Steyn: A Blizzard of Lies

As I've been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies

New Official Lies are being set in place. Over a year after Chairman Xi shipped the WuFlu out of the International Departures lounge to every corner of the planet, his enforcers at the World Health Organisation are ruling out any theory of its origin that might embarrass their Politburo masters.

Happy Presidents’ Day – or Presidents Day (the style is variable) – to all our American readers. You can find our two-part forty-five-song Presidential Medley here and here. Usually, after the mostly-peaceful peaceful transfer of power, I update our special to take account of the new guy – in this case, the purported forty-sixth. But for some reason, this time round, I just thought, aw, screw it.

~As I’ve been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies: Covid-19 originated in bats or pangolins. New York did a way better job of handling it than Florida, and Andrew Cuomo’s official stats are on the up and up. It’s totally racist to refer to the “Chinese Coronavirus” but not to “the UK strain” or the “South African variant”. There was no election fraud on November 3rd, but there was an insurrection on January 6th. And there are troops on the streets of the American capital to prevent a QAnon uprising on the old inauguration day of March 4th.

Some of the lies are, however, being quietly withdrawn, having accomplished their objective. In my opening monologue on Thursday’s Fox News Primetime, I said the following:

All but one of the five dead from January 6th were Trump supporters, felled by strokes, heart attacks; one poor lady was shot at near point-blank range by a police officer and was promptly memory-holed by the US media. The nearest thing to a Trump kill was Brian Sicknick. Here’s how America’s alleged newspaper of record, The New York Times, reported that story:
‘He dreamed of being a police officer, then was killed by a pro-Trump mob.’
The reporters were Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tracy Tulley:
‘On Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters… overpowered Mr Sicknick, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.’
‘Falsehood flies,’ said Jonathan Swift, ‘and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…’
The falsehood flew on the wings of The New York Times for weeks, and the Tale has had its Effect: there are millions of Americans who will still believe three decades hence that Officer Sicknick had his skull smashed by Trump supporters wielding a fire-extinguisher.
There was no such fire-extinguisher. No ‘bloody gash in his head’, per the Times.
The Truth, meanwhile, is not limping along after the Times falsehood. The Truth is still walled up in the DC pathology lab, unknown to the world.
If you’ve ever been at a crime scene, as I was once long ago, you’ll know the policeman always wants to know the cause of death immediately and the pathologist always wants to get the body back to the laboratory for a proper examination. Certain things can be ruled out in an hour or two – blunt force trauma, for example.
In other words, the fire extinguisher was known by officialdom to be a crock even as the Times published it.
Certain other things might require a couple of days or weeks – that’s because you have to take tissue samples and send them away for analysis, for traces of poisons or cancers. It is rather unusual in a functioning jurisdiction (which I certainly don’t regard the District of Columbia as) not to be able to tell you the cause of death after well over a month. The investigators’ latest theory is said to be bear spray. Bear spray is basically a weaker version of pepper spray, and it’s not known to cause human fatalities. And in any case, if Officer Sicknick had been exposed to bear spray, that should have been known to medical examiners four weeks ago.