QUESTIONS OF CONSPIRACY

The Gang’s All Here

There are many forms of conspiracy of which average citizens have some inkling or suspicion, despite, or perhaps because of the concerted mendacity of government officials and agencies, including our military bureaucrats.  Particularly since the Biden administration took control, world politics and military relationships have become more dangerous, more conspiratorial and far more difficult to control, let alone understand.  Naturally, Americans are much more nervous and feeling isolated, as we probably should.  With China encroaching on our spheres of influence and on numerous allies like Canada, Columbia, Panama, African nations and Europe, itself… even Hungary, the “world” seems to be ganging up on the U. S.

This is a rather abrupt turn of events.  One has to wonder if it’s all a matter of incompetence and lack of understanding, or if key power centers in the U. S. are executing a plan.  Can these questions be answered?

  1.           Was Covid-19 a strategy or unfortunate accident?
  2.           Is the widespread “legalization” of very dangerous marijuana and the      onslaught of lethal drugs flooding our neighborhoods, just wretched capitalism or an element of intentional weakness that makes sense to some people?
  3.            Is the attack on Ukraine part of an “approved” plan by globalists to weaken NATO and the U. S.?
  4.            Is the “attack” on oil and gas in the U. S. part of the same plan?
  5.            Where did the basic plan to expand “transgenderism” among grade-schoolers originate?
  6.            How is it that major hospitals suddenly coordinated with the LGBTQ+ agenda and public schools to begin performing transgender mutilations and sterilizations?
  7.            Is the pressure to give virtually everyone from age 5 and up the modified RNA injections part of a larger objective of weakening individual freedom, lower general health and possibly population control?
  8.           Who, or what country(ies), actually benefits from the dramatic changes in  U. S. monetary and immigration policies?
  9.           Who, or what country(ies), benefits from election fraud?
  10.  Who, or what country(ies), benefits from soft-on-crime policies in major cities?
  11. Who, or what country(ies), benefits from high inflation in the U. S.?
  12. Who, or what country(ies), benefits from restricting food production – reducing fertilizer use and sequestering productive acreage?

These are all rather sad questions to be able to posit.  How could so many negative policies suddenly descend upon our nation and people?  Can they all be parts of tragic, unavoidable coincidences?  Or, could they be coordinated from… well, somewhere?  Someone?  Some group?

Can we put much credence into the idea that Joe Biden, a man whose mental state requires guides and “handlers” at all times, actually believes in what he says or does, or that he thought up the set of policies he has put into action?

Or, God forbid, but not an impossibility, is it possible that leftists/globalists in the United States’ “deep state” have considered the evolving relationships and power of Red China, the problems and responsibilities of American freedom and nationalism and the blandishments of the World Economic Forum in terms of a financial control model of vastly smaller populations, and decided that the only answer to the possibilities of wars and nuclear conflict is to throw in with the W.E.F. and establish a global government able to negotiate with, and even coerce China into coexistence?  Perhaps systemic treason has been sold to the oligarchy as salvation.

THE PAINTING CALLED LIFE

Listen to the Artist

Politics is more than pointing out the lies of others, Prudence indicates.  So too is how people and societies organize themselves and their governing structures and technology.  Even more, so too is religion and ideologies of various kinds: much, much more than pointing out the lies of others.  There are larger pictures to take in and analyze and critique.  After all, do artists lie?  Are they, then, no longer artists?

Life is art… or at least the creation of an artist – an artist who tries to teach his/her subjects how to expand and beautify the painting in which they reside, on ever better canvas and frame, and in brighter, truer colors.  Life is the basis of the greatest artist’s greatest work.  Eventually life takes us to the edge of the canvas and what we call death results, but death is not the basis or the subject or the purpose of the painting.  Death dealt for selfish, craven reasons before the edge of the canvas is reached, destroys not only a bit of life but the integrity of the painting.  It’s source and perpetrator must be expunged, cleansed from the art that is life, for it/he/she has no place here.

Details of the art of life can be studied and understood a little better, and a little better, and a little better, still.  Important to the beauty of the multi-billion points of life that comprise the fulgent artwork of life on Earth, is freedom to act in concert with the artist’s intent.  Were there no options, no imagination, no whimsy, no beautiful choices, then the painting would be dull in color and harmony, smaller and devoid of love, the one color that is always the hardest to mix or apply, and the most vivid.

