There’s lies, damned lies and statistics, then there’s whatever you want to call what’s going on in the national election cycle.
Both sides of the aisle — a euphemism in and of itself for the divide betwixt and between the supposed conservatives and the vehemently liberal — are guilty of such things, but I find that particularly with the emergency backup candidate Kamala Harris, it’s not just lies, it’s a fantasy world of stolen accomplishments wrapped up in her speeches and statements made up of word salad/succotash.
If you look at the national media, you’ll only find stories making fun of Donald Trump’s claim of pets being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio; you’ll have to dig into social media or fun sites like Breitbart or NewsBusters to find stories on the Democrate candidate.
But they’re there if you look.
The amazing thing about the lies that are coming out of the Harris candidacy is that not only has she claimed successes of the Trump administration as hers, but that all the failures of the Harris/Biden administration are the fault of Trump.
My favorite is, of course, Harris’ insistence that she was never in charge of the border since she never was named border czar.
The national media was extremely quick to take up the torch, running with the press releases as opposed to actually doing solid research and reporting.
Several things to unpack here, most notably the use of language. When Harris’ writers are involved, they come up with moderately clever rationalizations for her abysmal showing on the border: since she wasn’t “formally” named border czar, she can’t be held responsible, and all of the video evidence to the contrary is just smoke and mirrors.
(If left to her own devices, she’s the living embodiment of “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them BS.”)
Not only are the media complicit in fostering the fantasy; the governments at every level are chipping in their efforts, either squeezing social media to squash stories that don’t toe the proper line, or trying to pass laws that limit speech, like banning “hate” speech or banning “deepfake” pieces that are critical of the powers that be.
Hillary Clinton has even advocated for criminal penalties to combat misinformation
The control of language has long been a tool of the power-hungry elite. So many phrases, like “repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth” speak to the age-old use of obfuscation to maintain power and control.
George Orwell, who’s kina enjoying a renaissance lately, described it like this in an essay, “Politics and the English Language”:
“The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”
That goes to show you that even more than 80 years ago people were finding that obfuscation was a pretty big weapon in the arsenal of the power-hungry.
The icing on this particular cake is that we’re all whinging about who said what in what way and fortifying the divisions between each other that the big picture has been forgotten.
The best answer to that is follow the moral of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Take the fruit, and let the chaff be still.
Tony Farkas is editor of the San Jacinto News-Times and the Trinity County News-Standard. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
