A Sea of Lies

Lying liars who lie … and are good at it

Too long ago, while watching a national network news broadcast, I experienced a jarring red pill moment.  I witnessed a U. S. Senator, I recall it was that Liar, I mean, Lion of the Senate Ted Kennedy, tell what he had to have known was an outright big lie on the Senate floor.

You may laugh that I was red-pilled and shaken by the moment, and I would not blame you.  Ted Kennedy lying was hardly earth-shaking.  But I was so naive as to think in terms as Tucker Carlsen once thought as he mentioned in his now famous Heritage Foundation speech, that politicos generally have the same laudable aims but honestly differ in how to reach them.  So they argue and politic and “may the best position paper win.”

But in that red-pill moment I began to see that is not the situation.  The aims are not the same as Tucker also said.  The situation is more good vs. evil, lies vs. truth.  And it has become more so today.

Some may think

Rod Dreher

hyperbolic in both the title and the content of Live Not By Lies, but he goes to the heart of where we are at as a society today. Like the old Soviet Union, we have a regime in power who will lie about anything and everything to further their power. And that regime controls not only the federal and blue state governments, but also big business and big education. So we are forced to chose as a society, as churches, and as individuals: will we go along with the lies or will we live by the truth even if it costs us dearly?

What red-pilled me was a blatant lie.  But lies can be sneaky instead.  Satan, the father of lies, usually does not come up to us dressed in a fancy red suit and say with a cheerful smile, “Good morning!  I am going to lie to you today.  It’s what I do!  Enjoy my lies and your day, good sir!”  No, he is the deceiver; he dresses up his lies as truth and can be rather clever about it.

To illustrate, let’s say you have a son who is a typical boy.  No I don’t think your son is of the Devil, although some kids do make me wonder.  Anyway, you come home and notice the cookie jar is suddenly empty.  You go to your son watching TV and notice cookie crumbs on his shirt and on the couch.  So you ask him, “Did you eat the rest of the cookies?”

If he is neither very honest nor very creative, he might just say, “No.”  For purposes of this post, we’ll call this uncreative method the straight up lie.  These can be effective if told well and often, however.  Hence the term “gaslighting.”

But if he is more creative and perhaps more evil, he may say, “No. My little sister ate them.”  Never mind that the little sister is very little indeed and can hardly walk, much less climb up unto a kitchen counter to filch cookies.  Now your larcenous lying son is acknowledging there is a problem: cookies are missing.  But he deflects the blame to someone who is not the culprit.  We shall call this method the blame lie.

A memory of my telling a blame lie when I was very young prompts a brief aside. One can get so caught up in lying that one believes one’s own lies.  In a strange way, I actually believed my babysitter drew on the couch and not me.  Aren’t little children wonderful?  I was such a good boy.

But it your son is subtle, he might instead protest, “I’m just sitting here watching Spongebob.”  In a way that is the most interesting lie, because what he says is not an outright lie; it is true.  He is sitting there watching Spongebob.  But it is still in the family of lies.  It is a half-truth, and so shall we call this method.  He tells only part of the truth and omits the more important parts to deceive and deflect.

Two episodes of lying prompt this reflection.  First is the Durham Report blowing out of the water the Russiagate hoax perpetrated against Donald Trump and against the American people.  Much could be said about the report, it is so damning to the FBI and to so many bad actors in so many ways.  But for now, I bring attention to the Washington Post and New York Times pushing this big lie, a variety of the straight up lie.

One may protest that the Post and the Times thought their reporting was true, so it wasn’t a lie.  But they had any number of reasons to know their reporting was wrong long before the Durham Report came out.  Really they should have smelled Hillary and friends before they even published.  Also they now continue the big lie by not confessing and apologizing for it, at least not that I have noticed. (There is at least one commendable exception, Jeff Gerth.)

The Pulitzer Prize board also continues their complicity in this big lie by awarding it with the Pulitzer Prize and not rescinding that.  This is not unlike the Pulitzer Prize being awarded to Walter Duranty for his big lies covering up genocide by Stalin’s Soviet Union.  That award, too, has never been rescinded.

Hmmm, the 1619 Project also got a Pulitzer Prize.  Hey, tell lies big enough and well enough and you might get one, too!

The second episode is much smaller but illustrative of more subtle methods of lying.  It was a post by Jemar Tisby on Jordan Neely.  I wrote on this for Stand Firm.  Tisby portrays Neely as a “houseless” victim while conveniently leaving out that Neely was shouting chilling threats to those in the subway car, that he was notorious as a danger on the subways, had been arrested 44 times, had punched a 67 year women in the face, fracturing bones, and had been charged numerous times for other assaults.  He also did not mention that others on the subway car assisted Penny in subduing Neely and thanked him for intervening.

Tisby’s is a half-truth.  What Tisby wrote is literally true, but leaves out important context and facts.  So it deceives.  As I noted, this is not a bug but a feature with Tisby.  Half-truths are an important part of how he operates.

The same could be said about the woke grift industry in general.  Their propaganda on Neely is similar, that he was a poor hungry homeless Black man killed by a White man.  Never mind a Black gentleman assisted Penny.  Never mind that Neely had a long record as a violent menace and was menacing again.  Those facts do not fit the woke narrative so the woke omit them.

The woke use the half-truth method frequently.  It could be said the whole woke narrative is a big half-truth.  To give another important example, I don’t know how many times I have heard the woke about “Mike Brown’s death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson,” as Tisby put it in his How to Fight Racism, without bothering to mention that Brown attacked the officer and was reaching for his gun.

This half-truth method is really pernicious because it is true Mike Brown was gunned down by a White police officer.  It is true Neely died during or after a chokehold from Daniel Penny.  And no one wants people being gunned down in the street or dying on the subway.  But too many don’t want to be bothered with looking into inconvenient facts, so they believe the half-truths and want “justice” based on that.  Of course, justice based on half-truths is grievous injustice . . . which is exactly what we are getting in American cities largely due to the success of woke half-truth.

The woke also engage in blame lies.  They do so practically by definition.  They redefine “racism” as different results between ethnicities.  Let’s say a majority black area has few retail services.  That is because of “racism” and “white supremacy” by woke definitions.  Never mind that the real reason is that shoplifting and outright looting is such a problem in many urban neighborhoods that stores cannot not make money there, much less keep their employees safe, so they close.  Actual racism has nothing to do with it. And some of the stores closing actually have rather woke corporate overlords. Democrat Soros DAs, supported by the woke, who will not prosecute theft and other crimes do have a lot to do with it. Woke rhetoric that makes people feel entitled to “reparations” may have something to do with it also. And when the occasional riot trashes a store, why should they bother to return?  So it’s not racism; it’s Democrat enabled crime.

There are straight up lies from the woke as well.  I’m old enough to remember “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” I have not heard this lie recently but it took forever to go away even after it was debunked by Obama’s Justice Department.  That not before it did great damage.  Big lies can do that.

I write all this not just to point my finger.  We have to understand woke lies and fake news lies and the methods behind these and other lies lest we be led far astray by them.  Many of the woke are otherwise decent people who genuinely want justice, but believe the lies.  Others still for some reason rely on mainstream fake news and also believe the lies.

We cannot conduct ourselves wisely guided by truth, we cannot “live not by lies” unless we know the difference between lies and truth.  But thanks to the woke grifters, fake news, and the social media industry that enables them, knowing the difference is easier said than done, is it not?  It is hard to grasp and hold on to truth in a sea of lies.

Well, knowing the difference between truth and lies is worth doing the work, to steal a woke phrase. Someone said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Knowing the truth and living by it may be costly but it is worth it.

But I will have to leave that subject for another day.