Holding the whole creation together is the love of life.  Here and there, created in love but, somehow, twisted to love death, itself, bits of life, humans, develop the love of death and the “art” of dealing death.  They claim to abhor terrible, brutal, violent death, yet do nothing within public policy to put a stop to it.  On the other hand, the same people use public policy to accelerate hidden, “life-saving” death, like abortion and vaccination.  That’s where the art of death exists, first from euphemism and then, only in unseen places, by terrible, brutal violent death.  In either case, the very presence of death-lovers amidst the beautiful artwork of life causes the artist’s paint to bead up, unable to blend or enrich the near-perfect painting alluded to; it leaves blank, colorless blemishes.

Freedom, or the absence of freedom, is like that: devoid of color, particularly vibrant colors of creativity, joy and charity.  Humans are designed for and have evolved to flourish in an environment of freedom – we’re “tuned” to what we consider to be beautiful and harmonious – and there are “rules” for being free.  Without the rules, which are not limitations, in application, but better described as guidance, humans can easily slip into license and corruption, both mental and physical.  Where this tendency has begun to concentrate we can see that the inherent beauty of human evolution has been dulled, and created still more areas where the artist’s paint has beaded up, failing to mix and blend and enrich the entire picture.  We have names for these “rule-breakings.”

The first name describes corruption of the heart; we call it hatred.  It has many manifestations, but all of them must be taught, it turns out.  Every cultural tradition seems to include an identification of the “first hater,” which is the same as saying the “first liar.”  Lying to other humans is an act of hatred: hatred of the inherent beauty of another human.  It declares that the hater who is doing the lying has no respect for the value and integrity of another person… or even of a country full of other persons.  Hatred is very easy to spread around when haters don’t even realize they are hating others, and when they may not even realize they’re telling lies!

So, the simplest form of heart-corruption is lying, but it’s not always a matter of lying to others: humans can be led to lie to themselves.  That’s an environment wherein there is neither much debate nor alternatives based in pure truth.  A small initial lie, like “this drug will make you happier,” can lead an inherently beautiful human to tell him- or her-self that he or she is not worthy of the beauty that others still enjoy.  Nothing good flows from that belief.  Even worse, rather than trying to convince such “lost” people of their inherent beauty, political forces try to make reinforcement of the new self-lie much easier.  It’s called respecting “civil rights” but it is an ugly perversion of the beauty of human life.  It also seems to be contagious, tending to infect younger and younger, beautiful humans.

At some point, societies develop a means of “enforcing” the rules of freedom so that the greater “good:” the maximum number of humans being able to survive, grow, create and have successful families and children, is assured.  Except for those whose freedom is stripped from them for varying degrees of failing to follow the rules of freedom, the enforcement paradigm works fairly well until a fresh lie is introduced: enforcement “hurts” too many people.  The political/police enforcers are quickly led to still another form of hatred-lie: “hurting so many of our fellow humans is not who we are as a people” and that ending a lot of enforcements is the “right” thing to do.

Now the artist’s beautiful painting becomes even more dull and hard to look at by humans who are still mostly beautiful… and hard to understand, as well.

Soon, because political power and re-election trumps everything, confused humans are led to hate those who refer to rules of freedom as being anti-freedom: the worst of all sins.  The defense of “freedom” for those who are already in the business of lying, readily morphs into the defense of licentiousness, at which point every person or institution who defends adherence to the “rules” for freedom, is identified as an enemy of “freedom” or of “democracy,” neither of which is defined.  The evil intent of anyone opposed to them, however, must be virulently opposed.

We can Prudently see, now, that hatred is more than the first name of rule-breaking: it’s the only name of rule-breaking.  It manifests as lying, and therein lies the complexity of hatred: the myriad kinds and styles of lies that are told to us and by us.  The struggles between truth and lies describe most of human history.  Prudence thinks humans have become LESS truthful over the centuries that have led us to today.  Certainly this is true for the United States.  Can we keep excusing lies from various groups, agencies and institutions simply because the liars believe what they are saying?

