Good liars have a grain of truth
A few weeks ago I wrote about a guy who told me “thousands” of people had died from getting the COVID-19 vaccine. I think I know where he got that idea. And it’s just one case of a growing trend.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has an office called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). In 2019, VAERS reported more than 48,000 adverse reaction reports. So that’s where this guy got that number. Note it doesn’t say they died; it says there was an “adverse event.” Aching muscles are an adverse event. But maybe he missed the sentence that explained that. Still, the implication is 48,000 times, some terrible consequence resulted from the vaccination.
Only problem is, VAERS doesn’t even suggest all of those adverse effects were caused by the vaccination. They’re just requests to look into the case. A person who dies of cancer, or in a car wreck, or in a plane crash after getting vaccinated goes into the database. Their website, https://www.cdc.gov/ vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/vaers/ index.html, says specifically the following:
“VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event. A report to VAERS does not mean the vaccine caused the event.”
The actual number of deaths proven to have resulted from COVID-19 vaccinations is THREE (https://covid-101.org/science/how-many-peoplehave-died-from-the-vaccine-in-the-u-s/). Three blood clots, possibly caused by the J&J vaccine.
So how did this person go from three proven deaths to “thousands?” He changed “adverse reactions” to “deaths” — again, without any supporting evidence. And many weren’t even adverse reactions. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Google it.
Good liars anchor their lies in a grain of truth. That makes the lie plausible — especially for people who don’t think critically. Liars in the political sphere depend on the boundless flexibility of the human brain to warp and extend and twist that grain of truth into whatever lie will support their case. Their thinking is of the general variety that says “you can’t prove that it’s false, so it must be true.”
During a taped conversation between Trump and election officials in Georgia, Trump claimed “tens of thousands” of dead people had voted. The basis of the claim: They took each name on the voter rolls and looked for a similar name in some obituary published in the past. Note ABSOLUTELY NO ATTEMPT was made to ensure the person who voted was the same person whose obituary they had unearthed. Joe Smith voted, but Joe Smith died 20 years ago: Voter fraud!
They’re not incredibly stupid; they’re incredibly unscrupulous. Of course they knew the people named in the obituaries weren’t the same as the people who had voted. Georgia’s Secretary of State repeatedly tried to object only two actual cases of voter fraud had been verified, but Trump cut him off, referring to irrelevant and mostly manufactured polling data that implied “he must have won.”
The designation of Democrats as “radical Socialists” is another case in point. Socialism inhabits a broad spectrum of thought from school lunches to nationalizing businesses. Virtually all democrats support school lunches; virtually none support nationalizing businesses. The newly-elected Chancellor of Germany is a Social Democrat, and under Social Democrats, Germany (and most of western Europe) has achieved a higher quality of life (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-of-living-by-country ) than America. (We’re not even in the top 10). And yet liars like Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, and the guy with the turkey wattle under his chin endlessly repeat the radical socialist mantra. Repeat a lie often enough, and the intellectually challenged will believe it.
As the old saying goes, sexual harassment is when an ugly man smiles at a pretty woman. I would know: I’ve been more flirtatious during my lifetime than Donald Trump was, and no one cares. But sexual harassment charges against politicians are often blown out of proportion to make a simple misguided flirtation, or even a friendly touch on the arm, appear to be something sinister and threatening. Guys, especially successful guys, often imagine they’re more attractive than they are, and girls are as drawn to these men as the men are to the objects of their admiration. But if it can harm your chances for re-election, your peccadilloes will be magnified. And you did it to yourself; you left yourself open to it with a harmless little gesture that was intentionally exaggerated or mischaracterized.
The argument “life begins at conception” is another case in point. No it doesn’t. The sperm is alive before that happy moment, as is the egg. But what proponents of that viewpoint are actually saying is the soul — an entity whose existence is a key element of religious belief (and therefore not a suitable topic for legislation under the First Amendment) — is what comes into existence. But to those people who have concluded that the “soul” exists, it seems perfectly plausible. They make that leap of faith effortlessly, in the complete absence of rigorous proof. Saying “life” instead of “soul” sidesteps that unfortunate Amendment, providing you don’t realize they just changed the subject. That’s another way a lie can be built upon something that “sounds” true.
Most of us don’t practice rigorous deductive reasoning. Unscrupulous political operatives exploit that lapse to plant the seeds of ridiculous lies, and count on uncritical thinking to allow that seed to grow into a ridiculous lie that makes voters angry enough to show up and vote. We have two choices to prevent this cheap trick from destroying our country, and one of them is for Democrats to show up and vote; the other is too awful to contemplate.
Les Pinter is a contributing columnist and a Springville resident. His column appears weekly in The Recorder. Pinter’s new book, HTTPV: How a Grocery Shopping Website Can Save America, is available in both Kindle and hardcopy formats on Amazon.com.