Lies are believed because they taste good. The truth is detested because it is sour.

We now can safely assume that the default position of citizens should be that most of what comes out of both the federal and Alaska government are sweet-tasting lies. We could categorically list them, and the lies go back generations.

The past (whether centuries or millennia old) is as real to an historian as if it happened last week. The discipline – no, the science – of history is as fascinating to historians as molecules are to a chemist, and while we certainly admire what a chemist knows, we are less inclined to do so with an historian.

Except for one, age-old adage which everyone accepts: “Those that do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

I used to keep that framed prominently in my classroom as a warning to my students who were lax in their studies. But I have come to treasure an even better one: “We learn from history that man does not learn from history.”

And history tells us that governments lie. It’s a practiced art form.

Let’s start with our local, allegedly prolife Gov. Michael Dunleavy.

Earlier this month, he told a joint session of the Alaska Legislature: “I hope to make Alaska the most prolife state in the country.”

And how does he do this? Did he shake out the leftist elements in his own bureaucracy? When did the Legislature empower government health bureaucrats to promote contraception, abortion and transgender madness? Or to continue promoting the now almost universally distrusted Covid jabs? When did the governor ever sign safeguards into law, or veto threats to our liberties? When did the legislature ever try to override him?

When did he refuse to enforce the overthrow of the State Constitution by the judiciary in its many, always abortion-related rulings? When did he ever ask the State Senate to impeach those judges?

Or perhaps he is borrowing the Leftist definition of what “prolife” means, i.e., socialist programs for free “health” care, housing, lunches, elective surgery and education?

Bureaucracy more or less takes the slow-motion infiltration of evil into our culture, but how about the approach that boldly marches front-and-center and demands immediate attention?

The recent saga of the Chinese spy balloons – floating for the better part of a week over the heartland of America – illustrates the practiced art of evasion and lying that only the federal government can brazenly perform.

“It’s too dangerous to shoot it down.” Oh really? It entered the U.S. over the Alaska interior, the most
sparsely populated region of the U.S.? If you are too squeamish to shoot it down, try getting a
pea-shooter and let it come down slowly.

“It’s spying abilities are limited.”

Question: “Are the American people entitled to know what this balloon is doing?”

Answer: “The citizens can look up any time and see it.”

And in the not unexpected cheap shot against Trump: “This sort of thing happened before with the previous administration.”

I don’t know anything about military capabilities, but it seems like it would have been easy enough to snag it and then reel it in without waiting four days until public and political pressure forced the administration to finally act.

If the traditional form of organized crime were running our governments, we would detest their enriching themselves at our expense. Al Capone once got control of the entire municipal government of the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Pretty bad. But the IRS is a well-oiled protection racket that not only forces us to pay for our own livelihood, but is a political weapon to be wielded against the regime’s opponents and critics.

But these people are worse than Capone, they are traitors. They don’t defend our border, they scatter illegal aliens to all points of the compass in the dead of night, they steal elections on the local and federal level, they have accepted bribes from foreign governments, and now they have apparently allowed several days of preliminary scans of our defense and strategic emplacements within the heart of our continent.

But the excuses – no, the lies – are good tasting, and lead us to think that “Nobody is that bad. Surely, our own leaders would not betray us, would they? We must give them the benefit of the doubt. The media would expose them if they were lying. We can trust them.”

Nothing can break the intellectual stupor of our culture short of a spiritual miracle, and it is in this realm where we are now forced to place most of our priorities. But even there, our American culture in divided.

And that is the most serious and sour-tasting truth of all.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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