The concerted effort by the left to undermine the credibility of President Donald Trump by calling him a liar, a case of the pot calling the kettle black, is itself classic projection and grand scale deception. The concert warms up with back-to-back greatest hits in Time magazine’s, "Is Truth Dead," and the L.A. Times' "Why Trump Lies."
But does President Trump lie?
To answer this question, let’s consider three types of lies: the white lie, the political lie, and the ideological lie. Regarding the white lie, Trump is guilty as charged, as are many politicians and public figures. This involves exaggerations, embellishments, the type of tall tales that one might blather at a dinner party. This involves selective memory, unearned valor, a rewriting of history. Famous examples include Al Gore claiming to have invented the internet or Hillary Clinton claiming to have dodged bullets at Sarajevo. While Trump has been caught in these sorts of lies, and while this is embarrassing, these lies are mostly harmless. Who hasn’t exaggerated from time to time?
Trump has not yet engaged in any major political lie. Some of the great political lies of modern American history include Woodrow Wilson, while running for re-election on the slogan "he kept us out of war," had already secretly entered into an agreement with the British that would enter the United States into World War I after the election. Or Franklin D. Roosevelt doing essentially the same thing when he declared during a campaign speech in Boston, October 1940, "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."
President Barack Obama told a whopper when he crisscrossed the country selling Obamacare by declaring: "If you like your health care plan you can keep it." Chief Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber spilled the beans when he observed "the stupidity of the American voter…was really critical for the thing to pass." Hillary and Bill Clinton routinely lied over decades about their corruption, knowing that if they genuflected to the left, if they served as useful tools, they could depend on a compliant liberal establishment and their media. This appears to be the case now with revelations that indicate that former President Obama likely engaged in spying on Trump as well as world leaders.
Which brings me to the third type of lie, the ideological lie, a virtually exclusive purview of the left. This is not to say that conservative individuals or groups don’t ever lie to advance a political agenda as lying is done by all types of people for various motives. The difference is that conservative lying is isolated, the lie is not systemic or pervasive and act of lying is itself anathema to the ethos of conservatism.
Not so with the left.
For the left, lying is not only permitted but is encouraged and even revered if lying is done in the service of winning an argument or advancing the cause. Indeed, the practice of leftism, the dialectic, is the skillful ability of the practitioner to lie by seamlessly offering two opposite points of view. During discussion, you might observe the skillful leftist shape-shift with the speed of lightening. Most good leftists internalize this reflex early in their political education as this becomes a subconscious means of communication. The good leftist almost speaks their own language, one that is replete with code words and gestures and dog whistles. French scholar Alain Besancon referred to this form of communication as the language of totalitarianism.
The left will lie with informal censorship. While we all tend to censor the unwelcome news, and over-emphasize the good, the left takes this into the stratosphere of a fine art. Ann Coulter observed that if The New York Times were to cover the death of Hitler they might use the headline "Artist Dies." An example of this is underway now with CNN host Don Lemon telling his audience not to pay any attention to the scandal unfolding around Obama National Security chair Susan Rice and surveillance.
The left will also employ made-up conspiracies to change the subject, many of which they might actually believe as they fit into a narrative which is itself often a lie.
At the end of the day the left must lie because their entire belief system, the edifice of leftism, is itself constructed on a lie.
They want human beings and societies to surrender their freedom, their property, their families and ultimately their minds and identities to a utopian collectivist condition by which the entire planet becomes one massive ant colony. To build this structure, in order to change the world, they must lie because this construct is impossible and is nu-natural to human nature. They promise false things like world peace, an end to poverty, an end to human suffering if only people would sacrifice their freedom. To paraphrase Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: A wise man builds his house upon a rock, a foolish man builds his house upon the sand.
Chuck Morse is a radio host who broadcasts live Thursday's at 10 a.m. ET at WMFO-Tufts. Chuck hosts the podcast "Chuck Morse Speaks" on iTunes and Stitcher and his books are available on Amazon.com. For more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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