Live not by lies
Live not by lies
Taking on the head-girl of Substack
This post is almost six months in the making. I did not ‘work’ on it for six months, I was just procrastinating as I was intimidated by the idea. I don’t like confrontations, especially when I consider them futile or when the odds of achieving something with it are heavily against me. Eventually, I re-read Solzhenitsyn’s famous essay and decided that I cannot and will not live by lies.
I have to stand up to the head-girl of Substack.
Six months ago, I lived in blissful ignorance of who
was (“HCR” from here on), but after stumbling across an article about Substack, I learned that she is the top earner at Substack and by an impressive margin at that.Since she is writing politics, I decided to subscribe to Letters from an American on the 28th of May.
I was absolutely appalled by the underhanded manipulative sleaziness of her posts. I looked at many since, but I can seldom pass more than a few blatant lies before putting it down. I find most of her political writing revolting and the point of this post is to illustrate why.
I will use quotes from three of her posts: 05/30/2024, 07-29-2024 and 09-16-2024.
I started with a longer list, but even in this three, there are more instances of fundamental dishonesty, than I would want to test your patience with. I also keep clear of anything that is just a disagreement. I will stick to lies.
There are many ways to lie: blatantly, through suggestion, insinuation, distortion, misquoting and misrepresentation, exaggerations, false analogies, and so on. HCR is using them all. Her most frequently used weapon is the creation of a narrative through inappropriate choices of words. Let me illustrate:
From her comments on The Trump verdict in May:
“Republican senators could have convicted Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors in 2019. In that year, the House impeached Trump after he tried to rig the 2020 presidential election by withholding congressionally appropriated funds to support Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2014 invasion. He withheld the funds to try to force Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky to manufacture dirt on Democrat Joe Biden..”
That is, of course, a lie. I listened to the conversation. There was no demand to “manufacture dirt” on anybody. Trump congratulated the new president and among other things, he expressed his hope that he (Zelensky) will be able to solve his country’s biggest problem, corruption.
The sleazy part of the lie is the wording ‘manufacture dirt’. The expression implies that Biden is clean.
‘Dirt’ on him must be manufactured. When we all know, because he was stupid enough to brag about it on camera, that Biden blackmailed the Ukrainian state into firing the prosecutor who was investigating the criminal corruption of Biden’s son. The investigation would have implicated him as well, as one of the beneficiaries of the proceeds of the crime.
HCR is not an idiot. She knew that perfectly well. Why the lie? To confuse and misdirect. A typical tactic of the left: accusing their opponents with the very crime they are committing.
“Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.”
I listened to her post. She read it out. 34 times. The commenters on her post rejoiced.
But do YOU know what was the 34 counts? Do you know what exactly was he convicted of?
I looked into it.
Imagine, that you are in a hurry to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. You find a shortcut through a private property. You know that you shouldn’t, but you cause no harm, so you walk across. You are stopped on the other side and charged with 500 counts of trespassing. You are charged for every step you took on that property and fined for each. This is how the Trump verdict worked.
One count for writing a cheque, one for mailing it, one for entering the transaction into a ledger. Now repeat it 11 times for 11 installments, add a charge for issuing the invoice and you have 34 felonies.
Even if you consider what he did a crime, the process is a charade. A travesty of justice. More pathetic and ridiculous than Stalinist show trials.
But that is still not enough for HCR:
“And so he continued his assault on the rule of law. … attacking the system that produced the guilty verdict.”
By professing his innocence, by calling the trial politically motivated, the prosecutor and the jury biased. Imagine that! In the world of HCR, contesting the verdict is an assault on the rule of law.
It seems that we are already living in a bigoted world where an accusation is all that is needed to consider you guilty. Just like in Stalinist Russia.
But we shouldn’t be surprised by that. We live in a world, where stating that you are not racist is considered to be the proof that you are and where you can be jailed for refusing to call a man a woman.
A world where even a Supreme court justice cannot tell the difference.
HCR goes on saying that:
“Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters to defend him with violence, but there was none reported.”
To prove that this is not true, would require me to prove a negative. All I can say that I believe it to be a lie. I have a thousand dollars to say that HCR is lying.
Just think about the logic of the sentence. His demands for violence were so obscure that his supporters didn’t get the idea or his supporters are so peaceful, that they defied his demands.
The problem is, that HCR knows, that on certain subjects, she can lie with impunity.
On July 29th, HCR starts her post with the following paragraph:
“One of the advantages of refusing the Democratic nomination for president is that his decision to do that has left President Joe Biden in the position of being above the political fray and being able to act for the good of the whole country.”
Did you catch the lie? About the generosity and magnanimity of Biden putting the interest of the country before his own? About “refusing” the nomination? When the whole world knows that it was a palace-revolt? He went down kicking and screaming. At first, he insisted that he will never step down, then disappeared for a few days, then a letter appeared, then a prerecorded address, read from a teleprompter delivering a ‘speech’ explaining ‘his’ reasons. No press conference.