The great painting called “Life” is still beautiful, but becoming less so at a frightening rate.  The single metric of suicides teaches us that increasing numbers of humans no longer perceive any beauty in living.  The great lie of abortion has blazed the trail… no – blazed the 8-lane expressway toward death as a “solution” to the problems of life.  Great, ugly swaths of the painting have beaded-up, unblended colors that look muddy rather than vivid, because of abortion.  Will truth ever overwhelm the hopelessness of abortion?

Nearly as much of a blemish on the painting called “Life” are the compound lies of transgenderism.  Here, the merchants of Death convince very young people to commit “suicide of the self,” even as they convince their parents that those same merchants are “educators,” preparing their children to be successful citizens of the United States of America.  Each child was born to be a certain person, a certain soul, and to conquer the challenges for that person, male or female.  Instead they are coached to either become sex objects at grade-school ages, or to “kill” their selves by undoing their sexual being with a grand pretense that it is possible to believe two diametric ideas simultaneously.  It is a means to living a lie, also destroying reproductive viability.  As it has spread through education in many states and countries, the painting has become duller, with sharp edges between vibrancy and death and dullness.

The elements of vibrant, vivid paint, including the color of love and not of death or hatred, still exist, and there are yet a few million of the artist’s apprentices still active and available.  We who are given the opportunity to co-create our painting – which represents a lot of faith on the part of the artist – often lose sight of the harmony and natural beauty that we have taken for granted.  For a hundred reasons we insist on trying to blend ugly, dull colors, believing that our odd intentions will render a better beauty than that created for us by the artist.  Yet our ugly paints keep beading up and leaving growing patches of ugly dullness amidst the original beauty.

Still, we push on, insisting that we know better than the artist of our life painting.  As the blemishes expand, those stuck in the ugliness try to blame the co-creators of beauty for the contrast, as though reducing the overall quantity of beauty and harmony would make everyone feel accepted and grant equity to all.  To their dismay, however, the rules of freedom don’t allow for it and, to the purveyors-of-ugliness’ horror, those are the rules of beauty, as well.

…No Weight at All

If broadcast words could be weighed, it seems Prudent that they would amount to a great, ponderous weight… and more than weight, a great mass possessed of a great inertia.  Fortunately, since most have no “God particles,” they bear no weight at all.  The God particle of speech is a mix of logic and sense or, put another way, reason and truth.  When enriched with God particles, speech carries a lot of weight, influence and ability to move vast nations, like ours.  We used to call it “common sense” but it is so uncommon, now, that we rarely hear that term.

So it is with most pronouncements and policies emanating from the federal government under the Biden administration.  Daily, and sometimes more than once a day, the Biden regime states a policy that is questioned only by a few, with most of media agreeing with leftism, and almost inevitably it is a policy that cannot be justified on logical bases or on (uncommon) sense.  A very clear example of this phenomenon is “Biden’s” (read: Obama’s) open borders policy and relaxing of immigration laws.  Millions of people have flooded (read: invaded) our nation while the Biden administration states that “…the border is secure…”  There are neither logic nor truth connected to this policy.

The ”Green New Deal” is a prime example of this process of misleading.  The “GND” is a lie based on a lie, but elevated to spiritual truth despite the near absence of “God Particles” in any of it.  There are truths nearby to it, but they lead in a very different direction from where the “Greens” intend to force humanity.  To start, the degree of human impact on the rate or type of “climate change” is immeasurable, as in unquantifiable, and our ability to alter it is unknown, if any.  Hence, it is completely illogical to destroy societies and standards of living in order to “fix” climate change.  Climate has been changing for as long as there has been an atmosphere on Earth: warm, cold, ice ages, sweltering swamp and warm oceans, dry, wet and every mixture thereof.

The major effort of the “GND” is the changing of energy sources from so-called fossil fuels (and nuclear) to so-called “renewables’ or “natural” energy sources.  The problems with this “conversion” grow destructive because the proposed alternatives are available only intermittently.  The green theory depends on wonderful batteries to capture energy when it’s available.  Such batteries are very ecologically “dirty” to make and to later recycle.  When all the energy inputs are calculated to make (now) lithium-ion batteries, and to create, erect and maintain solar and wind-power collector/generators, there is no advantage or even equivalence to the ecological cleanliness of our cleanest and most efficient uses of oil and gas and even coal.

