no matter the [in]verisimilitude, people will
remember the lie oft told over the truth

Reading Pravda In English

Today I’m going to do something incredibly distasteful. I’m going to teach you to be paranoid.

It’s been obvious to me — well before it was to anyone else — that while not living precisely in the Truman show, we lived in a carefully manufactured reality.

Oh, it’s not a conspiracy, though it contains conspiracies. It’s a prospiracy. Meaning that everyone having been indoctrinated in the same “verities” (which ain’t) and taught to see the world through a Marxist lens (if I had a dime for every journalist whom I heard say their job was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted! I’d never worry about money again) they all want to be on the side of those they perceive as angels, and manufacture consensus “truth” like one manufactures sausages.

Oh, they have to maneuver around some hard shoals of truth, because it’s hard to tell the empty belly it’s full, or the unemployed that he has a job. But they come up with excuses for that to protect presidents they love. They couldn’t make Obama’s misrule into a great new beginning or an era of plenty, but they tried. How many “Summers of Recovery” did we have, with even the Wall Street Journal joining into singing hosannas? And how many times did they make excuses, based on the state of the world, and what Bush had done, and this and that and the other thing. And now he’s in the rearview mirror they’re little by little burnishing his memory, talking about how great he was at this and that. In twenty years they’ll have it in the history books that his presidency was a time of joy and plenty, with the country united, and the only hardships were caused by Trump, who of course, knew nothing of management or money. No? Watch them.

If we continue lending them credence, that’s exactly where they’ll have us.

I’ve been aware of it since at least Carter, when I watched not only the press explain away the catastrophically high gas prices he inflicted on the country by saying we were coming to the end of oil, but the science fiction community, even, swing into step, and instead of bright futures of space exploration, start to write of miserable futures of scarcity and rust, where everyone behaved like villains. Because when the president is a miserable failure who shoots cats for sport, the only way to make him look good is to make every Jack and Jill a villain.

And then I watched the burnishing of the Carter years in the rearview mirror, the same as I watched them painting the Reagan years as miserable years of want and struggle and greed.

They lie to us, because they lie to themselves. Because their cult demands they be right, and history must be adjusted to fit.

As they used to say in the Soviet Union, we always know the future, because it’s dictated by the party and it’s the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat, ahem you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. It is the past that keeps changing, to retcon history to make the idiots in control always and forever heroes, instead of the scurrying rat villains that they are.

Their power is diminished now, this is true. The only people still reading the increasingly detached from reality newspapers or watching the official news (and don’t fool yourself that Fox isn’t converged) are people who are very busy or very old and usually the very busy are at least my age.

The cult of the “acceptable source” has diminished. Or at least it has split to acceptable sources on the right and acceptable sources on the left. Oh, and perhaps still acceptable establishment sources, but that’s smaller.

However, it is important to realize all those sources are still influenced by the big megaphone of the mainstream press, and still come through if diluted.

Yesterday at Power Line (Yeah, I know. Note I rarely link them anymore) I found myself reading a baffling article in which they talked of how Chicago and Wisconsin and whatever the other race was had gone left, and analyzing the causes. As if causes beyond “the vote is rigged” made any sense. They immediately fell into line with the big megaphone of the left, and accused those “agitating against abortion” of being guilty for the losses. Which frankly is why the left keeps agitating for abortion. Not because it’s an immensely popular topic or that the right talks about it much, after being quietly glad the national mandate was overturned, but because it gives them coverage for the massive, rank, obvious fraud.

And our side knows there was fraud. Impossible not to know in 2020, and those who paid close attention to important contests in 2022 saw it too, the same impossible numbers cropping up, as the automated fraud kicked in from the machines.

But because the mainstream press keeps treating those elections as legitimate, we eventually fall into treating them as such, and looking for causes for them.

It made me feel like someone watching people look for their glasses with them on their faces. Or carefully ponder what happened to the eggs, and ignoring the frying pan and oil, and the dirty plates.