As for the second part of the sentence, can anybody honestly believe that in his demented state, Biden can actually make policy and write articles? Biden has not been an actual decision maker for at least two years. The suggestion of HCR that this is not the case, is dishonest, but not a factual lie.
The rest of this July 29th post is just as dishonest as the first paragraph, but they are only misrepresentations of the truth, not factual lies.
The September 16th post of HCR is the one that finally explained her to me. The one in which she reveals the motivating principle behind her lies. Just bear with me, it will be my next point.
“In the week since Trump’s disastrous debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, MAGA Republicans appear to be melting down. As Republicans commandeer the disaster news, ….”
Who won a debate, or whether it can be described as a disaster is a matter of opinion. So is what can be considered a ‘meltdown’, but the fact remains that after a week, the verdict of public opinion, as reflected in the polls, was clearly on the side of Trump. The left biased MSM (and HCR) delivered their verdict, the voting public delivered another.
“On CNN yesterday morning, Vance admitted to Dana Bash that he had created the story of Haitian immigrants eating pets. He justified the lie that has shut down Springfield and endangered its residents by claiming such a lie was the only way to get the media to pay attention to what he considers the crisis of immigration.”
I watched the interview three times. He did not ‘admit’ and he didn’t lie. He also did not ‘endanger’ anybody. This is all narrative. As Vance clearly explained, they reviewed the news stories with Trump to pick the few that best illustrate the concerns their policies will address, then make it a priority to talk about them.
HCR’s turning him into a self-confessed liar IS THE LIE.
But she is not done with the subject. After a few more lies I won’t waste time on, she is quoting someone quoting Goebbels:
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted the support of racist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg of the Nazi Party for the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a text fabricated in the early twentieth century by officials in czarist Russia. Rosenberg stood by the “inner truth” of the text even though it was fake. Like Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote, “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.”
This is by far the best explanation of the
attitude:She clearly considers every single one of her factual lies, distortions, misrepresentations and insinuations justified by the ‘inner truth’ of her message.
And those lies keep coming. I counted 23 in his September 16th post alone, with three more that I would have to research before I can call them lies.
But I want to give you one more, before I finish, to illustrate my final point:
Trump supporter Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, wrote, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he later called a “joke” after observers asked about the national security implications of a defense contractor who has $15 billion in federal contracts suggesting the assassination of the president and vice president. Musk’s post had more than 39 million impressions before he deleted it.
Where is the suggestion? It is a statement of fact. I was disappointed to learn that Musk deleted the post. The point is important and needs to be defended.
We should not live by lies.
Contrary to their aggressively promoted self-image, the democrats are not, and have never been the good guys.
Democrats started the civil war
Democrats have been the party of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation and the KKK
Democrats were the most aggressive opponents of civil rights legislation
Democrat Presidents entered both world wars, both against the wishes of public opinion, both under false or manufactured pretenses.
Most of the presidential assassination targets were republicans
Most riots are perpetrated by democrats or democrat affiliated (and even financed) groups.
Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, BLM have caused BILLIONS in damage.
I cannot recall a single conservative/republican riot.
This is the factual truth. Somehow, you can never see an ‘art-work’ like this from a Republican ‘artist’:
Yet, every post of Heather Cox Richardson is filled with venomous contempt against conservatives and republicans. The big lie we have to live with today, the one that is at the core of HCR’s work is that the left is on the side of the angels while the people of the right are just the deplorable, stupid and evil spawns of Satan.
ANYTHING can be justified if you see yourself and your opponents in these terms.
I tried to understand her, so I watched a few of her speeches and interviews and asked the triple D question: is she dumb, just dishonest or outright dangerous? The answers are sort of, yes and yes in this order.
(and before you object, these are not facts, just my opinion 😊. Unlike her, I know the difference)
What surprised me is the realization of the first. She is very articulate which makes her appear smart. Dishonest, manipulative, but smart. I had to see her live to realize that she is not. By saying that she is sort-of dumb I mean that she sees the world with the blinders of history, politics and ideology. There are several fields and subjects that are essential to understand the world we are living in, but are completely beyond her purview: political philosophy, economics, geopolitics, demography, technology, etc.
HCR published a book recently about democracy. Browsing through the book made me realize that she does not understand the first thing about democracy. She is a possessed ideologue, fully consumed by the most superficial aspects of politicking.
The fact, that she is the most successful writer on Substack
is an indictment of the state of American civilization.
In this conversation: (@ 1:13:05) she says:
… if anybody cares I can tell you that we are not in a horse race election,
we are in a survival of the United States election.
I agree with her wholeheartedly and it will be the subject of my next post.
In the meantime, Live not by lies!
If you share my concerns, then share them widely.
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You've made some pretty astute observations, it is unfortunate that sometimes trying to talk with those who are already convinced of their own personal prejudices that they could be in err, is a losing battle. I sometimes reflect on that Shakespearean quote about: "Above all to thine own self be true, and deal thou falsely with no man".
Who?