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The normalisation of big lies in U.S. politics

Fake News, political spin and slanted reporting have entered new territory the last four years, in what can only be called bald-faced lies. Wilful lying to the American public has become acceptable to politicians and the aligned mainstream media. Outrage should be our reaction. We know that democracy fails when the media ignore political lies. When the media accept lies as truth, and perpetuate the lies, we find ourselves in George Orwell's 1984.

Lying is not new to U.S. politics, of course. What is new is how brazen politicians and the media have become in their dishonesty. They have been joined by corporate America. Even worse, Big Tech and the media routinely censor those offering basic facts counter to the politically (but not factually) correct narrative.

Let's be clear about this. In accusing the oligarchs — progressive politicians, "woke" activists, media shills and corporate allies — of lying, we are not talking about "another perspective" or new facts in a debate. We are accusing those in political and cultural power of outright mendacity.

The hypocrisy of the left is a given, as when the New York Times persistently declared before the 2020 presidential election that absentee voting creates opportunities for fraud, then ridiculed the claims of cheating after the election. Progressive politicians and media apparatchiks refuse to be embarrassed in the face of these whoppers.

Representative government can function only when our political leaders and the press are held accountable. Those of us who believe in accountability and transparency as necessary to a republic need to make sure that we have the facts.

Next, we need to understand the extent of the big lies that have been perpetuated by the left and its allies. Incessant lies started with the "Russia collusion" hoax in 2016, which was part of an overt strategy to undermine the Trump presidency. The phenomenon appears to have grown even worse since Trump left office. Space does not permit a list of all the big lies. Herewith we remind our readers of a few.

In March, Republicans in Georgia enacted a set of election law changes designed to improve ballot security following the scandalously loose voting procedures used in 2020 under cover of the Covid-19 pandemic. Immediately the legislation became a target of hysterical attacks.

Georgia voting reform and the big lie
President Joe Biden called the law "sick" and went so far as to brand it "Jim Crow on steroids". Biden's claim that the legislation forced polls to close at 5 p.m. was so inaccurate that the Washington Post's fact-checker gave Biden "Four Pinocchios" for falsehood. Biden made that claim at least three times, and further asserted wrongly that people waiting to vote would not be allowed to get water to drink while standing in line.

The damage was done. The National Baseball League swiftly announced it was moving its All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver to protest what it called "voter suppression". Biden supported this decision. Dozens of other Atlanta-based corporations, including Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, joined in denouncing the ballot security law.

Although many media organisations, like sheep, characterised the Georgia law as voter suppression, the Election Integrity Act of 2021 actually made it easier to vote and harder to cheat.

Whatever the weaknesses of the law from a conservative perspective, the act allows polls to stay open past 5 p.m., requires round-the-clock surveillance of ballot dropboxes, and mandates that ballots be printed on security paper. Absentee ballot dropboxes must be secured inside of buildings and are to be opened only during voting hours. Dropboxes are limited, and a team of at least two people must be involved in ballot transfers and must document them. Most importantly, the law grants the secretary of state the power to inspect absentee ballot envelopes.

The law did much more, but accusations continued to fly that it was racist. Why did President Biden and his allies want to describe the act this way and how did they get away with such a gross mischaracterisation?

The answer to the first question is simple. Progressives want to undermine states undertaking measures to protect vote integrity. They want to usurp the constitutional power of state legislatures to regulate elections. To ensure that ballot security measures are overturned by the Supreme Court, they want to "pack" the Court itself by adding extra justices. Progressives are pushing national legislation (H.R. 1) to have federal oversight over state election rules in every federal election. Any attempts to require voter identity verification are denounced as racist. Any attempt to limit registration before election day is vilified as voter suppression.

The answer to the second question — why progressives believe they can get away with such shameless lies about the Georgia voter integrity law — needs to begin with the simple truth: With the active collusion of the media, progressives have been getting away with lies for a long time, and they feel encouraged to continue.

Infrastructure and the big lie
Biden's mischaracterisation of his proposal to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure through a massive $2.25 trillion measure is a case in point. The American Jobs Plan calls for pumping money into manufacturing, transportation, renewable energy, combating climate change, expanding health care, providing universal kindergarten, extending the child tax credit and offering paid family leave. Only 37 per cent of the funds appropriated would go to what most people would consider infrastructure, and less than 6 per cent for roads and bridges.

That Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are trying to sell this mammoth spending bill as "infrastructure" constitutes a blatant attempt to deceive the American people. For example, the bill provides $300 billion to boost American technological manufacturing and $50 billion for the National Science Foundation to create a technology directorate. Another $50 billion is designated for the Department of Commerce to monitor industrial capacity and fund investments in critical goods production.

The plan proposes replacing 50,000 diesel transit vehicles with electric vehicles, including 20 per cent of all school buses. State and city governments are eligible for grants to install electric-vehicle chargers. The bill calls for building new public schools with better ventilation systems. Community colleges will be given $12 billion through the states to improve their buildings. Another $100 billion will bring high-speed broadband internet to all Americans; $123 billion will be invested to build more than 2 million affordable homes; an eye-popping $400 billion for long-term caregiving for the elderly and disabled will be given through Medicaid grants; federal buildings will be made environmentally sound.

The Biden administration and fellow progressives have stood by their claims that the Biden plan is all infrastructure. The White House issued a retort, "How many of you know when you send your child to school the fountain they're drinking out of is not fed by lead pipe?" The concept of child care as infrastructure was promoted by Congresswoman Katherine Clark (D-MA), who introduced the Child Care Is Infrastructure Act in March.

Even CNN concluded that the Biden administration officials were "inaccurately" selling the "infrastructure program". Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese were caught stating that the infrastructure program would create 19 million new jobs. Yet Moody's Analytics, a Wall Street research firm, predicted that the infrastructure bill, if passed, would create only 2.7 million more jobs, and with or without the program, the American economy was expected to create 19 million jobs. Both men had to admit on television that they were misleading in their use of figures.

Evidently the Biden administration decided that lies about the "infrastructure bill" are justified in order to expand the regulatory and welfare state and to effectively pass the Green New Deal, which presidential candidate Biden declared he did not support. As of this writing it remains to be seen what will happen to this deceptively promoted mega-spending bill in Congress.

Immigration lies
Biden's most flagrant deception has come in the midst of a border crisis, which he put into motion during the presidential campaign when he called for dramatically changing Trump's immigration policies. Biden unleashed a wave of illegal immigrants flowing into the country. In March alone an estimated 175,000 illegal immigrants crossed the border. The influx has overwhelmed the U.S. Border Patrol and alarmed border states.

Biden and Harris campaigned on a platform of relaxing border security as well as supporting health care benefits for illegal immigrants. He promised to find a pathway for millions of illegal immigrants to be offered amnesty. Once in office he repealed through executive order Trump's Migrant Protection Protocols, which required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their court dates. He also announced that no unaccompanied minors would be turned back at the Mexican border. By March the Customs and Border Protection had 18,000 migrant children in custody, warehoused in detention centres. Federal agents charged with protecting the border were turned into babysitters in chaotic conditions.

The Biden administration responded to what clearly was a crisis by calling the border problem a "challenge". Biden's Homeland Security chief went so far as to claim that the border was "secure". To assure everyone that he was in charge, he assigned Vice President Harris to address the problem. She has so far declined to visit the border. This is the woman who as senator voted against funding for border security, comparing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan and calling President Trump's efforts to secure the border "a distraction from real issues".

At his first press conference in late March, Biden stuck with his story that any problems on the border were created by President Trump and the flood of migrants was just a seasonal problem. Taking it a step further, he echoed the charge made by his Homeland Security secretary that Trump had dumped children into the Mexican desert without water. He went on to say that Trump had allowed children to starve to death. These allegations had no basis in fact.

A preposterous blame game
Perhaps Biden was confused. Maybe he was just winging it. But he knows full well that President Trump had gotten control of the border problem prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden blamed Trump for reducing shelters for migrants, thereby creating the problem of overcrowding today. The fact is that Trump closed the surge facilities established during a crisis in 2018-19, because the border was relatively under control. Finally, Biden told the press, and he has repeated this line, that he was telling migrants to stay home.

Once again, we must ask why Biden willfully distorts the truth. Is it just a reflexive reaction to Trump — a belief that every policy the previous administration implemented, from the border to relations in the Middle East, has to be overturned by Biden? Maybe, but a likelier explanation is that Biden's party understands that Democrats have their own demographic problem within the electorate. They cannot count on another Covid-19-type election. Therefore, they want to change the voting rules within the states and open the borders to a flood of illegals who eventually will be allowed to vote.