However, leftists have adopted the green new deal as the best way to replace the capitalist, free-enterprise economy.  If it hurts the majority of Americans it seems to be of no concern of theirs, if not their intent.  Their claim is that we must “decarbonize” in a decade or so or the planet will be destroyed by climate change and we’ll all die.  Human life is based on carbon.  Decarbonizing includes, in “green” theology, that there are too many people as well as too many cows, and too many farms using too much fertilizer growing food for too many people.  It’s not a pleasant concept.  Still, if we discard most of the progress civilization has made, both technically and politically, the Green gods will be pleased and will make the Earth more perfect for those people self-judged to be better than most and deserving of longer lives.

Our Military posture is another source of abundant fallacy.  Any policy that involves “woke” theories of racial and sexual identity is fundamentally untrue, yet both now appear to govern “military” thinking and practice.  We annually entrust hundreds of billions of dollars to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military branches, ostensibly to keep the country protected by maintaining overwhelming strength and prowess, both technological and human.  Instead the Pentagon has elected to cater to trangenderism – its own body of fallacy, if not phallacy – equal rights for women, a mixed bag of strength and weakness and waste, and politicized medicine, to wit, mandated “vaccines” that don’t work and risk the health of personnel.

The vaccine mandate error, alone, has cost thousands of trained – expensively trained and experienced – soldiers, sailors, airmen and women, and marines, their positions “in” the military.  What a stupid waste.  Clearly there is no capacity for admitting egregious errors by top “brass” or their civilian counterparts.  Altogether, over the past several years, their efforts have weakened the U. S. military.  It seems that this is failure of the grossest order.  Has anyone lost his or her exalted ranked position for this failure?  Not that Prudence can recall; with a group of relatively unintelligent far-leftists holding executive power since January 2021, we’re not likely to hear of any in the immediate future, either.

Just the egregiously damaging withdrawal / retreat from Afghanistan in August of 2021 should have resulted in a dozen or more high-level firings and resignations.  The only person forced out of service is a Lt. Colonel who had the temerity to point out the multiple failures being executed in that withdrawal.  Shame on us for tolerating, even rewarding such stupidity; shame on us for electing “executives” who employ stupid ideologies for U. S. policy.  God save us.

One Lie, Two Lies, Three Lies, Four

One way to look at our current national condition is from the top of the Mountain Of Lies.  It’s a better viewpoint for observing the accumulating effects of dishonesty upon the health and strength of the nation to which it is dished on a literal daily basis.  Sometimes there is illumination provided by organizing lists of items that share one or more parameters.  It will be Prudent to consider the entirety, if not enormity of the following list of lies on which Americans’ lives depend:

LAW.  Our history and culture are replete with real and literary conspiracies based on subversion of laws.  To Prudence, undercutting the law is the worst of all lies.  Peace, safety, freedom and life, itself, depend on honesty in matters of law.  It is still worse when it leaves the individual level and seeps into “official” policy and action – denying or subverting the law, that is.  We can see the scope of damage that official lying can do, by reflecting on the completely fabricated “Russia” conspiracy that politicians and law-enforcement agencies attempted to pin on Donald Trump before he won election as 45th President, and through much of his administration.  Subverting federal laws only expanded after that.

A few people lost their jobs at the FBI, but, so far, not their pensions!  The message is that anything illegal done against Donald Trump is not considered to be nearly as bad as illegal acts taken against some other American citizen.  Yes, you broke the law, but it doesn’t bother us enough to apply legal sanctions – wink, wink.  Subversion of law: one of the worst kinds of lie.

But, unfortunately, the unprecedented crimes against Trump are not the worst in terms of how the citizens of the U. S. are besmirched by government lying.  We have to look at immigration and border policies and practices since Joe Biden signed that stack of executive orders on January 21st, 2021.

U.N. and U.S. rules for “refugee” and “asylum” status are pretty loose, subject to multiple steps of acceptance despite previous errors or even untrue/fraudulent applications.  A judge can always accept some claim of good reasons to submit fraudulent statements in order to obtain safety unavailable in their country of origin.  In other words, it is subjective at almost every step.  Those who hyperventilate over “loopholes” in tax laws are singularly unconcerned about the sieve of loopholes in immigration law.  Interestingly, many of the possible claims for asylum are based on non-binary sexuality.  However, there are laws and regulations that govern the processing of asylum claims and of asylees, themselves.  These are being ignored at the President’s direction, leaving millions of illegal entrants in our country with virtually no way for our erstwhile protectors to monitor or arrest them when they fail to appear for “hearings” required by law.

