Long ago, I heard someone say the following: “Even if they catch you in bed with another woman, you deny it.” Never mind that it’s wrong. At the time it sounded ludicrous. Deny something you’re caught in the act of doing??
As ludicrous as it sounded back then, it has strangely come to fruition in the last several years.
On November 2015, Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter at a political rally. Clear cut, right? Everyone makes mistakes. Except he didn’t. He was “caught in bed with another woman,” but no he wasn’t. All who heard and saw the video are wrong.
On January 2021, a mob of people attacked the U.S. Capitol building, resulting in several deaths, injuries, and property damage. They were seeking to overturn the election results. Clear cut, right? It’s all on video. Except it wasn’t. It was a (cough) peaceful demonstration, according to Trump himself and many GOP Minions… err, I mean… government officials.
We live in a new era where lying does not have to be veiled, disguised, or subtle. Blatant lies are in. Not only are they “in”, but they are also eagerly gobbled up by followers who are only too happy to perpetuate the cultish environment. Oh wait… did I say “cult”?
How else to describe what is going on today? Much to the dismay of those of us with intelligence and moral values.
We should have known back in 2017, when then White House press secretary Sean Spicer infamously claimed that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest ever. Spicer has since regretted the claim, but at the time it set the precedent for blatant lying.
Pictures showed otherwise, although “photoshopping” had long been around by then. The point is that Spicer was able to blatantly lie, while keeping a straight face. (I have always maintained that he would have been better served by diminishing the importance of the crowd size in the overall scheme of things).
So here we are. Where blatant lying is the norm, and photoshopping and AI video generation can only help to make blatant lies more believable to an ever-growing gullible audience.
What a sad state of affairs…