Liam Allan met a girl at a party three years ago. The two had a relationship that lasted just over a year. Allan went to Greenwich University and broke things off with the girl. A few weeks later, Allan got home from playing soccer, was arrested by police officers, and spent the next two years on bail. The girl he had dated had accused him of rape.

The nightmare finally ended in December last year, three days into his trial. The police had copies of over 40,000 text messages from Allan’s ex-girlfriend. These, they insisted were “very personal” and irrelevant to the case. But the new counsel for the prosecution spotted that something had gone very wrong and insisted that these text messages be handed over to Allan’s defense.

The texts contradicted the statements Allan’s accuser had made in court. One message said, “It wasn’t against my will or anything.” Allan was cleared and all charges were dropped. He came within a whisker of going to jail for about 12 years and being listed as a sex offender for life.

The judge warned that there had been “serious risks of miscarriages of justice” and called for an inquiry “at the very highest level” of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Allan’s case is not a one-off.

Several other cases collapsed under similar circumstances. In fact, this problem is so rampant that every rape case in the country is now under review. That’s thousands of cases.

How did this happen? In Allan’s case, the police say it was a genuine mistake. But the near-ruination of his life was spurred by a push to get more convictions for sexual assault—with little regard to the facts.

Alison Saunders became Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013. Her tenure has featured a devotion to ideological crusades. The Telegraph revealed this week that her time in office has not been extended. Protecting women from sexual violence is certainly a laudable goal. But, as the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson wrote, “once it became clear that it was difficult to increase rape convictions by fair means, more creative solutions seemed to come into play.”

“Increasingly, women were encouraged to see themselves as potential victims,” she continued. “Saunders advised those who ‘wake up in a man’s bed with no recollection of the night before’ to ‘seek advice from a rape counsellor.’”

As the award-winning BarristerBlogger reports, “For many years there has been remorseless pressure on the police and prosecutors to convict more rapists and sex criminals …. The College of Policing retains its notorious policy that investigators should ‘believe the victim’ and not ‘focus’ on investigating their credibility. It is almost as if an accusation is enough to assume guilt and a trial is a tiresome and somewhat archaic obstacle on the way to locking up the accused.”

“Allison, I’m sure if you spoke to any detective in this field, they will confirm it is now standard to conduct investigations on the presumption that all men accused of rape are guilty,” a custody sergeant wrote to Pearson. “It is very rare for those who make false allegations to be charged. The [Department of Public Prosecution] seems to have formulated some crazed, ultra-feminist belief that all men are rapists and that the goal should be to confirm this at all costs, not undertake a balanced and open-minded investigation. This is grossly unfair and undermines confidence in our justice system.”

The detective in charge of Allan’s case recommended that he not be brought to trial because the case was so weak. But it went to trial anyway.

The consequences go beyond lives blighted by false accusations of rape. As Pearson wrote, “Meanwhile, the crimes most people care about—burglaries, stabbings, shoplifting, public disorder—were booming. Home owners were told that they should not expect to have break-ins investigated, as the police were too busy …. At the weekend, it was confirmed that the unthinkable had come to pass: London now has a higher murder rate than New York.”

This is what happens when authorities put their ideologies ahead of evidence.

This plague goes far beyond the criminal justice system. Inconvenient evidence is suppressed in favor of an approved ideology in all walks of life. The case of Liam Allan is a symptom of this problem. But it’s also a clear example of the injustices that can happen when facts are ignored.

Take the rise of Islamic terror. Last week, Douglas Murray produced an excellent article for the Spectator on certain facts that are missing on reports of terror and crime. In France on March 23, a gunman took hostages at a supermarket. On the same day, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor was stabbed and burned. Few of the English-language news reports gave much detail on the background of the attackers. Why? As Murray wrote: “To do so would be to trespass upon the fiercest dogmas of our day.”

“In Germany, friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers,” he wrote. “When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess—correctly—that the culprit is probably of migrant background.”

Britain has a problem with gangs of a certain religious background attacking young girls. But if you say much more than that, you risk censure. Murray reported that some of his readers have had their Facebook accounts suspended because they shared an earlier piece by him on the subject.

Murray isn’t writing on a Russia-based, fake-news site. This is the website of one of Britain’s top, most-respected newsmagazines—and even sharing his Spectator article can get you banned from Facebook!

“For the time being, serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them,” he wrote.

Or take Israel. On Sunday, Hamas organized its “March of Return” on Gaza’s border with Israel. As Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry explained on his show on Monday, too much of the mainstream media omitted crucial details in their reports:

These are just the stories published in the last few days. I could go on and on. I’m sure most of you have examples that you could add to the list.

The Bible reveals that we live in an age where those in authority “cast down the truth to the ground” (Daniel 8:12). That’s the spirit of this age, clear in so many different situations and institutions. Media (old, new and social), governments and experts are increasingly ignoring facts and suppressing evidence.

Why is this a time when many fear facts? When a person can be banned from conversation on the world’s biggest online platforms for stating things that are undeniably true? When even the police and justice system are encouraged to prioritize agendas over evidence?

This is something we all need to be concerned about. On the individual level, overlooked evidence can send an innocent man to jail. What can it do to the society of a nation?

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains the answer in his free bookletAmerica Under Attack. This booklet—which we’d be more than happy to send you free—exposes the powerful movement that suppresses the truth.