Steubenville’s ignorance-is-bliss philosophy extends far beyond the borders of that town. Chauvinism and support for “our boys” all too often blind us to violent or even murderous acts and spur us to attack the courageous whistleblowers who tell us the truth we’d rather not hear.

High school football players rape drunk teenage girls all the time. Most of the time, they get away with it. Nobody wants to go up against popular boys who are part of a team so central to school spirit. Nobody wants to stand up for a girl who “should’ve known better” than to get drunk in the company of such red-blooded boys. And even if a lone courageous soul does try to challenge the rapists, their boys’ club will stand with them, making it the word of one person nobody wants to believe against that of a group that everyone wants to believe.

But blogger Alexandria Goddard is a courageous soul who used to live in Steubenville, and she got hold of incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing posted by the rapists and their friends on social media. When she went public with that information, which was also supplemented by a sickening video acquired by the hacking group Anonymous, the even more courageous rape survivor had the support she needed to face her rapists in court and see them found guilty.

Because of the negative attention they’ve drawn to the Steubenville Stars football organization, Ms. Goddard, Anonymous and even the rape survivor herself have been viscously attacked through social media by Steubenville loyalists. Many more people, including a CNN reporter, have publicly expressed sympathy for the “promising athletes” who raped the teen.

Rather than dealing with the problem of rampant male violence, Steubenville Stars fans attack the whistleblowers.

Sound familiar? Patriotism and supporting “our boys” are supposed to be good things, as American as apple pie (or as Canadian as maple syrup). But they have a remarkable capacity to freeze out whistleblowers who tell us the truth we’d rather not hear.

There are estimated to be nearly 20,000 rapes that occur within the US military every year of which only a small fraction is ever reported. Women who have the courage to report the treatment meted out to them by their “brothers in arms” face an uphill battle (as documented in the award-winning film Invisible War).

Bradley Manning, another brave whistleblower, has already spent years detained in conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture called cruel and inhuman. His crime? Exposing bloody massacres, torture, US government lies that have propped up unsavory regimes (which managed to stay in power through murder, rape and torture tacitly sanction by the United States), and the list goes on. His accusers call this “aiding the enemy.”

Many have called for Manning to be murdered, including the now disgraced Canadian Conservative Tom Flanagan.

Another bold whistleblower, Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin, defied the Canadian Conservative government to denounce Canada’s complicity in the torture of Afghan prisoners, most of whom were likely innocent. The response from authorities? Attack Mr. Colvin as a dupe of the Taliban and berate him for ruining the morale of a nation at war.

On this tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, a war based on lies that virtually all the major media failed to question and fueled by blind patriotism, a war that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and continues to claim thousands more, isn’t it time we stopped siding with the bullies and started listening to those few brave truth tellers? What we don’t know can hurt us.

David Bernans is a Québec-based writer and translator. He is the author of the mystery novel Collateral Murder. Follow him on twitter @dbernans.