The Ignoble Lie

 

The Ignoble Lie

Victor Davis Hanson, The Epoch Times.  

In a controversial passage in Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates introduced the idea of the “noble lie” (“gennaios pseudos”).

A majestic fiction, he says, could sometimes serve society by persuading uninformed citizens of something good for them.

Ever since many prevaricators have used the excuse that they lied for the common good.

Take Dr. Anthony Fauci, our point man on the COVID-19 epidemic.

Fauci misled the country about mask-wearing during the pandemic by claiming they were of little use. But he argued that he lied so the public would not make a run on masks, deplete the supply, and thus rob medical professionals of protective equipment.

Fauci also told “noble” lies about the likely percentage of the public needing to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. He kept raising the bar—from 60 percent to 70 percent to 75 percent to 80 percent, to 85 percent.

Apparently, Fauci feared a lower figure, even if accurate, might lull people into complacency about getting inoculated.

Fauci also lied about his own role in routing U.S. aid money to subsidize gain-of-function viral research at the Wuhan virology lab—the likely birthplace of COVID-19.

Either Fauci was hiding his own culpability, or he believed the American people might not be able to fully accept that some of their own health officials were promoting the sort of research that was partially responsible for more than 700,000 American deaths.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has serially lied about the number of undocumented immigrants who have crossed into the United States. He falsely claimed mounted agents were whipping migrants. He fibbed about the purported lack of federal data of apprehensions, detentions, and deportations. His assertion that the border is secure was a joke.

Apparently, Mayorkas believes the public would go ballistic or his own administration would be roundly despised if he told the bitter truth about the border: by intent, the Biden administration has apparently deliberately left it wide open.

And it will likely allow 2 million undocumented immigrants into the country in the current fiscal year.

Lots of other unelected federal officials lied over the past five years by claiming or implying that harming the Trump administration was in the public interest.

Former FBI directors Andrew McCabe and James Comey likely misled the nation. McCabe admittedly lied that he did not leak FBI information to the media.

James Comey lied under oath on multiple occasions in congressional cross-examinations and claimed he did not know or could not remember basic facts about his own role in promoting the Russian collusion hoax.

Apparently, Comey and McCabe believed that by being less than truthful, they might better emasculate Donald Trump. And that result would be beneficial to America.

Our former intelligence leaders may have been the most brazen liars. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA surveillance program, though he denied it.

When caught in the untruth, Clapper reverted to the noble lie that he gave the least untruthful answer, apparently on the pretense that he did not wish to damage the reputation of an important intelligence agency.

Ditto John Brennan, the former head of the CIA. On two occasions he lied under oath about the agency’s monitoring of Senate staffers’ computers and the deaths of civilians caused by U.S. drone assassination missions along the Afghanistan border.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley lied for days about the details of an accidental drone strike that killed innocent women and children in Afghanistan.

Either Milley is now lying when he says he warned Joe Biden about the disasters to come in Afghanistan or Biden is lying when he denies hearing any such advice.

Many of the details of Milley’s conversations with authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa as reported in their recent muckraking book were abjectly denied by Milley.

The list of such lies could be vastly expanded.

IRS functionary Lois Lerner never told the whole untruth about weaponizing the IRS.

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch spun an implausible yarn that she accidentally bumped into Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Phoenix and never discussed the then-current FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton.

Special counsel Robert Mueller told a whopper under oath, claiming to know almost nothing about the Steele dossier and the misadventures of Fusion GPS. Both were the two catalysts that prompted his entire investigation of “collusion” in the first place.

In some of these cases, when caught and exposed, the liars will hedge by claiming temporary amnesia.

But sometimes they admit they lied but suggest they did so for higher purposes like national security.

In truth, in most cases, there was nothing noble at all in their lying. They simply spread untruths to protect their own endangered careers by masking their own wrongdoing or fobbing it onto others.

In other words, “noble lies” are rarely spun for anyone’s interests other than those of the liars themselves.

Biden Has No Answers

Biden has no answers to the nation’s problems except for empty promises

Post Editorial Board, New York Post

Name the crisis, and President Joe Biden and his team have no clue how to handle it, except to claim his stalled “Build Back Better” spending plans will somehow fix it.

