If you are allowed to say it in public, it probably isn’t true. You know this.
You know that all lives matter. You further know that men cannot get pregnant. And you definitely know that to say as much out loud could very well cost you your livelihood, your public voice, and endanger your home.
We live in a world where we are constantly obliged to lie – about everything, all the time.
How long do we want to go on like this? How long can we?
There is a magnificent, cosmic poetry to the fact that citizens of our empire of lies now go about with their mouths covered up.
In the realm of governance and policy, we have just witnessed perhaps the largest lie of recent history.
I did not vote in the US election, nor have I written or spoken a public word about it until now, but it is a lie of consequence.
As commentator Dan Bongino has been saying, “Epstein didn’t kill himself and Biden didn’t win.”
Population growth and demographic changes notwithstanding, Joe Biden did not get 15 million more votes than Barack Obama. Or are we to believe it was Joe who propped up the ticket in 2008 and 2012?
This is the OJ Simpson trial of elections. Everyone knows the truth, but will only admit it if it suits their purposes.
Perhaps you agree with the purpose, in this case. You may dislike Trump. People do, I am told. But on some level, the part of you that is still human must know the election is a lie.
On issue after issue across the cultural landscape, we are drawn into skirmishes and pitched battles between obvious truth and dehumanizing falsehood.
And what a depressing war this is turning out to be. Other generations had powerful, fearsome foes who, evil though they might have been, at least engendered respect.
My enemies are rich women who take pictures of the Amazon driver for not wearing a mask, post them online and say, “Let’s make him famous!”
And to be clear, they are my enemies. We are not on the same side, we do not want the same things, and we are not all in this together. If you do things like that, if you try cancel or shame people, or if you surround their home – whatever team you’re on, I’m on the other one.
The election larceny was qualified above as “perhaps” the largest lie of recent history because, as you well know, there is a spiky-headed virus about that plays by its own rules.
It cannot be stated often enough that we are dealing with an illness with a recovery rate above 99 percent, and for which several therapeutics and multiple vaccines are available.
In my native Canada, of more than 10,000 reported Covid deaths, just 175 occurred outside long-term care facilities. And these are the official figures, the belief in which requires one to set aside all the chicanery with deaths from other causes being lumped in and blamed on Covid.
And yet, despite fewer than 200 deaths outside an identifiable cohort in a country of 35 million, we lock life down. People say, “What else can we do?” as though we have not already done this.
Hordes of police descend upon business owners who try to open, even as actual criminals are released for fear of the plague. The authorities have a stronger response to disobedience than to danger.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his towering essay “Live Not By Lies” (dated February 12, 1974 – the very day the secret police broke down his door and shipped him into exile) asked, “What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us?”
The architect of Solzhenitsyn’s oppression, Vladimir Lenin, famously declared that “useful idiots” would bring his hellish dream to life.
We live in a time of useful idiots and useful lies.
So much of what people say now reads like an angry government brochure. It is joyless and banal, filled with admonitions and commands they have learned phonetically, but cannot possibly have thought through.
Profanity is sprinkled in, to make compliance seem edgy: “Just wear the damn mask” and “Stay the f--- home!”
People sneer at freedom as though it were a conspiracy theory. This contempt for our most precious God-given right is what makes it seem like war is imminent or underway.
To believe the official story on anything nowadays – from Covid-1984 to “President-Select” Biden to the elemental, obvious facts of daily life – one must be willfully blind.
Do you want to believe these things? Does this make existence more comfortable, and is that why you were brought into the world?
Let us hope not. You and I must therefore ask ourselves: Are we tired of lies yet?
Theo Caldwell just wanted to be left alone. Contact him at theo@theocaldwell.com
