Don't Lie to Me

Chapter One

HERE’S MY OPEN

We are in the fight of our lives.

It’s a fight between good and evil, and a fight between truth and lies. From the beginning, the Left has been waging an all-out war against President Trump. They have attacked him with every weapon in their arsenal, and he’s still standing, facing them down like no other man possibly could. Over the years, their attacks have only grown in intensity and frequency. When he was a candidate, they tried to convince us that he was racist and sexist. When that didn’t work, they told us that he was Russian agent and a Putin puppet. When that didn’t work, they told us that he had illegally meddled in the affairs of Ukraine, obstructed justice by trying to defend himself, and committed a thousand offenses against the Constitution along the way.

These were lies, plain and simple.

The liars, leakers, and liberals were lying to us then, and they’re lying to us now.

What we have witnessed since the beginning of 2020, from the anxiety over the coronavirus from Wuhan, China to the shameful politicization of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, shows that the liars are determined to create havoc and chaos in an effort to stop the reelection of Donald Trump. Somewhere deep in the consciousness of the Left, they know that if President Trump manages to beat them back one more time on election night on November 3, 2020, pulling off an upset victory on the heels of the worst economic crisis that this country has faced since the Great Depression, their efforts will have been for naught.

That’s not to say that they won’t try, of course. I am always amazed at their capacity to invent false narratives and distort the truth.

But think about it: Considering what they’re doing right now, how could they possibly get any more radical? For weeks, Americans saw the virus level as well as the mortality rate drop, and for weeks, Americans begged to be let out to go to work. As I write this, there are violent riots occurring nightly in several major US cities, and the leaders of those cities, nearly all of whom are Democrat mayors, are allowing the violence to occur and continue and insist that the feds be removed from their cities. In states like New York, Michigan, and Illinois, liberal governors flex their pathetic muscles by not allowing law-abiding citizens who peacefully protest to return to work, and they force them to remain indoors. They bully us when we say otherwise by claiming we don’t value human life. When we say, “We should open up,” they act like we’re saying, “I want your grandmother to die.” Yet these same governors and mayors allow protestors to gather by the thousands in the streets without any concern for the virus. In fact, they celebrate the protests.

Even the public health community lied to us. Either that or they simply weren’t competent enough to recognize the truth when it was right in front of their faces. From the beginning, they told us that two million people would die if we didn’t shut down the economy. They told us that the coronavirus could live on surfaces for weeks, that we needed to scrub our groceries with bleach, and that we needed to wear masks everywhere. They told us that the virus couldn’t be transmitted from person to person, a lie that we would later learn was spread by China with the help of the World Health Organization.

Now, they’ve gone beyond lying. They’re so brazen in their efforts to control us that when the hypocrisy is blatantly obvious, they simply say that social gatherings for social justice, although risky, are worth the risk.

In fact, on June 5, about 1,200 of the country’s top public health experts, who, up to that point, had been telling us that remaining inside and staying away from other people was the only way to stop the coronavirus from spreading, wrote a public letter essentially endorsing the widespread protests. In this letter, they said that they were perfectly fine with the protests.

In fact, they wrote that racism is a greater threat to Americans than the coronavrius.

“As public health advocates,” they said, “we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for coronavirus transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”^{1 2}

Over the course of a few weeks in the United States, it became effectively illegal to play catch with your son outside, go to church, or open your business, but perfectly legal to loot, riot, and throw bricks through windows. Suddenly, it was frowned upon to stand in front of your state’s capitol building holding a sign reading OPEN UP, but it was perfectly acceptable to put on a ninja outfit, throw milkshakes at people you disagree with, and assault police officers whose only goal was to make sure the protests remain peaceful.

The Left allowed social distance to give way to social justice.

So, my advice? If you’re going to head outside during what remains of this pandemic, be sure to pack a picket sign with a hatchet handle, some bricks, and a few Molotov cocktails. If you don’t take these precautions, someone might think you’re breaking the law.

A LIBERAL’S PARADISE

In some cases, rioting in the streets hasn’t been enough for the liberal mob. Neither has looting, burning down buildings, or assaulting members of the National Guard. In some cities, the mob has attempted to take the streets, too.

