If you’re wondering why lies can go on and on and on, apparently unchallenged, you can go no further than the death of cross-examination. It wasn’t suicide – this was murder with malice aforethought. Legal scholar John Henry Wigmore famously observed, "Cross-examination is the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth,” and he’s right. I wielded that weapon as a lawyer for nearly 30 years, slicing and dicing weak arguments, false claims, and utter nonsense. But its utility is not limited to the courtroom. Cross-examination should be part of all our debates, but it’s not, and that is no accident. Cross-examination makes it that much harder to lie, and when the only way you can win is through lies, you know what you have to do.
Look around at our "debates" today. They aren’t debates. They are a series of monologues where the speaker never has to defend what he is saying. Jon Stewart famously went off on CNN’s Crossfire a couple of decades ago, claiming it damaged America, but, as with most everything, he says, he had it completely wrong. Where you have two sides arguing, not just disclaiming, and pointing out holes in the other’s arguments, while defending the attacks on their own, you’ve got a chance of finding something like the truth. But what we have today everywhere isn’t the truth-seeking exercise. It’s a subjective truth explaining exercise. People talk a lot about critical thinking, but what they’re getting is neither critical nor thinking.
Now you see it happen occasionally. It still happens in courtrooms. A witness steps forward and gives his testimony. Then the attorney who called him sits down, and the other attorney comes in and starts asking his own questions. Those are designed to show the weaknesses in the testimony, the flaws, the gaps, the lies. And there are a lot of lies. My mom, Judge Schlichter, told me to remember, as she swore me into the California Bar – unlike Hillary, Michelle, and Kamala, I passed the bar exam my first time, and America’s hardest one – that, “everyone lies.”
And when everyone lies, it makes it that much more important to get to the truth. But you can’t get to the truth unless you can confront people with the holes in their argument. So much of today is designed to prevent that. Some of it’s an outright demand that you not confront them – how dare you not unconditionally and absolutely believe the “victims”? But, of course, a not insignificant percentage of alleged victims are, in fact, liars or otherwise charlatans. Look at the Epstein thing, if you can still stand paying attention to that ridiculous moral panic for another moment. Many of the alleged victims are just begging to be asked the question, “How old were you anyway when you first got with Epstein, and did he give you money?” And in many cases, an honest answer would be “18 or over” and “yes.” Well, there’s another word for someone like that, and it’s not “victim.”
But that would spoil the grift, so you must be told you can’t even ask that. You’re attacking the victims by testing the veracity of their story. And who would want to object to testing the veracity of someone’s story? Someone doesn’t care at all about the truth. And, of course, that describes the Epstein propaganda pimps to a tee. But enough about Thomas Massie.
Look at the media, including our own. A lot of it is monologue-based – you simply have your host and maybe some allied guests speaking unchallenged about whatever they’re talking about. You’ll know that most of the time, key participants actively avoid settings where they might be challenged. You rarely see a Democrat of significant stature doing a Fox News show. But we often see someone like JD Vance do the Sunday morning shows, and he – a lawyer – can challenge the assumptions of the host, which makes for legendary television.
But that’s the exception. Even when you have someone on the other side of a typical panel, remember this isn’t anything like an examination. They might get one hard question, and then it’s off to someone else. There’s no drilling down. There’s no confirmation of assumptions or checking of premises. It’s hit them and quit them. And that doesn’t help.
Next, look at Congress. The debates down on the floor don’t include cross-examination, nor are they designed to. But the examination of witnesses in committee hearings certainly is. Except you don’t get real cross-examination there. Instead, you get some Democrat from Massachusetts taking four and a half minutes of his time to pose a “question” that’s really a lengthy and convoluted accusation, and then when the witness attempts to answer, at least some part of it, a representative starts screaming at him. I wish I could say that most of the Republican congressmen are any better at it. You have some good ones like Brandon Gill and Ted Cruz and John Kennedy – notably, the last two were attorneys – but a lot of the guys in our party do the same thing with poorly focused questions, meandering soliloquies, and long tangents that destroy the impact of what should be short, sharp questions.
