I’ve written a number of pieces here at Mind Matters News about private truth — a sort of emotional “truth” separated from facts, and actually hostile to them. In the last decade, people have been under increasing pressure to platform private truth and deplatform facts.

For example, Cancel Culture came for the evolutionary biologists recently when they insisted, in the teeth of much Woke theorizing about endless “genders”, that humans are — as a biological fact — sex-binary primate mammals. The culture made clear that fact is not permitted to triumph over feelings like that.

There has been some pushback against Wokism since then, of course, because facts are stubborn things…

Another private truth story I covered is from Canada. It concerns the claims, first launched in 2021, that many children were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools for Indigenous children across Canada. The story, never well sourced, nonetheless assumed the status of a truth that Must Not Be Questioned:

On May 27, 2021, Rosanne Casimir, the local leader of the main Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior, made a startling announcement: ground-penetrating radar had discovered 215 children buried at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The following day, the New York Times reported, “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” World media swiftly followed suit, and claims about the graves of more than 1300 missing children at former residential school sites suddenly popped up across Canada.

The stories grew more sensational. As veteran political reporter Terry Glavin noted in the National Post one year later, the public had been told of “Youngsters thrown into incinerators. The corpses of children thrown into lakes and rivers. Priests ‘decapitating’ children. Little girls conscripted to bury babies. Dead boys hanging by their necks in a barn.” The credulity of most media seemed boundless.

“Canada’s Residential Schools: A Saga of Journalistic Wrongdoing,” September 27, 2024

The government of Canada is believed to have spent over $216 million on fruitless searches for the graves. Canadian politicians have entertained the idea of making it a criminal offence to question the story. And no graves were ever found.

Now suddenly — perhaps this is the usual way with private truths — it has all stopped. On February 13, 2025, an Indigenous group that spearheaded the efforts reported that the government of Canada has stopped funding the fruitless search.

Meanwhile, in a world where many bad things did happen at residential schools, many thousands of Canadian students were instructed to believe in — and mourn and atone for — dreadful things that never happened.

That’s just a very small part of the damage that private truth — which is incompatible with an open and science-based society — does.