I’d like to give a hat tip to Tom Woods for the idea and the headline. Tom used it as a lead to offer his email list a Black Friday deal on his Liberty classroom. I’m hijacking it to ask you to consider the question and nothing else. When was the moment that you realized they were lying to you?
Let’s accept that there may be more than one moment and that they may have been of differing value or scope. My journey from undecided voter to conservation blogger began on 9/11, but I’d seen plenty of evidence before this that the stories we were fed left out a lot of truth. Planes crashing into buildings (and a field in Pennsylvania) triggered a desire to understand why that happened. I’ve been on that journey for nearly twenty-five years and have been expressing my thoughts about the world publicly for almost twenty years. Over the arc of this experience, I’ve had plenty of moments where I realized some institution or other was also lying to me.
But if I had to pick a moment, it would be September 11th, 2001, followed by multiple lesser moments and then the day the lockdowns didn’t stop—day 15, if you like—even though we had already dug into the data and discovered something Hinkey was afoot. That became a moment of exploring and documenting months and years of nonstop lying on a scale not yet seen.
The difference from 9/11 is that I was not blogging then, but circa 2020, I was part of a growing army documenting the fiction while searching for and sharing the truth. The non-pharmaceutical response to the Chinese virus was a better recruitment tool than any I can recall since Obamacare. Even the rise of the MAGA movement in 2015 and 2016 does not compare because many of those warriors were silent partners. Locking them up and masking them made them vocal opponents of creeping tyranny. Folks willing to give the experts the benefit of the don’t, who then decided that there was nothing American about the government randomly closing businesses and keeping people in their homes.
When the pharmaceutical response arrived, the growing distrust multiplied along with the blatant lies and the palpable partisan schtick. These institutions didn’t care about public health, people, women, working stiffs, people of faith, or even children.
I did not mean to lean so heavily into that “moment.” Still, I suspect there were moments within it that made readers realize they were being lied to in a way that was more personal than climate change, the national debt, or just about anything Democrats say about crime, women, children, and minorities.
It may be impossible to identify the moment. Mine may have come earlier, such that 9/11 catalyzed the dormant seed. So, with that in mind, share a moment—if not the moment—and whatever it is, welcome to the skeptics club. Whenever you “signed up” or why?