That’s really the key to cross-examination. You want to zero in and force answers the witness doesn’t want to give. You want to use leading questions that force them to come to conclusions that are openly ridiculous. For instance, if you’re examining somebody about their assertion that all trans men are women, or trans women are men, or whatever the hell they say, you definitely want to focus on questions like “Can a man become a woman?” You can tell they hate questions like that because they won’t answer them, and they get mad at you for asking them, calling it a distraction. I guess technically it is a distraction, a distraction from their nonsense.
The recent tsunami of nonsense about illegal aliens screams for a heaping helping of cross-examination. We all know how it goes. On day one, you get a new story about a loving father minding his own business on his way to church when he’s tackled and abused out of the blue by brutal Nazi ice agents. And then a couple of days later, you find out that he’s coming back from having robbed a liquor store, carrying a little sack with a dollar sign on it, and then he took a swing at a cop. The regime media, freed from the necessity of defending their assertions, is free to assert total nonsense.
My favorite example is that tater-gobbling clover jockey the regime media tried to make into a martyr because they thought that President Trump’s supporters would be horrified at the thought of a pasty white boy being deported back to Ireland. Of course, our response, even before we heard the rest of the story, was that he needed to gather up his Lucky Charms and whiskey and do a jig down the jetway to an Aer Lingus flight back to Dublin. The stories about this poor, probably drunk, soul were utterly heartwarming and begging for cross-examination.
Question One: So, what was the government’s reason for wanting to deport him? Well, the reason was that he overstayed his visa by 20 freaking years.
Question Two follows up on the implication that he’d been here so long that we shouldn’t pour him: Do you contend there’s some sort of squatter’s right to stay in America?
And then you follow up on that: How does this squatter’s right work? Could he have been deported on the 91st day after he overstayed his 90-day visa? How about a year later? How about five years later? When does this unspoken rule that you just invented take effect? Or are you really saying no one can ever be deported ever? And, by then, they’d be so tongue-tied that we would not need to get into the whole unpleasantness about his drug-dealing warrants and abandoned kids back on the Emerald Isle.
When you force someone to explain the implications of his argument, you can often show it’s completely ridiculous, as in the case of Seamus O’Verstay. Which is why the Left avoids it – they do everything they can to avoid answering the questions that their argument raises. All those freaks with whistles and cameras screaming about ICE arresting people – do they think that any illegal alien can be arrested and deported? Or is their argument that if you get here, you get to stay forever, and you probably get welfare, too, as well as your own personal "Learing Center"?
So, the Left makes it a point to never be challenged – we cons, of course, are constantly challenged, and that helps us out. We avoid problems like the one Kamala faced. Remember how she got tied into knots because she had explained to an audience, without challenge, that, of course, America should subsidize sex change operations for illegal aliens in jail. That’s objectively crazy, and if someone had challenged her on that issue at the time and said, “Wait, are you really saying that hard-working American taxpayers should give their money so Jose could be carved into Lupita while he’s sitting in detention after crossing the border illegally?” she might have recalibrated, or she might’ve come up with a better argument to support the concept. But when Trump raised the issue during the 2024 election, she had no idea how to deal with it. She was outraged that it was even brought up, especially since it was a crazy concept that normal people thought was insane. And it hurt her a lot, which is why she’s drinking oaky Franzia Chardonnay in a condo in Westwood and not pounding box wine in the Lincoln Bedroom today.
We don’t have cross-examination anymore because our opponents don’t want debate. They want to simply declare the truth and have us obey. Oh well. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate among ourselves. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t cross-examine ourselves. It does mean we should keep exploiting their weakness and fear of having to defend that in defensible arguments that make up their bizarre ideology.
Read Kurt Schlichter’s JUST RELEASED new bestseller in the Kelly Turnbull "People’s Republic" conservative action novel series, "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter.
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