Losing the Standard

By Brigadier General (Ret.) Paul B. “Trey” Chauncey III

The Price of Meeting Deceit on Its Own Terms

Every movement that survives does so by guarding a standard, something higher than popularity or power. Ours once rested on truth. It was the reason people trusted our words, our motives, and our leadership. But lately, I see that trust slipping away, traded for quick victories in a culture that measures truth by traction and conviction by clicks.

This week offered another small but telling example. A story raced through conservative circles claiming Senator John Kennedy had read New York socialist Zohran Mamdani’s trust-fund manifesto on Fox News. It sounded perfect, too perfect. It never happened. The speech was fabricated. Yet it spread because it felt true, because it scratched the itch of outrage that now drives so much of our discourse.

That is the danger. When we start accepting what feels right over what is real, we become what we once opposed.

The Playbook of the Left

For decades, the modern Left has mastered the use of emotional manipulation as a political weapon. Its activists and strategists understand that perception often outweighs fact, that a compelling story can outrun substance, and that moral theater can move votes faster than evidence. From campus protests to national media campaigns, the tactic has been the same. Control the narrative, flood the field with emotion, and force opponents to argue inside a frame that is already rigged against them.

This strategy flourished in an age where digital attention is currency. Outrage became a business model. Algorithms learned to reward anger and anxiety. Entire movements adjusted their language and tactics to feed that appetite. The more intense the emotion, the more engagement it produced. The more engagement it produced, the more power it delivered.

None of this is accidental. It is the result of a deliberate decision to treat truth as flexible and feeling as supreme. Facts can be trimmed. Context can be cropped. So long as the narrative points in the approved direction, it is treated as close enough.

The Counterfeit Response

Now, in our frustration, many on the Right have begun to imitate the very tactics we once condemned. We circulate headlines we have not checked. We repeat stories we have not verified. We share videos that are edited to mislead, then defend them as “symbolic” or “close enough.” Some excuse it as “information warfare,” as if deception becomes acceptable when aimed at the correct target.

I understand the temptation. When institutions tilt one way, when the press filters every word, it can feel as if there is no other way to be heard. But when we choose deceit, even out of anger or exasperation, we lose something far greater than an argument. We lose the standard that once set us apart.

A movement that trades truth for virality is not clever. It is surrendering its most powerful asset. Our strength was never in tricking people. It was in earning their trust. If we abandon that, we become just another source of noise in a culture already drowning in it.

The Cost of Losing the Standard

In uniform, I learned that standards are not suggestions. They are the rails that keep a unit on the track when the world comes apart. You can fight through confusion, fatigue, and loss. You cannot fight through a collapse of integrity. When leaders begin to cut corners, the mission is already compromised.

Public life is no different. A republic cannot function without some shared respect for truth. Citizens do not need to agree on every conclusion, but they must be able to trust that the facts being presented are not willfully falsified. When leaders on any side treat truth as optional, they signal that results matter more than honesty. Followers notice. Once that lesson sinks in, trust does not simply decline. It disappears.

Trust is the force multiplier of leadership. It cannot be commanded, and it cannot be faked for long. It is earned slowly and lost quickly. When we allow ourselves to repeat what we know may not be true, or choose not to ask, we spend down that trust like cash. Eventually the account runs dry.

Why Truth Matters

Truth is not only a moral principle. It is the architecture of liberty itself. The founders understood this with a clarity that should still sober us. John Adams wrote that liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. James Madison warned that a popular government without popular information is a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

When truth becomes relative, freedom becomes fragile. People who cannot tell fact from fiction eventually stop believing in anything at all. In that vacuum, control rushes in. Those who own the platforms and the microphones begin to define reality by repetition. Conviction is replaced by fatigue. Citizens withdraw from public life, convinced that everyone is lying anyway.

At that point, the ground is ready for whatever story is shouted the loudest. The decline of truth is not an academic concern. It is a civic crisis and a spiritual one. A society that loses its appetite for honesty will eventually trade its birthright for convenience.

The Habit of Truth

Truth is not a reflex. It is a habit. It requires the simple discipline of asking whether something is accurate before asking whether it is useful. It means reading past the headline, questioning the source, and refusing to share what merely feels right. That is not weakness. It is moral strength.

C. S. Lewis warned that the man who surrenders to emotion in pursuit of a noble end is no longer noble. He becomes a tool of the very forces he set out to resist. The same is true of nations. If we abandon truth in the name of winning, we will win nothing worth having.

The habit of truth begins in small choices. It is the decision not to forward the unverified story. It is the humility to admit, “I got that one wrong.” It is the willingness to correct, even when the false version was more satisfying.

Reclaiming the Standard

If we want to lead again, we must reclaim the standard we are in danger of losing. That means choosing credibility over clicks and clarity over convenience. It means accepting that there will be times when the other side seems to gain ground by manufacturing outrage while we move more slowly by insisting on accuracy. That is not failure. That is faithfulness.

The Right cannot out-lie the Left, and it should not try. Our strength was never in mastering propaganda. It was in appealing to conscience, to common sense, and to the grounded instincts of people who still believe that character matters. If we return to that, we can offer something the culture no longer expects to see, leaders who tell the truth even when it hurts their own side.

The Enduring Lesson

In 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn urged his countrymen to “live not by lies.” He did not write those words as a political slogan, but as a command for survival. He understood that every lie told, and every lie tolerated, builds the walls of our own captivity.

We are standing in that same moral moment now. The world is watching to see whether truth still has defenders who will guard it even when it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or unpopular.

If we cannot tell the truth, we will be ruled by those who can invent it faster.