Yet his past spending has fueled the mess by dumping extra billions into circulation, creating record-high inflation. And the no-strings cash he’s sent to families plus his failure to end the pandemic as he’d vowed have created worker shortages — adding to the supply-chain crunch that has Americans worried about canceled Christmas, even as it further fuels inflation as too much cash chases too few goods.

As his no-enforcement policies have illegal immigration hitting new highs, Team Biden’s only “solution” is to hide the consequences by flying planeloads of underage migrants into places like suburban New York in the dead of night, severely straining already-overtaxed local services.

Is the nation stuck with three more years of this fecklessness?

Uncle Joe can’t even get through a softball Democrat-loaded town hall without embarrassing himself. As he struggled for some semblance of coherence Thursday night, his aides running the show were on damage-control duty, watching for what they’d have to walk back — such as his off-the-cuff vow to bring in the National Guard to ease supply-chain woes.

It should have been easy for the new president to bring the country back from its pandemic low: “The Trump administration purchased enough vaccine doses to fully vaccinate at least a large percentage of the 190 million people who have received two shots at present,” as even CNN admitted in fact-checking Biden’s town-hall claim that “I went out and bought everything I could do and buy in sight, and it worked.”

But Team Biden added no urgency to the national vax drive and even allowed its health bureaucrats to feed vaccine hesitancy by briefly suspending the J&J jab over trivial concerns. The thought that a new variant might extend the pandemic apparently never crossed their minds.

Instead, the prez turned his eyes to a “transformation” agenda — and not even his own.

The Biden administration dropped the ball on approving and distributing Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Dems chose Biden as a centrist over Bernie Sanders’ rabid (and unpopular) socialism. Yet Sanders is the actual author of Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar “Build Back” agenda, which the White House made its overwhelming priority without regard for the nation’s actual needs or what’s politically practical with a razor-thin congressional majority.

Oh, first came the $1.9 trillion COVID “relief” bill, passed without a single Republican vote despite his claim he’d bring back bipartisanship. The economy was already on the rebound when he signed the package in March, but its added unemployment “bonus” slowed the recovery by encouraging millions to stay out of the workforce. Those bonuses finally expired, but the checks to any family with kids (no work necessary) still go out every month.

Five million fewer people are working than before the pandemic — with 3 million fewer even trying to find a job.

Four in 10 US households face serious financial difficulties, while Biden admitted at his CNN town hall, “I don’t have a near-term answer” even to surging gas prices — a problem he also helped create, with his war on domestic drilling and pipelines.

He’s got no answers to anything, except for empty promises that he struggles to even keep straight.

NIH admits gain-of-function funding

Why would have to lie? He is complicit in something larger...

 NIH admits gain-of-function funding

NIH in Bethesda, Md., now admitting to funding gain-of-function research

Charles Creitz, Fox News

Despite repeated denials by NIAID Director Anthony Fauci that his agency used American taxpayer money to fund Chinese gain-of-function research on bats infected with coronaviruses, the National Institutes of Health – which oversees NIAID – admitted in a letter to House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer, R-Ky., that a "limited experiment" was indeed conducted.

Comer's fellow Kentuckian, Sen. Rand Paul, joined "Fox News Primetime" to react to the bombshell, as well as further reflect on his often-viral sparring with Fauci during Senate hearings on the matter.

Earlier this year, Paul accused Fauci of "obfuscating the truth" and at one point asked if he wished to rescind prior remarks given that it is a felony to lie to Congress.

The Brooklyn-born doctor responded that "if anyone is lying, it is you."

Paul told host Will Cain the story should not be about him, but about America's health and national security:

"Five million people died from a virus that came out of a lab -- wouldn’t we want to know, wouldn’t we want to prevent this from happening again? This virus is very deadly, what if we had a virus that had a 15% mortality rate?"

Paul, a doctor of ophthalmology, said China is already experimenting with a variation of the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus of the early 2000s – noting that its predecessor had a 1 in 2 mortality rate.

"They still to this day are trying to get around the truth," Paul said. "They say ‘well it was unexpected that it gained function’."

The senator noted that Fauci previously claimed a virus outbreak could be worth the scientific value of the preceding experiments:

"In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?," Fauci said back in 2012.

"Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks," he continued, according to the New York Post.