In Seattle, it worked. There, on June 9, a group of militant Leftists overtook a six-block section of the city and claimed it as their own. In a statement, they announced that you were leaving the United States. The Seattle police precinct was turned into the people’s precinct.

In this Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, first known as CHAZ before it was changed to CHOP, for Capitol Hill Organized Protest, we have seen a small example of how far the Left will go to satisfy the progressive extremists and surrender our cities to them. Even as groups like Antifa, a pseudo-military organization of anarchists and Leftists who run around in all-black garb with backpacks full of light weaponry, have moved in and conquered large swaths of our cities, most of our liberal leaders refuse to criticize them. Whether they agree with them or are afraid of being called racists, fascists, or—even worse—beneficiaries of white privilege, they’ve allowed chaos to spread throughout the United States of America.

When Jenny Durkan, the Democrat mayor of Seattle, was asked on June 11 how long she thought the autonomous zones would remain in her city, she reacted like she was at Woodstock.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We could have a summer of love!”³

Well, Jenny, perhaps you might want to get together with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray, who’s said that New York City without the NYPD would be “nirvana.”⁴ But do us a favor, won’t you?

Leave your police protection behind.

So, you have a right to ask: If these people don’t want to live in the United States anymore, where do they want to live?

Well, I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you what they want. According to a list of demands published on June 9, the men and women (and nonbinary, gender-nonconforming citizens) of CHAZ/CHOP would like the police completely defunded and abolished. They would like to see all prisons emptied and then shuttered for good. They would like all African American people currently serving prison sentences to be retried for their crimes (which is going to be difficult, considering that they have also demanded that all courts of law be shut down). And even if some people were convicted, there would be no jails to put them in. The residents of this autonomous zone have also demanded that prisons be replaced with restorative, transformative accountability programs. I guess victims should be on notice that they need to have a “transformative accountability session” with their rapist. After all, if these lunatics were ever to get their way, rapists wouldn’t be going to prison.

I’ve often said that if you want to know how a Democrat is going to run this country, you don’t have to do much thinking—or, God forbid, elect one of them. All you have to do is take a look at some of the cities they’ve already been allowed to ruin. In places like San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit—all of which have been under Democrat control for decades—you’ll find some of the highest crime rates in the nation. You’ll also find homelessness on a mass scale, as well as broken needles and human feces in the streets. In fact, according to a list published by Business Insider earlier this year, you’ll find that the ten most dangerous cities in the country are all run by liberal Democrat mayors.⁵ In Baltimore and Detroit, two liberal strongholds, the murder rate is higher than in El Salvador, Guatemala, or even Afghanistan.

If you want that for your city, then by all means, cast your vote for feckless Joe Biden. If this appeals to you, then run out and buy yourself a ninja outfit and see if you can get in touch with Antifa.

The Leftist liars and hypocrites will tell you that they hate walls, and yet the first thing they did to secure their un-American utopia was erect large barriers to keep out “fascists.” They’ll tell you that private citizens shouldn’t be allowed to own guns, which should belong only to members of law enforcement. Then, they’ll tell you that members of law enforcement are a bunch of violent, racist thugs who shouldn’t have guns, either. Then, when it’s time to give someone the job of protecting their newly made city from outsiders, they stationed armed guards at the gates with AK-47s, rifles, and sidearms.⁶

Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that when they say “fascists,” what they really mean is anyone who doesn’t buy into their deranged, radical agenda. To them, you’re a fascist. So am I. Their use of this term, which is a real word with a real meaning, has become so watered down over the years that it includes virtually anyone who disagrees with them. According to the platform of Antifa, words are violence, and anyone who says words you don’t like is a fascist.

In fact, as the Left gets more and more radical, you’ll find that there are very few people they don’t think are fascists. In the beginning, it was only Donald Trump and a select few of his advisors. Then it was anyone who worked for him. After some time passed, it was anyone who supported him, and then it was anyone who was friends with anyone who supported him.

