Liars (24 page)

H
illary Clinton was doomed, and she knew it.

Trailing by double digits to a crazy-haired, wild-eyed, unrepentant socialist in every New Hampshire poll, she had little hope of turning things around. Time was too short. Bernie Sanders's crowds were too massive. The architect of the first effort to cram socialized medicine down America's collective throat was on the defensive, preposterously, as insufficiently radical.

With just days to go before the vote, this was no longer a fight for victory in the first primary state. This was a fight for her reputation. A fight for her political soul.

For most of the campaign, Senator Sanders had worked hard to define himself as the only true “progressive” in the Democratic hierarchy. That wasn't too hard for a radical who had been an apologist for Marxists around the globe for decades, cheering them to victory against the United States.

In the 2016 race, Sanders proudly dubbed himself the most “progressive” member of the U.S. Senate and suggested that his opponent, Clinton, was
a “moderate” and a sellout. No charge could be more
deadly in a primary dominated by modern-day hippies, race- and gender-obsessed victim groups, jobless millennials, union thugs, and the permanently aggrieved.

So on February 3, 2016, as Clinton climbed onto the stage in the tiny town of Keene, displaying her fiercest glare and donning her most formidable pantsuit, she expressed “disappointment” that Sanders would deny her the title of “progressive.” Her record in such matters should be beyond question, she contended to a crowd of her supporters. As her spokesman later put it, “You would be hard pressed to
find a more accomplished and passionate progressive.”

Days later, standing only a few feet from her political nemesis in an MSNBC debate, she again laid claim to the progressive label. “I am a progressive who gets things done,” she said, adding,
“The root of that word—‘progressive'—is progress.” Secretary Clinton noted that in Sanders's view, even Barack Obama might not be a progressive.

As it happened, the president himself took umbrage with that suggestion only a few days later. At a speech in Springfield, Illinois, where eight years earlier he had all but claimed to be this century's Abraham Lincoln, Obama announced that he was a progressive, too: “I am a progressive Democrat. I am proud of that.
I make no bones about it.”

Which leads to the question, which of these three is the real progressive?

Easy. They are
all
progressives. The whole lot of them—Clinton, Sanders, Obama, and their allies in Washington, D.C. Progressives have hijacked the entire Democratic Party, which was once the proud political party that elected the tax-slashing and fiercely anticommunist John F. Kennedy as president. So, too, have they hijacked most members of the Republican Party, whose leaders are perfectly content to accede to the progressive status quo of a federal government that intrudes into our lives and confiscates our property daily. They deny
this, of course, but that's because progressives are accomplished liars. The terms go hand in hand.

And that's what we're going to explore in this part of the book: the deceit that is used as a tool to stir and exploit fear. All of their lies prey on our most primal emotions: envy, jealousy, loneliness, and, above all else, the terror of death. Whether it's “rising oceans” that will swallow our coastal cities on account of melting ice caps, or “automatic assault rifles” that will be used to murder us all, or “income inequality” that will turn us into paupers, the Left has perfected the art of the Great Lie.

The Great Lie actually starts with word
progressive
itself. They constantly mislead about what it actually means. They want you to believe that progressives are basically forward-thinking liberals who believe in democracy, open debates, free thinking, and looking out for their fellow man. They are harmless leftists. You know, like the Swedes.

As Clinton herself noted, the root word of
progressive
is
progress
—and progress is a good thing, right? With each passing year, we have more miraculous innovations that extend our lives and make them more convenient. We have more scientific discoveries that reveal truths about subjects from the farthest reaches of the universe to the makeup of the smallest atomic particles. All of these are evidence of a species on the march. We move forward, not backward. Who could be against that? Who could stand in the way of that kind of “progress”? Why would anyone not call himself or herself a “progressive”?

This is one of the arguments that makes progressives so sinister. They harness the best marketing terms to mask the insidiousness of their ideology. To protect the Great Lie.

Progressives claim that they stand for the future. The truth is that progressives actually represent the oldest impulse known to mankind: the will to power, to dominate, and to exploit. At the heart of progressivism
is a deeply regressive ideology, one that eliminates individual freedom and makes men serfs and slaves.

Progressives claim that they are basically warmed-over liberals. The truth, as you've seen in the history of the founding fathers of progressivism, beginning with Hegel through Marx and Wilson through LBJ and Obama, is that progressivism is the
opposite
of liberalism, at least as it was once properly understood. Liberals—philosophers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith—invented the idea of individual freedom. This idea captured the imaginations of a generation of freedom fighters born in thirteen colonies some three centuries ago. They took those ideas and put them into practice with two radical documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Theirs was a reaction against centralized government, a revolution of the individual against the collective.

