The tapestry of lies

In my novel Sephirot, the main character, an ordinary guy named Duncan Kyle, finds himself lost in an interlocking maze of worlds, each of which seems to be doing its best to trap him permanently.  The first character he meets, the enigmatic Sphinx, gives him a warning about what he's about to face.  "The first thing you should learn here," she says, "is that everything you see and hear is a lie."

Duncan quickly comes to the obvious question, which is if everything here is a lie, is the Sphinx's own statement a lie as well?

The Sphinx cocks a sardonic eyebrow and says, "Oh, of course not.  I wouldn't lie about something that important."

When later, he meets the gruff rogue Jack Holland, he's once again confronted with whether anything he's seeing is the truth.  "Do you believe it?" Holland asks him.  "All this?"

Duncan responds with a question.  How can he not believe what's right in front of him?

"Then you're choosing to believe a lie," Holland responds.  "You're more'n half gone already."

Lie to people often enough, and they lose their ability to tell the difference.  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, knew that principle well, and used it to astonishing success.  He put it succinctly: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

It's a lesson the Trump administration has also learned well.  Consider the following:

They said they'd never overturn Roe v. Wade; it's "established law."

They said they were all for a healthy environment, including clean water and air.

They said grocery prices would come down and the stock market would surge "on day one."

They said the war in Ukraine would be peacefully resolved within three days of Trump's inauguration.

They said there'd be no instigation of, or participation in, more military actions overseas; the focus would be on helping Americans.

They said they'd never make cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

They said they'd never touch Social Security.

They said of course they were supportive of equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, that Trump is a "real friend of the gay community."

They said they aren't after legal immigrants, only illegal ones.

They said well, okay, they are after legal immigrants, too, but they'd never go after American citizens.

And... surprise!... just two days ago Trump said that his pal Nayib Bukele, dictator of El Salvador, had better build five more concentration camps, because the "homegrowns are next."

Trump supporters, look long and hard at this photograph.  This is not a terrorist or a criminal or a gang member.  This is  Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist, weeping as his head is shorn in the CECOT concentration camp.  He was in the United States seeking asylum from his native Venezuela.  He committed no crime, received no constitutionally-guaranteed due process.  Go ahead, try to defend this, I dare you.

Every single time, they're hoping that enough people will say, "Well, even if they lied, it doesn't affect me" that their supporters will not think to add the obvious word "... yet."  But each lie further erodes our freedoms -- and further dulls our ability to recognize it for what it is.

Part of the problem, of course, is the media.  That we even had to invent the word "sanewash" to describe Trump's handling by the media is telling.  But beyond that, they've downplayed the lies, calling them "evasions" or "partial truths" or "alternative views" or even "opinions."  Outlets like Fox News and OANN are the most egregious, but even supposedly centrist media like CNN and The New York Times routinely soft-pedal stories highlighting the barrage of falsehoods coming from this administration.  The result is that unless you put in a concerted effort to find the truth, you're being given watered-down half-truths at best, and at worst deliberate omissions and outright glaring lies.

I've found myself wondering how many of the Republican officials know these things are lies.  Some, like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan, are clearly True Believers, and are every bit as culpable as Trump himself.  Some, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are probably too stupid to tell the difference.  But the others?

Doesn't matter in the end, of course.  Someone might want to remind Marco Rubio, for example, that "I was following orders from higher up" was not considered an acceptable defense at Nuremberg.

My one (small) consolation is Stephen King's observation that "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."  The flipside of this, though, is that even in a short time, the victims of regimes like this one will suffer horrible harm.  Some will die.  Our standing as a world leader, as a light for freedom and equality under the law, has already been irrevocably damaged.  I don't know how likely it is that the legal system will save us; Trump already received one 9-0 (even freakin' Clarence Thomas!) Supreme Court vote demanding he bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, another innocent man sent to a concentration camp without due process, and Trump's response basically was "I don't hafta, who's gonna make me?"

And so far, no one has.  If the president defies the Supreme Court, we have no checks and balances.

I wish I had something more positive to say.  Like Duncan's predicament in Sephirot, simply realizing you can't believe anything you're seeing or hearing only gets you so far.  Disbelieving what they're saying is just the first step.

The second -- the one we've yet to take as a nation -- is to demand truth, fairness, and justice in a voice loud enough that it cannot be ignored.

Keep in mind that the one advantage we've got is numbers.  Once the tapestry of lies is torn to shreds, once the men and women who created it have been deposed, we've got the power to rebuild what we once had.  But that means getting enough people to recognize what's happening that they're willing to act.

Otherwise, as Jack Holland put it, we're "more'n half gone already."

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