Big Lies, Here and There

 A political big lie is first a lie told for political gain and second big -  a statement  that if true would have important consequences and implications for a society.  It is usually also big in another way -  that of  being  frequently and consistently repeated and claimed as fact by influential advocates and supporters of those telling it.  Big lies may be completely unconnected to anything in reality or have a superficial and irrelevant connection to something true which may make them seem more believable.  

The most recent political big lie is from the Republicans - Trump’s claim that he won the election in a landslide, but the Democrats stole it from him by changing millions of votes in voting machines, dumping hundreds of thousands of fake ballots in close states, counting hundreds of thousands of votes from dead people, illegal aliens, and  non-residents, and other forms of cheating.  He has been saying  it since the election without presenting any evidence to back it up. He has been joined by some Republican politicians and a high percentage of talk radio people and others in the conservative media. They have not given people any evidence either. It is true that Democrats like to cheat some in elections. It is a tradition with them. Robert Ingersoll was warning about it not too long after the Civil War.  That says nothing about whether they did  cheat  or even could have cheated in the ways Trump has claimed and is no excuse for someone falling for Trump’s lie.  People are right to see Trump’s behavior and that of his supporters in media and politics as outrageous, dangerous, and harmful to the country. According to polls millions of people who voted for Trump believe it and thus have been led to conclude at least for a while that the country’s politics are rigged and its government is illegitimate. Thousands of people who believed it wasted their time and money coming to Washington on January 6^th to demonstrate their belief, and a couple of hundred or so of them rioted and attacked the Capitol.

However Trump and company are not alone in their demagoguery. Democrats have  their own big lies.  One  is the  apocalyptic take on climate change – the claim that unless Democrats are given vast new powers over people’s lives, civilization and perhaps even human life will be destroyed by global warming in three, five,  or ten years. It is preached continually by  leftists, Democrats, and their public relations people in  the traditional media. There is no evidence for it, and the dates from past similar prophecies of climatic doom have passed unnoticed.  It is true that the general climate has gotten warmer over recent decades. It is also true that human produced carbon dioxide in the air contributes to that. That  does nothing to validate self-serving scare stories about the coming end of the world. This lie is outrageous, dangerous, and harmful to the country. Millions of people are said to believe it, and many of them are going through life worried and fearful, some  enough to be willing to accept any orders they might be given to save the planet and to demand that their neighbors do the same.

Another notable big lie of the Democrats is the claim that America is plagued by systematic anti-black racism. Even if one accepts that they do not mean racism in the literals sense of a belief that members of some racial groups are inherently superior or inferior to others solely because of their membership in the group,  but only racial bigotry or prejudice, it is still a lie, and those saying it have no evidence for it.  (Some of them  have more or less admitted this by resorting to  the easily refuted assertion that any statistical difference in anything between racial groups is evidence for racism.) The systems of government, colleges and universities, the traditional media, and large corporations are slanted in favor of black people through affirmative action quotas and set asides, lower admission standards, “diversity” training and  indoctrination, and a tendency to view and report things from the viewpoint of political correctness. Yet Democrats, leftists, and their friends in the traditional media make the claim  of systematic racism continually. It is true that there are plenty of anti-black bigots out there, and that some of them are cops who do bad things. It is surely true that the days of Jim Crow were an inexcusable national disgrace. That does nothing to validate assertions  of present day systematic racism.  The lie is outrageous, dangerous, and harmful to the country.  It increases hostility between racial groups, tells black people they cannot succeed in the world without being lifted by the benevolent hand of Democrat politicians, and tells white people they are worthless bigots, whether they know it or not, in an attempt to make them easier to rule.

A willingness by large numbers of people to accept big lies is a bad thing for a society, apart from the damage done by any particular big lie.   On the record of the success of the lies mentioned above, there is plenty of that willingness in the country these days.