There’s an old joke, the butt of which changes depending on the time and its personalities. But it could be rendered like this: “How do you know when leftists are lying?”
Answer: “Their lips will be moving.”
(Unless they’re ventriloquists, I suppose, and have a puppet not named Joe Biden.)
This seems to be the message, too, that the New York Post editorial board delivered in a Sunday article. As the title unabashedly states, “The left’s lies just keep growing — even as each of them gets debunked.”
The Post opens with a recent example of left-wing prevarication, writing:
Anti-Trump leftists can’t stop spreading disinformation in a desperate bid to make their skewed worldview make sense.
In Chicago last week, local Democratic leaders stoked panic over claims that ICE agents had shown up at a local elementary school.
Chicago Public Schools Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova claimed school staff had “kept ICE agents outside of the school” and affirmed that “we will not coordinate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker piled on, blustering, “After a week of Republicans sowing fear and chaos, the first reports of raids in Chicago are at an elementary school.”
One problem: There were no ICE agents at the school. They were Secret Service agents, looking into a threat against a government official.
Turns out it was Pritzker and his Democratic cohorts “sowing fear and chaos.”
Leaning on the Lie
The irony here is that it is leftists, more than anyone else, who warn of mis- and disinformation’s perils. Yet this appears projection, as the Post’s numerous examples attest. One example is reminiscent, too, of how actual “racism” is so rare — among conservatives, that is — that the Left must fabricate “hate crimes” allegedly perpetrated by them. (Paging Jussie Smollett.) As the paper also reports:
To cast Trump supporters as racist, New York Magazine ran a story last week smearing a Trump inauguration celebration organized by GOP Youth Advisory Council co-chair C.J. Pearson, a black man, as “almost” entirely white — and was promptly called out for cropping several non-white attendees out of the cover photo.
Talk about erasing minorities’ lived experiences.
The Post also mentions the September takeover of multiple apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, by Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gangsters. (They were in our country, mind you, despite Biden administration claims that the border was secure — another lie.) And that these miscreants were present and imperiling the city is now absolutely confirmed. Yet according to The New York Times, the “paper of record,” it was a hoax. The outlet had, in fact, run the headline, “How the False Story of a Gang ‘Takeover’ in Colorado Reached Trump.”
The Post mentions as well pinko-slipped ex-CNN journalist Jim Acosta. He insisted that questioning Biden’s cognitive ability is akin to “birtherism” and that Trump didn’t win the 2024 popular vote. (Trump did, of course.) There’s also the revelation that Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) flat-out lied when he defiantly claimed on Saturday that he was housing an illegal alien above his garage. Apparently, he was just trying to out-value-signal fellow leftists such as Pritzker.
Dishonesty, Thy Name Is Leftist?
One could also mention older lies, such as Bill Clinton’s infamous claim, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” There are the destructive lies, such as those about “Hitler’s pope” or the Crusades. And there are the profoundly inane liars, such as the left-wing comedian who, after his tales of victimhood were exposed as fabrications, claimed they were “emotional truths.” But the list is endless. More interesting is why it is endless. And the Post posits a theory:
Leftists are, it writes, “proud of their disinfo.”
In fact, at issue is a very different mindset from that of the normal person. And understanding it requires that we avoid the common human phenomenon I mentioned earlier: projection.
That is to say, most of us will accept, at least in principle, that one must yield to Truth. This means that when a position is shown to conflict with Truth, we alter the position. Of course, rationalization can enter the equation and hinder this corrective process. Nonetheless, the principle itself is accepted.
But not with many on the Left — and especially not among its high-profile figures. Divorced from Truth and wallowing in relativism, they make everything relative to themselves. They deify their agenda and put it in the place of Truth. Then, when a position conflicts with the Truth, they simply rebrand the latter as a lie.
Activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. learned this the hard way years ago already when other liberals labeled his opinions “malinformation.” This is, he explained, “info that is true but inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear.”
A Long and Dark Tradition
This phenomenon is nothing new, either. Just consider what brilliant writer Gary Saul Morson pointed out in 2019 about the early-20th century’s most notorious leftists. “Bolshevik morality holds that whatever contributes to Bolshevik success is moral,” he stated in “Leninthink”; “whatever hinders it is immoral.”
Epitomizing this was Bolshevism’s main theorist, Vladimir Lenin. “Yes, we are contradicting what we said before,” Morson quoted him as telling a fellow traveler. “[A]nd when it is useful to reverse positions again, we will.”
It all reminds me of a liberal who, addressing Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and lies with me decades ago, said emphatically, “He did the right thing.” So, yes, they are proud of the lies — as long as they’re peddled effectively.
The idea is to play the game, outmaneuver your adversaries, to be a master of deception. It’s sort of like private eye Jim Rockford’s fast talking to extract information. It’s like the perfectly executed con in the film The Sting. It’s just so … so cool. It’s the “right” thing — that is, if you’re the wrong kind of person.
Call it the Zen of Prevarication, brought to you by the people of the lie.
