Did the Press Lie to the American Public About Joe Biden? Or Just About Everything?  

Water is wet! French fries are greasy! Tiger sharks sometimes nibble on exhausted airmen’s toes when their planes are shot down over the sea!

The Wall Street Journal recently published an equally shocking report: It turns out (you might want to take a seat for this) that Joe Biden has been touch-and-go mentally for years.

Furthermore, Kamala Harris, Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and their friends in the media (so many friends) covered up the fact that the presidential library was missing a few volumes — and shouted down as partisan hacks anyone who refused to go along with that charade.

What? You knew all that?

Of course you did. The real scandal is that (unlike Watergate, to which some on the right are comparing this scandal) we are not even mildly surprised. The scandal is that there is no scandal because it’s so hard to differentiate between the lies the Left continuously tells and the Lie that the Left has become.

So we should “take heed, lest we fall.”

Popular Leftist Legends

Like the proverbial frog in water, we have gotten used to spin. Is anyone surprised when the FBI quails at calling an obvious terror incident “terrorism”? When people said Biden was “sharp as a tack,” we hardly expect anyone to shout, like King Tirian in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: “Ape, you lie. You lie damnably. You lie like a Calormene. You lie like an Ape.”

You can’t even call such fibs “the new normal.” Some have been with us for so long, such as:

Government handouts are “free.”
Love is love. (Not lust.) And also “free.”
Florida passed a “don’t say gay” bill.
The homosexual lifestyle is indeed “gay.”
Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Islam is a religion of peace: Christianity causes the problems.
Black Lives Matter engaged in “mostly peaceful protests,” but January 6 protestors killed people.
Men can become women. Women can become men.
Republicans are racist. Democrats merely judge people by the color of their skin when they apply to school or for a job.
Black parents need to have “the talk” with their children, because police are inherently racist and shoot black kids at the drop of a hat. (In fact, as I show here, medical professionals kill thousands of times as many innocent civilians as police.)
$38 trillion in national debt is not worth talking about. But look at those heartless Republicans trying to “shut the government down!” (Even if vital services would, in fact, continue through said shutdown.)

Growing to Gargantuan Proportions

Conservatives should learn two principles by gazing at the linguistic “swamp” into which our opponents have fallen and in which they are bumbling around.

The Pinocchio Principle.

In a Disney classic, a blue fairy explained to a little wooden boy: “You see, Pinocchio, a lie keeps growing and growing, until it’s plain as the nose on your face.”

When did the Democratic Party commit so deeply to falsehood, or to becoming a Lie rather than merely a teller of lies?

I sometimes trace this fall to the year 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court claimed that the U.S. Constitution renders it illegal for states to pass laws against abortion. That ruling became a political sacred cow, which like the cattle in an ancient Pharaoh’s dream ate up the harvest of truth. From the seed of this patent untruth sprang more weird ideas, including “abortion rights,” Bill Clinton and “bimbo eruptions,” “any collection of people under one roof is a family,” and “boys will be girls, and may change in the women’s locker room or be surgically altered at age 13 without their parents’ consent.”

The breakdown of the family, which stems in part from sexual frivolity, also leads to increased crime in vulnerable communities. After coupling, a young couple splits, and the girl is left raising their children alone. But children raised without a decent male in their lives are far more likely to abuse drugs, get pregnant, join gangs, and commit crimes. Yet Democrats cover up such consequences of the Sexual Revolution by denouncing “inequity” in policing.

A Pandora’s box of miseries are correlated with children raised by single mothers. Feminists may deny this all they like, but the Bible is right: for humans, family with biological parents of two sexes provides the best environment in which to raise children. When the Sexual Revolution broke up couples, children took it on the chin and then passed the dysfunction on to their own kids.

But many of our lies go back much further, and are not solely about sex. One can trace our cherished delusions to earlier liars like Albert Kinsey, Margaret Mead, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Marx, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — and ultimately to the snake in the Garden of Eden, who told Eve, “You will be as gods, knowing good from evil.”

Remaking the family was the act of demagogues with apples in their hands who thought they could do better than the Ten Commandments. Having embraced one lie (“free love”), the Left had to embrace more lies to cover up that original sin. I suspect this pattern of growing dishonesty even helps explain our national debt. If you de-prioritize children by killing the unborn and putting your passions first, why not send the survivors the bill for your spending? The lie grows and grows until it is plain as the nose on your face — or a $38 trillion deficit, which the Democratic Party still refuses to talk about and most Republican lawmakers scamper away from in terror.

The Pinocchio Principle is not confined to leftists.

Whether we’re talking about education, Donald Trump’s character, or relations with China, we are tempted to simplify, cherry-pick, and omit facts that complicate our story. Tell one lie, and then we must tell more to cover it up. It is more comforting to bury sin and try to spin our way out of trouble than confess it and be cleansed.

Three years of publicly lying about Joe Biden is a symptom of moral rot, not a cause. But while we call the Left out for dishonesty (as we must), let us “take heed, lest we fall.” I first mention lies of the Left not because there are no corresponding lies on the Right — even if “progressives” have progressed further into delusion — but because the sins of the other guy are always easier for me to spot and easier for us to hear. I will talk about some cherished right-wing delusions in subsequent articles.

David Marshall, an educator and writer, holds a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.

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