Paul said Fauci has been intentionally "never fully explain[ing] why [the experiments] are not gain-of-function. His declination is this: it’s inadvertent, we didn’t know they were going to gain function. That is what a gain-of-function experiment is. You don’t know when you combine two viruses that they will be more deadly but it might be if you have half a brain you know if you combine two viruses it might be more deadly."

"He's been parsing words."

Cain replied that another major issue is that much of the public believes Fauci's "words are Gospel" and that he is infallible.

Paul said he and other lawmakers have already referred Fauci to the Justice Department for investigation – but noted that he is not expecting much given the inordinate resources being allocated by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to "go after moms complaining about what they are teaching in school."

"I don’t know if they have time to go after Dr. Fauci for lying. He should be held accountable because what we have developed as a system of health care in our country where doctors are afraid to speak out because they will cut out their research funding, doctors who have talked about innovative treatment to try to help people survive COVID are being lectured and told we will take your license. This is the kind of thing, this top-down centralization of medical authority, it’s not good for our country and it’s not good for innovation."

Paul said he fears that an apolitical doctor will stumble across a life-saving treatment to another disease or virus – but instead discard or not publicize his work for fear of retribution from the medical establishment and people like Fauci, whose office allocates millions of dollars in grant monies.

Biden Family Corruption

 

Biden family corruption is an elephant the media works to 'disappear'

Jonathan Turley, Fox News 

This week marked an anniversary of one of the greatest political tricks in history: the disappearance of Hunter Biden scandals.

One year after the New York Post broke the story, new emails were recently released that added new details to what was a raw influence-peddling operation which netted millions of dollars from foreign sources. A new tranche of emails connecting President Joe Biden to key accounts prove just how this political sleight of hand was worthy of Harry Houdini.

After all, Houdini only made an elephant disappear. The Bidens made what amounts to an entire circus disappear in front of an audience of millions. For both Houdini and the Bidens, the sheer size and audacity of the act contributed to the trick. The fact is: the 10,000 pound Jennie never left the stage. Neither did the Biden scandal.

The Bidens made a full-sized scandal disappear, with the help of media members who did not want the public to see it. Twitter banned links to reports about the laptop until after Biden was elected president. The media dismissed the story as a "conspiracy theory" with some mocking to boot.

Committee Chairman Adam Schiff assured that public that "this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin." Some 50 former intelligence officials, including Obama’s CIA directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, also insisted the laptop story was likely the work of Russian intelligence.

The laptop is, of course, now recognized as genuine—even by some of the early deniers. Hunter remains under criminal investigation for possible tax and money laundering violations.

But the greatest "reveal" is the person referred to as "the Big Guy" and "Celtic" in these emails: President Joe Biden.

Recently released emails reference payments to President Biden from son Hunter's accounts and indicate the possible commingling of funds. Even more embarrassing, the shared account may have been used to pay a Russian prostitute named "Yanna." In one text, a former secret service agent warns Hunter (who was holed up with a prostitute in an expensive hotel): "Come on H this is linked to Celtic’s account."

The question is whether prosecutors will continue to act like they do not see the elephant. Consider these established facts:

First, it is widely believed that Hunter Biden, and his uncle James Biden, received millions in influence peddling. For his part, Hunter only had influence and access to sell. He admits that he was a crack addict and alcoholic all the way up to the start of his father’s presidential campaign: "Drinking a quart of vodka a day by yourself in a room is absolutely, completely debilitating," as well as "smoking crack around the clock."

Second, President Biden continues to deny knowledge or involvement in these foreign dealings. But those denials are now directly contradicted by emails and witnesses.

Hunter himself contradicted his father’s repeated denials. Likewise, a key business associate of Hunter, Anthony Bobulinski, directly accused President Biden of lying about his involvement. Bobulinski has detailed a meeting with Joe Biden in a hotel to go over the dealings. 

Past emails included discussions of offering access to then-Vice President Biden. They also include alleged payments to Joe Biden. In one email, there is a discussion of a proposed equity split of "20" for "H" and "10 held by H for the big guy?" Bobulinski confirmed that "H" was used for Hunter Biden and that his father was routinely called "the big guy" in these discussions.

Third, while he was vice president, Joe Biden allowed Hunter to fly on Air Force 2 to countries like China where he was seeking millions. He also met with Hunter’s foreign business associates. In 2015, a State Department official flagged the possible conflicts from Hunter’s dealings during the Obama Administration.

