Lies: To Believe or Not to Believe
Back in the 1970s I believed the Watergate Narrative, that President Nixon was a monster for… Yes, what exactly was it he was supposed to have done? Organized the Watergate burglary? Lied about it? Lied about what he knew? Lied about his role in the coverup?
Newt Gingrich, a couple of weeks ago, taught us to believe that the Watergate affair should be understood as a coup. Francis Sempa agrees in “It’s Not Just Watergate: Much of Our Recent History is Misunderstood”:
Instead of being a morality play on the supposed sins of President Richard Nixon, Watergate at its essence was a liberal media-Democratic Party-bureaucratic putsch to remove a popular president from office—and it worked.
Hello COVID, 2020 election, and January 6.
We are all happy to be horrified at the lies told by the politicians in the Other Party. Thus our liberal friends went to enormous expense to tabulate and publicize Trump’s Lies. But they have completely lost interest in “fact-checking” when it comes to the Biden administration.
But I understand the reaction of our liberal friends to the rise of Trump. When you are the ruling class you get to feel that you are the good guys, and your ideas and your agenda are the right ones for America. See, everyone agrees! But ordinary people agree with the ruling class because they instinctively know what keeps them out of trouble.
After questioning the Watergate Narrative Sempa goes on to discuss a few other Approved Narratives, as in:
McCarthyism. Guess what, there were Communists in the US government. “Diana West in American Betrayal likewise shows that communist infiltration of our government was even greater than McCarthy alleged.”
FDR was woefully unprepared for World War II, and his “end-of-the-war diplomacy set the stage for the Cold War”.
Truman and MacArthur disagreed about strategy in Korea, but MacArthur didn’t challenge Truman and accepted his firing.
Democrats and Civil Rights. After opposing civil rights for most of his career, “President Lyndon Johnson [changed horses and] persuaded some of his fellow Democrats in Congress to support the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Neither law would have been passed without Republican support”.
And I am reading Kissinger’s Diplomacy in which he describes President Wilson’s Fourteen Points in World War I and delusional, and the Treaty of Versailles a staggering failure that set up World War II.
For me, I don’t care so much about the tawdry lies from day to day. I care more about the bigger lies, that are worse than lies: they misunderstand the nature of human society, as in:
Capitalism as exploitation. No, it has reduced hunger from 95% of humans to 5%.
Labor laws as benefiting workers. Not really. Employers bid for good workers and pay them well.
Government pensions. Ordinary people would be much better off if they saved for their own pensions with Fidelity and Vanguard.
Government healthcare is a mammoth exploitative monopoly. Period.
Government welfare is a form of slavery.
And so on.
But the world doesn’t change because the government exploits. It changes when the government runs out of other peoples’ money.