OPINION:
This coming November, remember the incessant lies you’ve been told. Remember how you’ve been gaslighted.
Remember, you were told that President Biden was competent, healthy and sharp in mind and body and that those who pointed out the signs of dementia he showed were guilty of “cheap fakes.”
Remember, they said Mr. Biden was the last line of defense against an existential threat to democracy while he and his party were sidestepping the democratic process to install their real nominee without a single voter casting a single vote.
Remember, you were told the economy was the best it had ever been when the average price of groceries, rent, electricity and gasoline had increased by 20% to 50% under the current administration’s watch.
Remember, you were told the nation’s borders were secure while 10 million immigrants from Iraq, Iran, China, Syria, Gaza and Lord knows where else entered the United States illegally and then disappeared into communities across our country.
Remember the accusation that you were a xenophobe for noticing when one of these illegal intruders was charged with murder after an American woman who was out for a jog was sexually assaulted and killed.
Remember the lectures about how letting thousands of vagrants live in tent cities on the sidewalks of Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington was just and humane.
Remember how the police were the problem and that defunding them would make our cities cleaner, safer and crime-free.
Remember how you were told that the trespassing into the U.S. Capitol by a few hundred protesters on Jan. 6 was an insurrection, while the burning, pillaging, looting and utter destruction of neighborhoods nationwide by thousands of Black Lives Matter anarchists was a peaceful protest.
Remember how churches were shut down because they were a threat to community health, but these riots were not.
Remember how the racism of critical race theory was not racist and that the overt mediocrity of diversity, equity and inclusion would not compromise the quality of our workforce. Remember that hiring and firing based on expertise, competence and merit needed to stop because it was the product of White privilege.
Remember that you were told the summer of 2024 was the hottest in recorded history, even though it wasn’t. Remember that you were told masks work when they don’t, that ivermectin is a horse medicine and that an experimental injection is better than your natural immunity. Remember that women aren’t real, and men who dress as women are women.
Remember, you were guilted into believing that good parents should aid and abet cutting off their sons’ genitals and that the best mothers and fathers should affirm cutting off their young daughters’ breasts. Remember that windmills are better than natural gas and that electric cars apparently get their electricity from thin air.
The list could go on. Hunter’s laptop. Russian collusion. The Steele dossier. Hillary Clinton’s emails. Cocaine in the White House. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Iran nuclear deal. It’s all been a lie.
The German historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt once said: “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A person who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
Arendt added, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is [to create] a people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
She concluded that looking back at the rise of the Nazi regime and “the ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
This November, remember these words. Don’t take refuge in cynicism, and vote.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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