design. When falsehood becomes the standard operating practice of a leader and administration, a reliable tool for managing the public instead of informing it, we have left the territory of human error entirely. Treating a method like a stumble is how a country talks itself into accepting the unacceptable.

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The Danger is The Shrug

Here is what keeps me up at night, and it is not any single lie.

It is the shrug.

When powerful people lie without consequence, and the rest of us look away because we are tired, or because we assume it will never reach our own front door, we teach every future leader a lesson. Lying works. It is cheaper than the truth and it carries no bill.

People who learn that lesson do not stop on their own. They keep going until something stops them. Until verification catches them. Until their conduct costs them something real. We’re watching it daily with Trump, and this past week with Todd Blanche during his confirmation hearing.

The belief that this will never touch you is the most dangerous lie in the whole arrangement, and it is the one we tell ourselves.

I have let Thursday night’s speech marinate for the last twenty-four hours, and here is what I keep noticing. The conversation has drifted away from the falsehoods to the merits of what he said. People are arguing about the policy and treating the whole thing like a normal address from a normal President. Almost no one is sitting with the plain fact underneath all of it. He lied. Over and over, on camera, to the people who pay his salary. And for the most part, everyone seems to simply shrug.

I want to move the focus off the content and onto the conduct. What he lied about will change from one week to the next. The part that should stop you cold is steadier than that. A man placed in a position of leadership and control over this country looked us straight in the eyes and lied, and he did it on an ordinary day like it cost him nothing.

This message is the most important thing I will write this year, and I have been a lawyer and a writer for a long time.

The Enablers Own This Too

Focus for a moment on the people standing next to the lie.

The ones who say nothing because silence pays. The ones who repeat it and build a career on being useful to it. They tell themselves they are just staying in their lane, just protecting their seat at the table.

Understand what that silence actually is. It is a choice. When you hold power or a platform, and you watch someone lie to the country and you cover for that lie with your silence or your applause, you have joined it. You are riding the same wave and reaping the same benefits, and you are doing nothing to stop the damage from landing on everyone below you.

That makes you as responsible as the person doing the lying. As accountable. By association and by benefit, you own it.

Here is what turns my stomach. These are people so absorbed in what the lie does for them that they have stopped caring what it does to everyone else. The everyday Americans on the other end of it are the exact people they were elected or appointed to serve. They took an oath to those people, and they traded it for a seat at the table and a little proximity to power.

One Lie After Another

Last Thursday, the nation sat through a speech full of lies. A presentation stacked with claims that do not survive contact with the record, statements pulled out of context, and assertions offered as fact that were nothing of the kind.

He promised proof and delivered the opposite. He walked in front of the country and pledged hard evidence behind his years-long claim of election fraud and a stolen 2020 election. The evidence never came. The documents his own administration posted to back him up point the other way. One file on the White House website states it plainly. Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a scale wide enough to change an election result.

He claimed China pulled off the largest compromise of election data in history, 220 million voter files stolen and hidden from you. The underlying intelligence describes something far smaller and fully legal. China purchased 2020 voter data from about seven states, and voter registration lists sit out in the open across the country, ready to download or buy. North Carolina posts its list online. Buying public voter data hands no one the power to change a result. Former intelligence officials say China gathered the material to sharpen influence campaigns and then chose not to interfere in the race.

He revived his years-old claim that Venezuela’s voting technology threatens American elections, telling you the CIA had reporting of a plot to help the Maduro regime. The declassified material concerned Venezuela’s own elections and its own machines. His own task force member, John Solomon, stood outside the White House afterward and acknowledged the intelligence community has zero evidence a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022, or 2024. Asked whether Venezuela tampered with voting machines in the United States, Solomon confirmed it did not, saying they did it on their own machines.

And this one really stood out to me. He then lied again and blamed a shadowy deep state for hiding all of it from him. Look at who was actually running his intelligence and law enforcement during the first term, because these were his people. He hand-picked them.

His Director of National Intelligence was John Ratcliffe, whom he nominated himself and who held the post from May 2020 through the end of the term. His CIA was run by Gina Haspel, the appointee he made the first permanent woman to lead the agency. His FBI was led by Christopher Wray, whom he nominated in 2017. His Justice Department answered to William Barr, his own Attorney General, who stated flatly in December 2020 that the FBI and DOJ had found no evidence of fraud that would have changed the result. Much of this material took shape while those four sat atop his own agencies and while he sat in the Oval Office holding the power to declassify every page.