None of this is unfamiliar to me. I was fortunate, at a very young age, to be present at historical events, and then read them described in the press, and finding no resemblance whatsoever. I’ve also been fortunate to realize that whether I was there or not, and no matter the verisimilitude, people will remember the lie oft told over the truth.

In fact, I will tell you it was easier for my parents to see the lie when reading the press under the national socialist government which fell when I was 11 — because they knew it was a lie and under censorship, and knew to read “pravda” by reading its entrails — than afterwards, under the succession of socialist and one or two outright communist regimes, and the lies became even harder to discern later after 78, under supposed “freedom of the press” where it became a prospiracy as what we have, and the directives from above more or a “Of course we should talk of x to advance y.”

Do you remember when Alaskan cruises were all the rage, because the left wanted to kill the Alaskan pipeline, and so they must go on and on about this pristine wilderness that would be “destroyed” and take as many influential lefties as possible through it, people who never asked how the pipeline would in fact harm this natural environment?

Right now the rage is all in cool electric cars. Because of course, the left wants to push the carbon free bullshit, as though it were possible, and didn’t cause more environmental destruction — unless you don’t count Africa.

And for a while they were trying to push the poor, oppressed illegals, though I think they found it hard going. But these themes will be everywhere at once, startlingly, because all of them rush to be the “good people” the (im)moral crusader no one needs.

The fact that now their big thing is to teach children weird sex is both baffling and a measure of how out of control their message machine is.

At the same time it’s a massive distraction. You should of course be outraged about it. And about the fact they’re trying to careen us into war. And and and

But you shouldn’t lose sight of the important thing: They’re doing all this because they’ve corrupted our voting system.

The only way to fight it that doesn’t involve blood up to our ankles is to fight it on that front. To do everything possible and impossible to restore voting integrity. The big things like repealing that fraud machine, Motor Voter, must be done once in power.

Meanwhile, it behooves us to not use machines. To vote late and on paper. (And raise holy hell on all fronts if someone has already voted for us) and above all to sound the tocsin and remind everyone that there is election theft, and it will continue until made to stop.

At this point no election can be assumed to be clean. To assume so is to give them power and legitimacy they don’t have.

Sound the tocsin. Sometimes it’s all you can do. Refuse to forget the theft.

And when you read the news stay alert for “why is everyone talking of THIS now?” and stay alert to discontinuities in the story, things that made no sense. They will describe x as leading inevitably to y, but there is no connection, either in fact or even — often — in Marxist fables.

Take the current rise in crime. They will tell you it’s because people are poorer and therefore are committing more crime. But that connection only exists in the minds of Marxists. Poor people are not likely to steal because they’re poor. The crime rate is probably the same, rich or poor. It’s only the crimes that are different. However, the left letting murderers, rapists and thieves out of jail (or into the country through the wide open border) has indeed increased the crime.

When they talk of increased automation, and “AI” causing unemployment, remember they used the same excuse under Carter. It is no such thing, but their onerous regulations (Biden signed a boatload last week) and taxes and instability causing the economy to buckle.

Pay attention to those explanations that make no sense, to the events that disappear from the front pages or are never mentioned, to the lacunae and omissions or outright obvious lies.

By remembering the Diamond Princess Covid-19 numbers, I stayed clear-eyed about the rather minor impact of the virus and how out of proportion the response was.

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Robert A. Heinlein

There is no truth in pravda, but there is truth in the lacuna, the omissions, the “wait a minute, that ain’t right” in the “it was there, and it was nothing like that.”

Find those. And hold them. No matter how tempting it is to forget and join the consensus. No matter how easy it is to think “I must be wrong, because they all say that–“

Find the facts, and hold them. And steer by them. We need people aware of the truth, as the gaslighting machine that our overculture has become spins us further and further from reality.

Because reality is that which will kill you, even if you deny it. Reality is what you must live with, even if you’re away with the fairies in your mind.

Reality is a stone cold bitch. It never forgives.

But if you live by her, if enough of us lives by her, there is a chance, slim but possible, that we can get through this and emerge on the other side as the free nation we were meant to be.

Again and again, what are the facts? Go find them. (read more)