What about 'unity'? Was it a lie?
Biden's policies are not creating national unity, even though he continued in his first months in office to enjoy high favorability ratings in the polls. During the presidential campaign, Biden decried incumbent President Trump as divisive.

He soothingly proclaimed that he and his team were committed to bringing unity to the country. He declared he was running not as a Democrat, but as an American, representing the nation. Over and over he repeated, "We choose unity over division." He told reporters that now in office he was trying to "eliminate the vitriol", "trying to reflect what the majority of the American people — Democrat, Republican, independent — think" and trying to "stay away from the ad hominem attacks on one another".

Did Biden believe his rhetoric about "unity"? Doubtful, given that his campaign team prepared close to 100 executive orders that were certainly not designed to bring unity to the nation.

One of his first actions was to end Trump's ban on transgender soldiers serving in the military. This was followed by an executive order effectively forcing schools receiving federal funds to allow transgender athletes on female sports teams. (See Mindszenty Report, March 2021 for details.) This is the same Biden who denounced Georgia Republicans as racists on steroids and described Trump as the president who left children and young families in the desert to die of thirst and starvation. This is the president who vowed that his presidency would "root out systemic racism in this country".

The big lie of 'systemic' racism
One of the biggest lies of the last year is "systemic racism". Politicians and radical groups such as Black Lives Matter have been stoking racial grievance and anti-police sentiment in the U.S. since the Obama administration. Murderous riots ensued after false or misleading media depictions of a number of deaths of black men while resisting police, most notably after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. Yet "systemic racism" in American law enforcement is unsupported by statistical evidence. (See, e.g., Mindszenty Report, July 2020.) Nor is there any evidence of systemic racism in employment, notwithstanding the ever-louder clamours for more affirmativeaction hiring.

Media reports minimised the extensive violence, looting and property damage of the anti-police riots in the last year, and few rioters faced serious consequences for their behaviour. In contrast, the mini-riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was falsely portrayed as an "armed insurrection" instigated by President Trump. In fact, Trump specifically encouraged a peaceful and patriotic protest; none of the protestors was found with a firearm; and the only violent death in the protest was that of an unarmed female veteran shot by a Capitol policeman.

It took three and a half months to definitely rebut the big lie that a Capitol policeman was murdered by pro- Trump protestors. Unlike most rioters protesting against "systemic racism", many Capitol protestors are facing severe consequences including denial of bail before trial.

The original Big Lie of the last five years, the Russia collusion hoax, began during the 2016 presidential campaign with the connivance of the Hillary Clinton campaign. High officials within the Obama administration, including the FBI, CIA and Justice Department, were involved in sustaining this hoax and propagating it to the press. Trump's presidency was handicapped from the outset by these fake charges. Even after a special prosecutor appointed by Trump's Department of Justice issued a report stating categorically there was no evidence that Trump was a Russian agent or was being blackmailed by the Russians, congressional Democrats used the hoax to impeach President Trump.

The media went along with the story, providing a platform for hucksters to promote wild claims, including that classified evidence they had seen confirmed that Trump had been compromised by Russian intelligence. Having gotten away with telling the big lie, the press and Trump's partisan critics felt free to continue to deceive. Even when Trump released classified material concerning the Russia hoax that showed high officials in the Obama administration saying one thing under oath, and the opposite in public, the press ignored the story.

To top it off, shortly before the presidential election the mainstream media, Facebook and Twitter actively suppressed reporting on evidence of Biden family corruption revealed by Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop computer, in many cases calling the evidence "Russian disinformation". The then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has flatly denied that the laptop was Russian disinformation.

Maybe the problem is an apathetic public, or a 24-hour news cycle and social media in which stories are quickly pushed out by something new. Whatever the cause, politicians and media find it easier to lie than ever before. This is not only morally wrong, it is unhealthy for a democracy. It has reinforced deep cynicism with large numbers of voters. Many Americans no longer trust the press or politicians. Those using deception and lies encourage such cynicism.

What can be done in response? Dig out the facts; create or support new media and social platforms to reveal the truth; and pray for our nation. Now more than ever.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article, complete with references and footnotes, is available from the foundation's website: www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

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