The Art of the Big Lie(s).

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – March 14, 2023

The Left has canonized a number of outright untruths. There are three characteristics of their mendacity.

One, the lies are either issued by leftwing government officials or adopted from lying universities, social media, or the corporate world.

Two, the lies involve the most vital aspects of American society—its foreign policy and national security, its social harmony, and its history and traditions, and are designed to undermine them.

Three, the prevaricators never apologize for their lies, but instead either project the lie back onto their victims or quickly move on to an even greater untruth. Even when refuted or exposed, the lies are seen as having served a useful higher political purpose or, as the late rogue Sen. Harry Reid put it of his lies about Mitt Romney’s taxes, “Well, they can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?”

Here are the five most infamous lies and the damage they did.

Big Lie 1. Russian “Collusion”

There was no evidence that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.

Robert Mueller’s team, stocked with “all-star” leftwing partisans, went through 22 months and $40 million and found nothing.

The FBI offered the lying Christopher Steele (a paid FBI informant/contractor) $1 million to prove any one item in his concoctions; he could not. Not one.

No matter. The FBI knowingly used the fraudulent document to deceive a FISA court judge. And even that ruse was not enough, as FBI lawyer and now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith doctored evidence to ensure a warrant.

In the end, “collusion” was simple projection. Hillary Clinton used three paywalls, the DNC/Perkins-Coie/Fusion GPS nexus, to spread dirt on her presidential opponent—by using Clinton operatives to compile Russian disinformation.

Most ironically, the Clinton paywalls employed collectors of Russian collusionary fables—Charles Dolan’s Russian disinformation conduit in Moscow and Igor Danchenko, the Russian gossip collector at the Brookings Institution. Adam Schiff, the Democratic Congress, and the DNC knew all this and yet continued to peddle the collusion lie since it wounded the Trump administration and was useful again in 2020. Three former FBI directors—Mueller, Comey, and McCabe—either lied under oath about the dossier or feigned amnesia or ignorance about its very untruths they had once embraced.

The FBI has ruined its reputation, by hiring Steele, knowingly using his lie to obtain federal warrants, and conceding nothing in the dossier was provable. And Christopher Wray’s recent pathetic performance in an interview with Bret Baier only made things worse. He claimed there were no asymmetries in the way the FBI treated various suspects, whether the 2020 rioters versus January 6th-ers, or pro-abortion versus pro-life protestors, or the Trump documents versus Biden documents, or former Trump officials versus current Biden officials.

Big Lie 2. The “Disinformation” Laptop

The FBI knew the laptop that it sat on for months and kept from the public was authentic. Hunter Biden never denied that it was his. Tony Bobulinksi swore the emails from and to him on the computer were authentic—even as Joe Biden repeatedly lied on a live debate stage that it was “Russian disinformation.”

James Clapper and John Brennan assembled 50 former intelligence operatives and “experts” on the eve of the 2020 election to swear it was “likely” Russian disinformation and should be not just ignored but considered part of the Russian “collusion” efforts. None have apologized for their own disinformation.

The FBI never explained why they sat on the laptop, much less why they hired Twitter and muscled Facebook to suppress pre-election news stories and posts about the authenticity of the most embarrassing laptop.

To this day, no federal agency is seriously investigating the contents, despite its haphazard publication pointing to a number of potential Biden family felonies and tax exposures. The material on the laptop if clearly examined and exposed and investigated by authorities might well lead to indictments of the Biden family syndicate.

Part Two –  March 15, 2023

Big Lie 3. The Pangolin/Bat Myth

Almost immediately after the arrival of the coronavirus, the public, some brave scientists, and intelligence officers were convinced that the engineered virus escaped the Wuhan lab because:

1) The Chinese suppressed most information about the lab’s work on the virus.

2) There were virulent attacks on those who doubted a natural origin by both Beijing and the U.S. government and corporate world that all lodged the false charge of “racism.”

3) The close proximity between the first cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan and the Wuhan virology lab.

4) The absence of a single natural case of COVID-19 in any animal species prior to the pandemic.

5) The known gain-of-function virology research ongoing in the lab.

6) The singularly unusual and exceptional genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

7) The paranoia of CDC and NIAID officials (who had funded grants to the Wuhan lab via EcoHealth) about charges that gain-of-function research, with U.S. help, at Wuhan may have birthed the viral epidemic.

8) The control over the lab by People’s Liberation Army.

None of the Left in congress, the Biden administration, or the media have apologized. Most have doubled down to insist that the lab connection remains a “conspiracy theory” and“racist.”

China has concluded that the U.S. is afraid to pursue the truth and therefore Beijing will either accelerate its gain of function research on the theory that Americans will never complain even after suffering well over one million dead or draw larger conclusions that the U.S. has lost all deterrence vis-à-vis Taiwan, an island now ripe for absorption.