Clearly, these whack jobs live in their own little world, and you are not a part of it. Nothing can be done to appease them. Just ask Mayor Durkan, who tried and failed to make concessions to the liberal mob. During the early days of the protests, she let these radicals do whatever they wanted to do. While they were destroying the city, she babbled on about a “summer of love.” When President Trump criticized her for it in a tweet, saying that the violent takeover of Seattle had to end, she responded “Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy.”⁷

Less than two weeks after she sent that tweet, the violence began to ramp up. As President Trump predicted, once the looting started, the shooting started. Police, to their credit, previously chased out of their precinct, responded to a 911 call of a shooting as the anarchists refused their entry.

The nineteen-year-old shot that night died. There was no crime scene preservation, no interviewing witnesses; there would simply be no justice in this so-called nirvana. Within 48 hours, there was a second round of shooting in the CHOP zone. Then a third and a fourth. One of those shot seeking victim status actually claimed the police who had tried to enter repeatedly and were stopped and pelted, claims the police didn’t respond quickly enough.

Seattle police then actually released a five-minute video showing police and emergency responders being prevented by a violent crowd from getting to the victim.

Finally, Schizo summer of love Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan asked the occupants to leave—very politely, and without much force. In response, the squatters refused, threatening business owners with retaliation if they even painted over their graffiti.

Only when the protestors showed up in Mayor Durkan’s own front yard, holding signs and threatening her property for a change, did she take action. The morning after the protestors held a rally in front of her house, the mayor gave police the full authority to break up the CHOP zone for good.

It was clear within hours.

Today, Capitol Hill businesses and residents are now suing the mayor over the handling of CHOP Zone, claiming that she and the city effectively authorized the actions of these anarchists. And this woman is so tone deaf to the damage she facilitated that she’s started her reelect 2021 mayoral campaign early.

THE PETRI DISH

For years, we have been living in a petri dish of lies, deceit, and the makings of a violent revolution.

We began to get a sense of it during the Obama years, when the economy was at an all-time low and many of us felt like things would never improve. Everything seemed out of sync, and every day we were lied to.

We were told that 1 percent GDP growth was “the new normal,” and that the economic recovery was moving along at a normal pace, while many Americans were working two or three jobs just to keep food on the table. We were told that ISIS was in full retreat in the Middle East and that our military was more capable than ever of dealing with them. Meanwhile, ISIS was expanding, and the generals on the ground knew it. Obama was calling for a reduction in army staffing to pre–World War II levels. He refused to call radical Islamic terrorism by its proper name, choosing instead to refer to “acts of terror,” using a smokescreen of euphemisms and politically correct phrases.

Anyone who dared go against him, such as Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, who testified in front of Congress that Al Qaeda was not in any kind of retreat, was marked for retribution and rewarded with an undeniable target on his back.⁸

During the Obama years, things that were blatantly clear to us were steeped in smoke. When a man named Nidal Hassan stepped onto a military base at Ford Hood, shouted “Allahu akbar,” and opened fire, killing thirteen people and wounding twenty-eight, we were told it was “workplace violence,” not terrorism. Even though Hassan carried business cards that said “soldier of Allah,” the liberals refused to see what was right in front of their faces.⁹ In Obama’s mind, adherents to the religion of Islam were a persecuted minority in this country, and it would have been politically incorrect to suggest that their religion had anything to do with terrorism.

On September 25, 2012, two weeks after the attack on our embassy in Benghazi that left four people dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, President Obama addressed the United Nations, saying “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”¹⁰ The comment perplexed me for years, but it was at a national prayer breakfast a few years later that he made it even clearer. There, he told Christians to “get off their high horses” and take a hard look at the shameful acts that had been committed in the name of Jesus Christ.

During those years, we were told to be sensitive to people’s feelings—we were told not to say anything that might be offensive to anyone. America watched as its younger generation, recently out of high school and college, was offended by words and ideas. It was the beginning of a new paradigm where the First Amendment gave way to political correctness, when facts gave way to feelings. Young people dictated what others should think, and they threatened social condemnation for anyone who didn’t fall in line. On social media, this would become known as “cancel culture,” a system in which anyone—even those who agreed with the Left’s insane dictates more than 99 percent of the time—could be excommunicated and scrubbed from history for saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, or even thinking the wrong thing.

