From Mueller to Maxwell
There are always new scandals, but the lies remain the same
In March of 2019, Robert Mueller submitted a report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He gave the report to his boss, Attorney General William Barr. The report was perhaps the most anticipated document of its kind in my lifetime, and everyone desperately wanted to know what it said. We were attacked, and we knew it, and we wanted answers. Instead, we were fed a series of lies that have since become the dominant post-attack narrative.
Attorney General William Barr held that report for a full month before releasing it, but the delay is only part of the deception. In place of the actual report, he released a four-page summary that essentially reversed Mueller’s position on every key element of the report. Trump and his cronies took that 4-page lie and turned it into a media blitz, and for a month all of America heard two words and two words alone: Total exoneration.
When the report was eventually released, it no longer really mattered. I mean, we tried to get the real report out there, but as the old saying goes, “the lie gets around the world before the truth gets its socks on.” That’s basically how it went down. These days, “the Russia Hoax” is gospel on the American right, and it is successfully used again and again to paint the criminals as victims. These days, talking heads on the left don’t even defend the Mueller report anymore, even though it clearly says Trump and his team were in bed with the Russians from the start.
Time and repetition – that’s all it takes to make a lie true. Trump knows this, and that’s why we are now listening to audio from a set of staged interviews with convicted pedophile Ghislaine Maxwell. William Barr’s fake summary of the Mueller report and last week’s fake interviews with a woman twice convicted of lying under oath are identical – not in their content but in their purpose. And as much as I hate to break it to you, this tactic is going to work yet again.
We may get more documents and such as the whole Epstein saga continues, but by now we should all know how this is going to go. We saw it when Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and started a 20-year war that killed millions, yet he faced no consequences. We know for certain that he lied. We just don’t care. We didn’t care when Bill Clinton lied to us about Monica Lewinsky, and we didn’t care when Trump lied about Russia. And when I say “care” what I mean is that we didn’t care enough to hold anyone accountable. You might have cared. I certainly cared. But we the people didn’t do anything, and that’s on all of us.
Trump and Barr helped Putin attack the very core of our democratic system, and as of yet, they have faced no consequences. And while it’s possible that raping children might just be disgusting enough to shake us out of this cycle and force us to reject the curated lies and actually hold those in power accountable, I wouldn’t bet on it. Time and repetition have never not worked, and to be painfully honest about it, we simply aren’t the Americans we used to be anymore. Our great grandparents would have shut down the country by now, but we’re not them. We will accept the lies much sooner than we will accept the discomfort that comes from rejecting them.
I don’t know if the Epstein Files will ever see the light of day, but if they do, understand that they will be rejected by many as “the Epstein Hoax” the moment they become public, a significant percentage of our friends and neighbors will immediately dismiss them. And if you happen to disagree, I’ll leave you with two closing thoughts. First, I hope you’re right, and I hope I have never been more wrong. I hope I get to write a follow up to this in which I admit my mistake and throw myself on your mercy. That would be a great day for me.
But whether it’s Bill Clinton, George Bush, Donald Trump, or Jeffrey Epstein, everything tells me that we are going to eat this lie like we ate all the others.
Please, America – prove me wrong.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
Yeah we know. The orange monster’s consigliere covered his ass and kept the plan in place.