Fourth, new emails suggest a commingling of funds between Hunter and his father. Emails from Eric Schwerin, his business partner at the Rosemont Seneca consultancy, refer to the payment of household bills for both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. He also notes that he was transferring money from Joe Biden. Rosemont Seneca is directly involved in the alleged influence peddling schemes and questionable money transfers from Chinese and Russian sources.

Finally, Hunter himself admitted that his missing computers files may have been stolen by foreign agents for blackmail purposes. Hunter’s emails claim one of his laptops may have been stolen by Russian agents after a drug and alcohol binge with prostitutes.  

Given the ongoing criminal prosecution, that would seem an ample basis for the appointment of a special counsel. The President is mentioned repeatedly in emails and by witnesses in relation to influence peddling schemes—and even receiving funds from shared accounts. He has also denied knowledge that key witnesses refute, including his son.

Influence peddling is common in Washington, D.C., and it can be done legally. Yet, it has also been the subject of intense criminal investigations. For example, the FBI raided the home of Donald Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani and others based on allegations of influence peddling in an ongoing criminal investigation. The Justice Department wants to know if Giuliani secured contracts in exchange for access or influence. The media eagerly recounted the raids and how Giuliani may have cashed in on his access.

Yet, an influence peddling scheme that directly impacts the president and his family continues to be officially unseen. Indeed, the value of involving the media in the original trick is that it invests reporters in the illusion. It is like calling audience members to the stage to assist in the trick. Reporters have to insist that there was nothing to see or they have to admit to being part of the deception.

This is why, in Washington, the illusion depends on the specific elephant. Houdini once said that "It is still an open question…as to what extent exposure really injures a performer." The same question can be asked about a politician. 

President Biden is in full display in these emails. The question is whether the public—or the prosecutors—want to see him.

Healthy Noncompliance

 

Healthy Noncompliance

Glenn H. Reynolds, NY Post

The irrational COVID regime is driving many Americans to a healthy noncompliance

If regular democracy isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s time to fall back on “Irish Democracy.”

That’s what Yale political scientist James Scott calls the passive resistance of a society that doesn’t like what its rulers are doing to it. In his book “Two Cheers for ­Anarchy,” he writes, “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

Irish Democracy is when the populace simply doesn’t cooperate with the agenda. Sometimes there is active sabotage, sometimes surreptitious monkey-wrenching, sometimes foot-dragging and sometimes outright noncompliance. Sometimes it’s all of those at once.

Right now, we are seeing some of that in response to vaccine mandates, mask rules and various other forms of population control that have been adopted since the pandemic struck. Go almost anywhere with a mask mandate, and you will see some people not wearing masks at all, daring anyone to do anything about it (often, they don’t).

You will also see a lot more with the mask pulled down below their noses, providing the vague suggestion of compliance without ­actually going along. These people will usually pull the mask up if asked, but then pull it right back down again as soon as the asker leaves the vicinity. (Hey, why take it seriously when our elites have made clear that the mask rules don’t apply to them and their gatherings?)

Likewise, social distancing is ­often honored in the breach. And why not? If football stadiums and rock arenas can be filled with profitable crowds, how seriously can people be expected to follow other rules?

When I was in New York City recently, restaurants and bars were “checking” people’s vaccination status by taking a cursory glance at a largely illegible photo on an app. Going through the ­motions is a form of passive ­resistance, and lots of people seemed to be doing that.

Others are exiting the workforce rather than comply with vax mandates. Biden administration officials seem mystified as to why people don’t want to work for employers who seem to be operating as extensions of government regulators. And many people who are employed are refusing the shot and daring their employers to fire them in a tight labor market.

The establishment isn’t happy with all of this, of course, but it’s also not nearly as strong as it pretends. If most people, or even a significant minority of people, started to ignore the federal government, the feds would soon be rendered impotent.

We can see this already with marijuana. As I am often forced to remind people, marijuana isn’t ­legal. It remains banned by federal law, even in states that have removed their own penalties.

Yet about a decade ago, people basically just decided that pot was legal. And for all practical purposes now, it is. After Colorado ­legalized weed, the Obama administration made a few abortive ­efforts to enforce the federal law on a large scale, then gave up.