It’s all part of “Progressives’” intention to dissemble our Constitutional Republic.  Every person connected to the Biden administration who comments on “the border,” has lied about it, and quite consistently.  Those are bad lies, sure enough.

We could also bring forth the mendacity surround “Covid” and ersatz vaccines, but there’s only so much we can include, here. See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/08/26/if-you-knew-covid/

LEGISLATION.  Once upon a time in Washington, representatives of the people and representatives of the states would diligently research and debate, in both Houses of Congress, the federal budget.  Presidential administrations would cook up budgets with their own plans and hopes, including the increased spending inevitably required by each and every one of the 1,000 or so executive departments, offices, agencies and “black” projects.  Congress, politically, would dissect parts of it, replace parts of it, gain hours of news coverage about their essential work, and eventually pass some form of it, including myriad political advantages for the parties holding some level of power: earmarks.  And, always, plenty of “pork.”

The two great sources of power in Congress are 1) Spending; and, 2) Taxing.  No matter how motivated or honest a new congressperson may be, fairly quickly he or she becomes either purposefully corrupt or casually corrupted by the systems of Congress.  The orientation process for newbies includes explaining why it is that what each feels is the right thing to do… cannot be done.  In order to accomplish a small bit of what spurred the campaign to enter Congress, much has to be compromised.  That is the economic dynamic of Congress – not right or wrong, but bartering for good and not-good.  With the number-one goal of everyone in both Houses being re-election, the barter system quickly becomes bartering to gain re-election benefits.  Voting on the so-called “budget” offers dozens of barter opportunities, and so it goes.  It is inherently corrupt and corrupting, which means that our fresh new representatives – House or Senate – must lie to us at their first opportunity.

Then, there are the aggregations of spending and taxing ideas that are given names like, “The Inflation Reduction Act.”  These mountains of malarkey cut and pasted by the “power brokers” who then present a 1,000-page or 3,000-page pile of words with hundreds of new “laws” included and call for a vote within 24 or 48 hours.  No one can read or understand the implications all of it before voting, yet there is a great trumpeting of accomplishment.  Most of the time prior to the vote is spent by each “yea” voter to find something – anything – that he or she can tell constituents was “accomplished” for their benefit, including how their representative “fought” for them against the evils of Washington.  Still, where’s the truth?  There are $31 Trillion in the national debt that display 65 years of great lying to American citizens.

IMMIGRATION:  No country is a greater magnet for emigration than the U. S.  Despite the constant Marxist drumbeat of “systemic” racism, imminent murder of blacks by police and unfair incarceration of pathetic, somewhat innocent or non-responsible prisoners, people of color flock to our southern border by the millions.  Some just walk in and say the magic words claiming asylum.  Our Border Patrol officers spend virtually all of their time “processing” the flood of people from up to 100 countries(!).  In The meantime, about 25% as many as claim asylum escape through our poorly secured border, carrying tons of fentanyl and other drugs (drugs that kill over 100,000 young Americans every year) as well as carrying plans in some of their heads to commit terrorist attacks.

It is one of the prime responsibilities of a President and administration to prevent these very circumstances.  For a government to NOT fulfill this obligation requires two forms of “untruth:” 1) a purpose other than protecting the United States or its citizens; and, 2) a constant barrage of utter lies about the “secure” status of the casually breeched southern border, supporting the pretense of an administration that is fulfilling its vows.  Typically, there is a penalty to pay for lying, much more so if the lie causes injury or cost to the subject(s) of it.  What sort of penalty is appropriate for this grandiose lie?

The upshot of this close-to-the-worst-of-lies is that about 4 MILLION illegal entrants are scattered across the country.  Each of them is a living, breathing, expensive lie.  Along with them are the nearly 1 MILLION “gotaways” who evaded apprehension thanks to President Biden’s utter… no, purposeful… failure to complete the border wall, which would at least have channeled prospective entrants to limited points of entry.  They are all lies, too, whose very presence implies some sort of right to be inside our borders.  That there is no such right for nearly all of the 4 MILLION and the 1 MILLION, simply compounds the grotesque lie this administration has been telling American citizens.