But progressivism stands for the idea that freedom isn't enough, that voluntary cooperation and the free market and individual rights do not work. To improve the quality of life for everyone, government must intervene with rules and regulations. Progressivism is the salve for the struggle, pain, and anxiety of living in a difficult and unpredictable world.

Progressives claim to fight for the average man. The truth is that most of them have both pity and contempt for human beings. They see the rest of us as machines that can be tinkered with and perfected. They believe they know what's best for everyone. They think that if we submit to the government expert-determined progressive agenda—which included disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South in the late nineteenth century, prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, eugenics and eliminating supposedly defective races (which animated Hitler's campaign of extermination in the 1930s and '40s)—we can create utopia. They believe that under the banner of “social justice” we can, in effect, become God, that they can create heaven on earth. It may take centuries or even longer,
but gradually, generation by generation, progressives can do it. If patience is a virtue, progressives are the most virtuous people on earth.

Progressives claim to believe in a compassionate, tolerant, live-and-let-live society. But in fact, the heart of progressivism lies in two core principles:

• Individual and human society is perfectible, and therefore all problems known to man have solutions.

• An enlightened few can impose these solutions on everyone else.

Both principles are obviously false. The first runs counter to everything most of us believe about human nature, selfishness, and sin—not to mention plenty of historical evidence that men living today are just as capable of depravity and evil as they were millennia ago. The second principle, a kind of tyranny of good intentions, is deeply antidemocratic. It rejects most Americans' fundamental belief in human equality.

Ideas have consequences. And no idea may be as catastrophic as progressivism. Progressivism spawned socialism, communism, and fascism. Many of the greatest evils of the twentieth century—Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin—share their ideology, their belief systems, and their motivations with the progressive movement, the very same movement that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to claim as their own.

In what follows, I'll go through some of the more common lies we hear from progressives or about the progressive ideology. I'll use their own words to show you the lies, and then I'll take each of them apart using facts, logic, and common sense.

LIE 1

I will use every single minute of every day, if I am so fortunate enough to be your president, looking for ways that we can save lives,
that we can change the gun culture.

—HILLARY CLINTON, 2016 CAMPAIGN

This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe.
This is how we will be judged.

—BARACK OBAMA, UNVEILING NEW EXECUTIVE ACTIONS ON GUN CONTROL, 2013

In the spring of 1922, a group of men in sober dark suits met in a small hotel ballroom a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. At the head of a square table sat the meeting's leader, a small-framed, unassuming man wearing wire-rimmed glasses that perched above a neatly trimmed mustache. He straightened his papers in front of him, cleared his throat, and read a short prepared statement to the group of assembled government officials of the Prohibition Bureau:

We have made good progress in our efforts to forever stamp out the scourge of human inebriation, having won an Amendment to our beloved Constitution making the manufacture and ownership of
liquor as illegal as the ownership of Slaves. However, as long as any of our fellow citizens remains trapped by their inability to resist the temptation to drink, there is still more we can do to protect our citizenry, and their wives and children.

He read on to the silent group and proposed a plan that would help ensure that the government could both identify and “treat” those citizens who still violated their hard-won temperance laws. It was simple: they would add poisonous wood alcohol to bottles of whiskey and then make sure those tainted bottles made their way into the speakeasies and back-alley bars that had popped up across the country in response to the Eighteenth Amendment. When people broke the law by consuming the whiskey, they would get extremely sick or even die, enabling the government to identify lawbreakers and also to discover exactly where alcohol was still being distributed.

The room of federal-government employees listened, nodded, and then left to go dutifully about the business of poisoning and killing thousands of their fellow citizens.
ⁱ

Eighty-seven years later, government officials of the successor agency to the Prohibition Bureau—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)—initiated a program to sell assault rifles to known gunrunners and drug traffickers. The plan was simple, at least in theory: by arming drug warlords with traceable firearms, they could identify the chain of black-market firearms dealers who were enabling drug dealers to be so heavily armed. The government agents set about the work of stamping out the sale of deadly weapons to known murderers . . . by selling deadly weapons to known murders.

Just more than a year after that, an officer of the U.S. Border Patrol was killed in the Arizona desert by Mexican criminals. Assault rifles
provided to the assailants by the U.S. government were found at the murder scene.

We've met the small-framed, unassuming man in glasses described in the first scene before. His name is Wayne Wheeler, the progressive “dry” zealot who, while not a government official himself, essentially functioned as the United States' Prohibition czar. In 1921, Wheeler handpicked a former ally in the Ohio temperance movement, Roy A. Haynes, to be the nation's official Prohibition commissioner.

“Through Haynes,” according to historian John Kobler, “
Wheeler controlled the Prohibition Bureau.” Wheeler was a strong proponent of providing poisoned alcohol to America's illegal drinkers, reasoning that “the person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide. . . . To root out a bad habit
costs many lives and long years of effort.” In the end, the government is estimated to have
poisoned some ten thousand Americans.