Big Lie 4. The Basket of Vaccination-Related Lies

Almost everything we were told by the government and Big Pharma about the coronavirus and the mRNA vaccinations was untrue. The real facts were the following—and suppressed by the media and administrative state:

1) Natural immunity was always as effective or more effective than the protection offered by any of the vaccinations.

2) The vaccinations never ensured one would not permanently be infected or would not be infectious.

3) The mass quarantines and shutdowns did not stop the epidemic, but probably killed more Americans through missed medical procedures, suicides, economic ruination, and spousal, child, and substance abuse than COVID-19 itself.

4) The serious dangers that the mRNA vaxes posed to young men were greater than the dangers of COVID-19 infections.

5) There was never any medical proof that continued mask wearing would repress the spread of the virus.

6) Shutting down the schools did far more damage to the nation’s K-12 youth than did the virus.

7) No one fully disclosed how little testing there was of the long-term safety of the vaccinations or the serial booster program.

The ripple effect of death and destruction throughout the U.S., whether defined as lost school years, the rioting of summer 2020, the post-George Floyd toxic wokism, or the usurpation of our freedoms, is likely irreversible. We will suffer from these pathologies for years to come.

Part Three – March 17, 2023

Big Lie 5. The Ukrainian Impeachment call.

Donald Trump did not stop approved shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine in exchange for investigating the Bidens.

He simply delayed arms shipments that the Obama-Biden administration had strictly prohibited. Indeed, he ultimately sent them.

Trump had good reason to be suspicious of the Ukrainian government given the press reports that the Biden family was engaged in dishonest and lucrative leveraging of Ukrainian oligarchs and government officials through chronic influence peddling.

Joe Biden himself had boasted publicly of his past threats as Vice President to cut off U.S. aid to Kyiv unless it fired a prosecutor believed to be investigating Ukrainians involved with Hunter Biden’s Burisma shake-downs—again a classic case of leftwing projection of blaming Trump for considering to do what Biden actually did. Note that currently there is no free media in Ukraine, and officials cannot talk to the press without the permission of Zelenskyy.

Had Trump not sent offensive weapons to Ukraine, it would be currently in a much graver situation. The “whistleblower” never himself heard the Trump phone call. Lt. Col. Vindman who did hear the call was not fully forthcoming about his relationship or contact with the whistleblower and his own relating of the call’s contents to him.

Adam Schiff lied repeatedly about his knowledge of the whistleblower and prior conversations with him, as well as reading misleading and false narratives into the intelligence committee records.

There was no special counsel’s impeachment report, no lengthy impeachment hearings, and cross-examinations. Some Senators who tried the impeached Donald Trump such as Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren had a conflict of interest since they were all shortly to declare their candidacies against him in 2020.

Instead, the Democrats established a new precedent that anytime a president loses his House majority in his first term, he may well be impeached. No one since the first impeachment has argued: 

ü that the Bidens did not engage in influence peddling with Burisma and members of the Ukrainian government, 

ü that Donald Trump stopped offensive arms shipments to Ukraine, or 

ü that there was no evidence of serious corruption inside the Ukrainian government.

What was the result of those lies? The Trump administration was crippled in its first year by false charges of collusion and the special counsel’s injurious leaks that were not reflective of its final conclusions.

The FBI destroyed its reputation: 

ü by its directors’ false or misleading testimonies, 

ü by its legal counsel committing a felony, 

ü by losing subpoenaed phone data, 

ü by the machinations of counsel Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok, 

ü by the unethical maneuvering of counsel James Baker both at the FBI and later as chief counsel at Twitter. 

The agency’s efforts to suppress the truth of the laptop warped a U.S. election and destroyed the bureau’s credibility or, rather, what was left of it.

By falsely accusing Russia and obsessing over these lies, we insidiously drove Moscow and Beijing together as we see now in full fruition in Ukraine.

The lies about COVID-19 vaccination, its origins, and government reaction to it nearly destroyed the U.S. economy from March 2020 to January 2021. Millions died worldwide who could have been saved had the U.S. pressured China to explain the origins of the virus rather than demonizing those who were demanding such accountability.

The quarantines and shutdowns permanently damaged an entire generation of school-aged children. The effort to slur those who questioned the safety of the vaccination destroyed lives and increased deaths and injuries for those who felt forced to take them.

Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins sabotaged the reputation of our top health agencies, such as the CDC, NIAID, and NIH that have now lost the public’s trust.

In short, just these five canonized lies: 

Ø sandbagged an American presidency, 

Ø warped a U.S. 2020 election, 

Ø crippled the U.S. economy, 

Ø harmed an entire generation of youth, and 

Ø ruined the reputation of the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and DNI.

And many of them continue to be promulgated.