COVID:  This compendium of lies began 10 years ago as the great Dr. Anthony Fauci funneled NIAID grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research on the SARS-2 coronavirus.  He has denied that purpose, of course, which simply shows that lying is common in the federal government’s hundreds of agencies.  Fauci’s NIAID agency of the CDC earned millions in royalties from helping Moderna develop its mRNA “vaccine” (the vaccine that doesn’t prevent infection, doesn’t create immune response and doesn’t prevent contagion), which Moderna was working on in Wuhan months before the world heard of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19.

Interestingly, the only response to Covid infection was – and still is – “vaccination.” All other treatments, some very effective, have been suppressed and discussion of them censored.  Reputable scientists estimate that half a million American deaths can be blamed on failures to treat Covid with known anti-virals, immune boosters and supplements.  Individual personnel within the NIH are allowed to earn royalties from numerous pharmaceuticals they helped to research, including the slickest liar of all, Dr. Anthony Fauci, reportedly the highest-paid employee in the federal swamp.  Lying about Covid must have been the most lucrative scam he’s had.  To really push the mass vaccination program that was part of a tawdry, essentially worldwide scheme, great fear had to be fomented, and locking down the country from most business activity fitted in perfectly with that goal.

First, though, the “Friends of Fauci,” recognized scientists all, conspired to flood medical publications with false opinion papers that claimed, uniformly, that the origin of the ENGINEERED SARS-2 novel coronavirus came from some natural evolution that workers at a “wet market” in Wuhan city were exposed to.  Real virologists, like Fauci, can identify the Furin cleavage site in the viral chain where other genes were added to the original SARS virus.  Yet the papers went forth at Fauci’s direction to confuse politicians and divert attention from the financing of the exact research – begun in the U. S. and shifted to Wuhan – that made COVID-19 so infectious.  Lies have consequences.

COVID killed a lot of people, although far fewer than statistics claim, and nowhere at a higher rate than in the United States!  How could that possibly be?  We certainly have a right to know.

In effect, the pandemic here was handled politically, not medically.  Fauci and others inside the deep state, beholden to big Pharma, and PROFITING from them, advised federal and state governments to impose useless and actually harmful steps, locking down economic and social activities, ruining family economics and, worst of all, forcing protocols on hospitals that ignored known treatments and caused the deaths of thousands who could have survived.  It seems criminal.

As the so-called “vaccines” were introduced, the lies became greater.  The definition of “vaccine” had to be changed to include the weird chemicals that comprise mRNA shots.  Pushing them as vaccines was and still is comforting to the average “emergency use” recipient, now pushed down to infants and children.  Unfortunately, nRNA shots don’t prevent the disease, they don’t prevent infecting others, and they don’t instill normal immune response.   Oh, and they don’t last long in their one effect: mitigating the “severity” of infection.  As one gets into “booster shot” country, the effects dwindle to a month or two.  The shots are utter failures as vaccines and immensely successful as money-transfer agents.

But, wait!  There’s more!… or less.  The shots are dangerous to humans!  You’ve seen the ads, over and over, telling the trusting that COVID vaccine is “effective and safe.”  Some mothers couldn’t wait for them to be available so that their kids could be protected from a disease that is of nearly ZERO threat to them!  Zero as in NO THREAT!  Why force an experimental drug known to damage children to the point that they are at greater risk from the injections than they are from the disease?  I’ll tell you why: FEAR and two years’ of lies from our helpful government.

Other lies… well, let’s talk about IMMIGRATION.  Anyone in this administration or Congressional Democrat who happens to get a question about the “control” of the border with Mexico, lies.  No one stands out as telling the truth about this one issue.

President Biden is virtually never asked about the border – that’s left up to his press flacks: first Jen Psaki and now the incomparable Karinne Jean-Pierre.  On August 29th reporter, Peter Doocy asked “KJP” why tennis star Novak Djokovic cannot enter the United States to play in a tennis tournament because he ‘s not “vaccinated” against Covid, but migrants can just walk into Texas and Arizona unvaccinated and are allowed to stay?

Jean-Pierre’s response was that just walking in was not how it works.  When corrected of that notion she stated that “…it’s not like that you can’t just walk over and…”  And so it goes in the great mendacity machine that is the Biden administration.

Prudence has asked before: Where do we turn when our own government lies to us?