We first watched this play out, ironically, on college campuses, places that were supposed to be the bastions of free speech. At the University of California at Berkeley, offended students broke windows, burned cars, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to property. At other universities, students on the Left shut down speakers and incited riots whenever someone said something that hurt their feelings. When a group called Antifa—short for “antifascist”—began showing up at these demonstrations in small numbers, infiltrating peaceful protests, and inciting violence, anyone who was concerned about them was dismissed.

It wasn’t just physical violence, either. At Evergreen State University, students held a “day of absence,” demanding that all white students and faculty stay home for the day, recording anyone who didn’t comply and posting the videos on social media to shame them. In those days, we knew that the “woke” revolution was a problem on college campuses, but we thought it was contained. We thought that once these students headed out into the real world, getting jobs at institutions like the New York Times, Google, and Twitter, they would adapt to the ways of the world.

They didn’t.

Instead, these oversensitive students went out into the real world and insisted that the world adapt to them, not the other way around. Rather than shedding the lessons they had learned in college—about how their feelings were all that mattered and that all conservatives were evil fascists—they doubled down, putting blinders on that blocked out the real world. Some of these former students got jobs at big tech companies in Silicon Valley, where they have been censoring the speech of conservatives using complex algorithms and other shadowy practices. Others went into media, getting jobs at major news outlets like the New York Times and CNN. With these people at the helm, the mainstream media grew even more radical than it had been during the early years of the Obama presidency.

Long before we had even heard of the coronavirus, an epidemic known as Trump Derangement Syndrome was spreading—and this generation was patient zero. Under their influence, our media institutions began blaming Donald Trump for anything that went wrong.

In their eyes, President Trump—a man who rebuffed political correctness and identity politics—was dangerous. That’s why the liberals expended so much of their energy trying to remove him from office. From the moment he announced he was running for president, it began. They wrote books alleging he was incompetent, dug into his private life, and attacked members of his family and his administration, but none of it stuck. Meanwhile, President Trump never did anything other than give it right back to them, knowing that his astounding record of success would be the best revenge.

For that, they hated him.

All the Democrats could do was sit around, lob more baseless accusations at the president, and hope that something—maybe a meteor or a global pandemic—finally appeared to stop President Trump from succeeding.

Then, out of nowhere, a virus arrived from Wuhan, China—a virus that would halt the country’s economy, wreak havoc on our lives, and finally give the Democrats something to hold against the president in the lead-up to Election Day, as if he had brought it to the country himself.

For Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the rest of the liberal establishment, it was perfect.

In fact, this virus couldn’t have been any more perfect for the Left if it had come wrapped in shiny paper and a bow, with a tag that read: TO: LIBERALS, WITH LOVE, CHINA.

GOING VIRAL

With the coronavirus came the perfect opportunity for the Left to continue its effort to tear down America.

Suddenly, governors and mayors on the Left could force people inside, stop them from working, and make sure they were dependent on the government for everything. It was like a Leftist fever dream. During the pandemic, people were dependent on the government not only for money, which came in the form of unemployment checks and a small one-time stimulus payment, but also for information. Every morning, people were glued to their television screens, looking to their mayors and governors for answers. In the evenings, they would turn to President Trump’s briefings with the Coronavirus Task Force—when the liberal media wasn’t cutting away from the president in mid-sentence, of course.

During the pandemic, the governors and mayors of this nation had all the power. Although President Trump had made the decision to shut down the economy, he left it up to the governors and mayors to decide whether they would reopen. There was nothing else to do, and there was nowhere else to go—not legally, at least.

In some states, nearly all of which were run by liberals, these attention-seeking politicians seized power and had a very hard time letting it go. All over the country, people who had been exhausted by Sleepy Joe Biden’s failing attempts to finish his own sentences looked elsewhere for a liberal hero. In New York City, they found one in Andrew Cuomo, the governor who had never done anything for them. During the pandemic, though, the people of New York seemed to forget all about his past transgressions.

