The Pill We Don’t Swallow: Reflections on the 8th Commandment & Last Tuesday’s Debate
The overt deceit in Tuesday night’s debate is a call to action for Catholics.
Nothing can justify recourse to disinformation for manipulating public opinion through the media...moral judgement must condemn political control of opinion through the media.
Catechism of the Catholic Church1
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Tuesday night’s debate recalled an absurd opening scene from the 1984 film, Ghostbusters, where Professor Venkman (Bill Murray) conducts an experiment on the correlation between psychic skills and electric shocks. Suposedly, when a subject incorrectly guesses an image on the back of a flashcard, he receives an electric shock, and when his guess is correct, nothing happens. But this “poor scientist” displays no adherence to his conceit. His male subject sometimes succeeds in correctly guessing images, yet Murray penalizes him with an electric shock regardless, every time. The bonny, blue-eyed, blond subject, on the other hand, never guesses correctly. Yet Murray cannot bring himself to shock her, and the scene ends with him asking her out on a date.
A similar dynamic played out in Tuesday night’s debate, where legacy media again displayed overt bias and subversion of the truth. Before a viewing audience of 67 million, debate moderators David Muir and Lindsey Davis “corrected” statements from Trump continuously, regardless of the statement’s veracity. When Trump asserts that the Democrat’s radical position on abortion permits killing babies after birth, for example, Davis responds by saying: “There is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it was born.” Davis’ correction, it turns out, is the lie. The CDC cites that between 2003 and 2014, a conservative estimate is that 143 infants were born alive after an abortion and allowed to die.2 The Minnesota Department of Health records 24 infant deaths between 2015 and 2022 from abortions that resulted in live births. Physicans took no steps to save these infants’ lives. And Governor Walz signed a bill in 2023 that made this legal.3
Yet these “poor moderators” could never bring themselves to correct Kamala, their doe-eyed darling, even as she piled on lie after inaccuracy after flagrant lie. She coupled Trump with Project 2025, a document he played no part in creating and an affiliation he’s denied many times. She said that under Trump’s presidency, women pregnant due to rape or incest would have to carry their children to term, after he had just said that he believed in permitting abortion for victims of rape and incest. She called Trump a dictator, said he wanted terminate the Constitution, and even touted the “fine people hoax”; asserting that Trump had called Nazis “fine people” in a press conference after the 2017 rally in Charlottesville; a lie that has been debunked by multiple media outlets and is easily debunked simply by reading the transcript from the press conference.4
In such a carefully prepared debate; wherein Kamala recited multiple well-rehearsed speeches and had beforehand hunkered down for several days in a Philadelphia hotel with David Plouffe, Karen Dunn, et. al for focused preparation; these lies weren’t mis-calculations. They were purposeful and planned. And they conveyed a communication between Kamala and the moderators: they were going to let her get away with anything.
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This deceit isn’t something Catholics roll over and take. This overt display to control politics by manipulating public opinion demands a response.
How does one condemn ABC’s manipulation on Tuesday night, and so live in obedience to the 8th Commandment?
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Catechism of the Catholic Church. Doubleday Publishers, April 1995 Article 2498 & 9.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/health_policy/mortality-records-mentioning-termination-of-pregnancy.htm
Press Conference Excerpt, posted at Politico (https://www.politico.eu/article/full-text-trumps-comments-on-white-supremacists-alt-left-in-charlottesville/)
TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.