Commentary: Some leaders say ‘don’t believe what you see’

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Hardly any morning goes by without yet another act of violence or tragedy in this country. That, or another act that makes no sense perpetrated by our own government.

Some of these are on the ludicrous side, like telling us there is no problem at our southern border while those on the ground charged with protecting it would beg to differ. Criminals are crossing from all over the world into our country, or just turning themselves in and being transported somewhere into America. During the pandemic, this continued despite some draconian restrictions placed on us here.

Meanwhile, we spend a lot of money defending Ukraine’s right to defend its border and recently our President Joe Biden while in Japan answered “yes” when asked if we’d use our military to defend Taiwan’s border from China. But we still won’t secure our own.

Inflation and crazy high gas prices are blamed on the Ukraine-Russia conflict when it is obvious to most of us that’s not true. In fact, while he was in Japan, our president also said this: “Here’s the situation. When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”

We’re warned we’re going to have brownouts all summer now. So how will we be stronger?

In other words, this price increase is really part of his (or whoever is calling the shots) plan.  Samantha Powers, another Biden cabinet member, used the words (and it’s not a new phrase) “Never let a crisis go to waste” when referring to fertilizer shortages — which will affect our food supply and make food more expensive.

There are plenty of other examples of lies we’re being told right to our face, but sadly,  wokeness shouts down any dissent. While reading, I came upon a column written by Brien Farley, which made it all make some scary sense to me. He described how the theater creates the illusion of make-believe to make the experience more enjoyable to the audience, like in stabbing scenes and the like. Clearly no one is stabbed but the audience is transformed by pretending and willingly going along with it.

I think that’s what’s happening here and now, only some of us don’t want to go along with the pretending with so much at stake.

In his column, he quotes physician and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, who I think sums up what we are seeing from our own government and the big media who repeat what they say, true or not.

He wrote, “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the obvious lies, or worse, forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.”



He closed with, “a society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”

Think of how any dissent in the treatment of COVID-19 was reacted to, including berating any qualified person outside (or in some cases inside) the purview of Dr. Anthony Fauci. They were trashed for daring to disagree. Think about the comment Dr. Rachel Levine, who was born a male but identifies as female, made about trans kids needing affirming treatment and everyone in the medical field agreed. But not everyone in the medical field agrees, but they can’t say that except anonymously under threat of their license, loss of practice and trashed reputation.

We’ve watched riots, looting, arson over the past two years or so and been told as fire burns in the background, these are “mostly peaceful” demonstrations. Police are being defunded and we’re told we’d be safer, and aren’t. Violent criminals with long rap sheets are released over and over without bail. Again, we’re told we’ll be safer and aren’t.

Instead it is all lies. The chaos just makes too many people willing to give away freedom or fear speaking against what they are actually seeing happen right in front of us. Anger is being spread, and fueled often by our “leaders” at the highest level. It looks to me to be on purpose.

We’ve had a couple more very tragic mass shootings — senseless shootings — in the last couple weeks and our president came out almost immediately and said he knows what needs to be done to stop these.

If that’s true, I’d sure like to know what that could be. He’s had 40 years in some government office or another to tell us what that might be. But he hasn’t.

But I’m certain about this: legalizing drugs, minimizing crime, defunding the police, vilifying the police, not enforcing gun laws to the fullest extent right now while electing prosecutors who don’t want to put these people in jail with every enhancement at their disposal hasn’t helped.

But that’s the crap we’ve been told was the answer.

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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@gmail.com.