Now even in states like mine, Tennessee, where marijuana remains against state law, it’s effectively ­legalized. You have to try awfully hard to get arrested for it.

Some on the left are calling those who resist the regime names like “domestic terrorists,” but that doesn’t carry much weight anymore. With the left having spent a decade calling everyone Hitler, “domestic terrorist” barely registers. (And given the Biden administration’s craven surrender to the real terrorists in Afghanistan, some Americans might be forgiven for thinking that if they get called terrorist enough, they will be in line for the basket of goodies Biden is giving the Taliban.)

I got the shot, but the bullying has become insufferable and counterproductive. The masks are by now downright moronic. Ditto the arbitrary six-foot rule, based on flu droplets rather than COVID’s aerosols. Resisting government bullying, too, is a kind of public duty. And more and more people seem to be doing just that.

Can America Survive Progressives’ Attacks

 

Can America survive progressives’ attacks on its origins and values?

Victor Davis Hanson, NY Post

Over the last two years, progressive critics have casually attacked the origins, nature and values of American society. Is the idea of America so indestructible that it can weather any assault?

The foundational dates of America — the signing in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence and in 1787 of the Constitution — have been attacked. Citizens are now asked to believe that they have no inspirational or historical value.

Statues of the American luminaries have been defaced or toppled. Names on schools and monuments are obliterated.

The Soviet-like erasures do not just involve Confederate generals. Often the Founders, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — along with Civil-War-era luminaries such as Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln — are damned from our memories. Their common crimes are believing in the American ideal.

“Critical Race Theory” argues America can presently discriminate to atone for past discrimination. And it can practice racism to fight prior racism — amid a multiracial democracy of competing tribal interests. In just a few months, our elites have completely jettisoned the centuries-long aspiration — energized by Martin Luther King, Jr. — of a racially blind America.

“Critical Legal Theory” believes that laws are merely the biased constructs of the rich and powerful. They purportedly lack any grounding in the natural law of keeping order and reflecting innately human morality. Spiraling violence in the streets of major American cities is now the offspring of such pop theorizing.

“New monetary theory” recklessly insists that printing money will not cause inflation and expenditures do not have to correlate with revenues. Do such charlatans remember 1930s Germany, 1970s America or contemporary Venezuela?

The US military helter-skelter fled Afghanistan, abandoning thousands of Afghan allies and hundreds of US citizens and green card holders. A military that holds its own soldiers accountable for losing a few bullets left over $80 billion of US weaponry and equipment in the hands of terrorists.

In 2020 during the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, the country suffered from 120 days of violent protests, rioting and arson, including firebomb attacks on Washington, DC’s historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, a Portland courthouse and a Minneapolis police precinct. On Jan. 6, 2021 protestors stormed into the US Capitol.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown, and quarantine, unelected bureaucrats usurped the constitutional rights of citizens, often on dubious medical grounds.

Rents for millions were arbitrarily suspended on orders from the Center for Disease Control. Quarantines were routinely violated with exemptions if protestors were deemed woke. And bureaucrats for months lied that naturally acquired immunity from prior infection was inferior to the protection provided by vaccinations.

There are lots of assumptions of all these revisionists, revolutionaries, iconoclasts, name changers, bureaucrats, and establishmentarians. They seem to think citizens should forfeit their history, customs and freedoms to a self-appointed elite.

Somehow Americans have been badgered that the US has to be perfect to be good — as defined by political activists with agendas that would transform America into something unrecognizable.

We seem to forget that citizenship is not history’s norm.

Except for brief parentheses in ancient Greece and Rome, and the Western world after the Renaissance and Enlightenment, since the dawn of civilization some 7,000 years ago most people have been rendered mere tribal residents, or worse, slaves, serfs, and subjects.

The radical American idea that we make our own laws and govern ourselves is a fragile notion. And it depends on a variety of requisites that we are now in danger of destroying.

American citizenship requires a viable middle class, constant civic education, secure borders, a common identity, control over unelected bureaucrats, a featly to the Constitution and some awareness that global norms are often antithetical to an exceptional America.

America is history’s aberration. Those now trying to tear it down are the same familiar suspects over the last 2,500 years, who despise consensual government and the middle classes who preserve it.

Victor Davis Hanson’s just-released new book is “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.”