Even when Governor Cuomo signed an executive order that forced thousands of people who’d been infected with the virus into nursing homes all over the state, a decision that caused the deaths of ten or eleven thousand people who we knew were the most vulnerable, the liberal media fawned over him. Even when he wasted time conducting ridiculous interviews with his brother, Chris Cuomo, on CNN, arguing about who makes better meatballs and who has the bigger nose, they kept airing his press conferences. Within weeks, these press conferences had become a shameful vaudeville act that made a mockery of the people who were dying of the virus. But the higher-ups at CNN didn’t care. All that mattered to them was ratings.

Meanwhile, reporters on every mainstream media network pushed the lockdown with an almost evangelical zeal. They bombarded us with images of mass graves, packed hospitals, and graphic photographs of people on ventilators. They told us that more than two million people in the United States could die, a number that would later turn out to be based on bad science and faulty modelling.¹¹ Every day, the media warned us about the dangers of not wearing a mask—of course, that was after they told us we didn’t need to wear a mask—social distancing, and not doing your part to stop the virus from spreading. Chris Cuomo, who suddenly became one of the most watched anchors on cable news during the first months of the pandemic—before his ratings took a big nosedive in late May—was among the worst of the guilt bullies on the Left. After it became clear that the curve was flattening and people could go outside again, Cuomo took to the airwaves to scold New Yorkers for daring to go for a stroll in the park.

“We are deceiving ourselves,” he said on CNN on May 5 as he put up pictures of people sitting in Central Park in Manhattan. “Look at these fools. Fools! I know they wanna be out there. Fools! It’s not about you! What about the other people? Look, I’m not gonna castigate you. That’s not my job. I’m not your daddy, but we have to think about this. We are rushing to get back out of want, not just out of need… beautiful weather does not make for a beautiful reality.”¹²

By the way, at the time Chris Cuomo spoke those words, he was sitting in his house in the Hamptons. He had a job, and he never had to worry about losing it.

In the interim, many people lost everything. Businesses closed, many of which will never reopen. The emotional toll, including depression and suicides, got much worse during the pandemic. Victims forced inside with their abusers and unable to get out caused domestic violence numbers to increase dramatically. Abused and neglected children, who often found respite going to school, suffered physically and emotionally locked at home with an angry parent.

The Left used the virus to stop us from going to church and synagogue. They used it to stop us from seeing our friends and burying our loved ones—those who died from the virus or one of the many afflictions that were ignored during the pandemic.

In liberal states, the rules about what we could and could not do were often as ridiculous as they were harmful. Had the situation not been so deadly serious, these rules might have been comical. In places like Michigan, for example, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer ruled with a tyrannical hammer, people could still go out and buy alcohol and marijuana whenever they wanted. To her, those businesses were considered essential.

As for churches and synagogues? Not so much. The Left’s disdain for Christians was evidenced by the fact that many pastors were given tickets for violating social distancing orders when they tried to hold services for those people parked in their cars in parking lots.

During that time, it seemed as though the lockdown might never end. The Left had gotten a taste of power, and they were never going to let it go.

ON A DIME

With every day that leftist politicians continued their hold on our states and cities, extending their lockdowns well past the point of medical necessity, small businesses in America suffered. Many bars and restaurants, which often operate on very thin margins, were forced to close their doors for good. In the small towns of this country, many of the family-owned stores that had been fighting a losing battle with big corporations for decades finally had to give up the fight. The big corporations took in billions of dollars in profit every year; they could afford to weather the pandemic and still pay their employees. Small businesses, many of which barely make enough money to cover rent and labor in the best of times, could not.

One of these small businesses was a restaurant in Minneapolis called Conga Latin Bistro, which sits on Hennepin Avenue on the south side of the city. In 2014, a man named George Floyd had come to Minneapolis from Houston, where he’d worked at a church helping people find housing, to become a security guard at the restaurant and start a new life.¹³ However, when the pandemic hit the United States and restaurants all over the country were forced to shut down, Floyd lost his job. In March, he found himself in the same position as millions of other Americans: He was broke and out of work, and most of the places where he would normally have looked for work—the nightclubs, bars, and restaurants around town—were closed down indefinitely.