Then follow the timeline to today. That same John Ratcliffe now runs Trump’s CIA. He endorsed Thursday’s release in a careful statement that said the files shed light on China’s intentions and Venezuela’s capabilities, but never claimed foreign activity changed the 2020 result or the result of any other election. The story asks you to believe that Trump’s own DNI, his own CIA director, his own FBI director, and his own Attorney General all buried proof of a stolen election from the very president who appointed them. That is not a deep state. That was his team and it never happened.

This Is Not Politics As Usual

Some people reading this will wave it off. Politics as usual, they will say. It has always been this way. That is the most comfortable story of all, and it is false. Yes, politicians have lied before. Yes, people working for them have said and done the wrong thing. What we are living through now is different in kind.

For most of our history, a lie from the top of the government carried a real risk of ending the liar. When Richard Nixon lied to the country about Watergate, his own party walked into the White House and told him he was finished, and he resigned rather than face certain removal. The press dug, the courts ruled, and members of his own side chose the country over the man. That accountability is the guardrail that has now vanished.

In Trump’s case, the scale alone tells the story. The Washington Post’s fact-checkers catalogued more than thirty thousand false or misleading claims across Trump’s first term. The occasional political exaggeration is something every generation has lived with. Thirty thousand documented falsehoods in four years is something this country had never seen until it saw it.

The second term has been fact-checked in relentless bursts rather than one running total, and the pace has not slowed. CNN’s fact-checkers logged 28 separate false claims from a single week this past May. The counting has essentially become a full-time job that no single newsroom can keep comprehensively, which is its own kind of answer.

Here is what truly sets this moment apart from every one that came before. The lie no longer arrives as one man’s spin from behind a microphone. It arrives wrapped in the machinery of the government itself. On Thursday night, a sitting president stood in the East Room, arranged his intelligence and law enforcement chiefs behind him like a jury, and released hundreds of pages of declassified material he claimed would prove a stolen election. His own documents proved the opposite. He used the seal, the stagecraft, and the full authority of the state to sell the American people something his own agencies had already debunked. While he does it, he is tearing down the very offices built to catch this kind of deception.

The election security agency has been hollowed out, and the official who called 2020 the most secure election in American history was shipped to the Justice Department for investigation. A politician shading the truth is an old and tired story. A government aiming its own intelligence apparatus at the public as a prop for a false narrative, while dismantling the watchdogs that would expose it, is something this country has not faced before. That is where the danger lives, and every American, regardless of party, should be alarmed by where this road leads.

It’s Time to Hold Them Accountable

Good Americans on both sides of the aisle need to say the same thing out loud, and they need to say it now. Enough. Truth belongs to no party. It is the ground every other value stands on, and once a nation loses its grip on what is real, it loses the ability to govern itself. That is the whole game. A public that cannot tell fact from fiction cannot hold anyone accountable, and a leader who understands that will lie to you precisely because it works.

So take away the reason it works.

Hold them accountable. All of them. Name the lie out loud the moment you see it, because a lie left unanswered hardens into accepted fact. Share the record and the receipts with the people who only heard the speech. Back the reporters and watchdogs doing the slow work of verification, because they are carrying weight the rest of us benefit from. Vote like the truth matters, because your ballot is the one consequence these people actually fear. Refuse to let anyone around you file this under politics as usual, because the moment you shrug, you have joined the people counting on your silence.

I was fourteen years old when I learned that a lie carries a price. I paid it with weeks of hard labor under an Arizona sun, and I have never forgotten the lesson. The President knows that lesson too. So does his press secretary, and so do the officials standing behind him and congressmen and women who have decided the truth is negotiable when the cameras are on. They are betting that the office protects them from the reckoning the rest of us have always faced. It is long past time we proved that bet wrong.

I will never forget what we are watching in this country. Burn it into your memory too, and then do something with it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Related: "Don’t Forget- The Full Case Against Donald Trump — Lies, Crimes, Corruption, and the Receipts They’re Hoping You’ll Ignore.” (June 2025)

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