Lies You Were Taught in School

You’ve been lied to.  That’s the hard truth.  We instinctively trust our teachers.  We believe them and believe they are teaching truth to us.  So, when confronted with this assertion, our first question should be did they lie knowingly or unknowingly?  Did they intentionally deceive you?  Probably not, at least not in grades K12.  They were probably repeating what they had been taught in college or what the textbooks said. They didn’t question their teachers either.  What lies have you been told?  There have been at least three and we’ll take them in order of importance.

The first big lie is that the United States Government is a Democracy.  You’ve all heard the sayings, “Democracy dies in darkness!” and “…our Democracy.” And my personal favorite, “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our Democracy!”  Well, it’s about time somebody was!  Because we don’t have a democracy and we never have.  Thomas Paine in his revolutionary pamphlet, “Common Sense” said, “Democracy is the vilest form of government.”  (Of course, Communism hadn’t been invented yet.)  What did he mean?  Democracy is mob rule or, as noted Economist Dr. Walter Williams often said, “The tyranny of the majority.”  No, our Founding Fathers created a Republic instead.  In fact, the word democracy is not found in the U.S. Constitution, but the word Republic is.  Article IV, Section 4 reads, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this union a Republican Form of Government and shall protect each of them against invasion…”  Finally, our Pledge of Allegiance says, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands…”  We have a Republic!  Now you know more than the multitude of lawyers and judges who signed that recent letter to the editor attempting to rebut Fred Harrison and the Freedom Caucus.  They couldn’t get three sentences written without saying, “Our constitutional democracy…”  Ignorance saunters onward.

The second big lie you may have heard is that the Founding Fathers were Deists, that is they merely believed in a god.  This is false.  By far the majority of them were Christians.  Of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, 53 out of 57 were members of Christian Churches of various denominations.  Members are distinguished from mere attenders.  Membership required taking vows or oaths, which were taken very seriously and with warnings to be telling the truth.  Our Founders believed in the God of the Bible.  Our foundation as a nation is the Bible.  The three branches of our Government are derived from the Bible, Isaiah 33:22.  The 10 Commandments are the foundation for our system of morality and for our laws.  That’s why they are displayed at the U.S. Supreme Court.  If you served in the Military or hold public office, you took an Oath of Allegiance which ended, “So help me God.”  This is the God of the Bible.  We have had Chaplains in the military since George Washington was General of our Army.

Here’s another lie you were told.  Senator Joseph McCarthy, author of the “Red Scare,” and whose investigations of subversive Communists embedded in the U.S. Government happened in the early 1950s, was a crackpot who saw a Communist under every rock and behind every tree.   I know I was told that one, and I halfway believed it for many years.  But something happened in 1996 that changed my mind about Senator McCarthy: the Venona Papers were declassified.  The Venona Project was a Top-Secret U.S. Army Intelligence effort that successfully broke the Soviet Code during WWII.  It was so secret that even President Truman was not informed of it.  Army Intelligence operatives intercepted and read all the secret Soviet communications with their spies, including some employees of the U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury Department as well as others.  The revelation of this information vindicated Senator McCarthy’s efforts for the most part, though like all of us, his efforts were not perfect.  He definitely was on the right track.  You can read an excellent summary of the Venona Project in the book Treason by Ann Coulter and a detailed analysis in Blacklisted by History, by M. Stanton Evans.  Either of these make fascinating reading.  

Finally, if you are searching for Truth, read the Bible, which is the Word of God.  It is Truth.  Oh, by the way, here’s another lie that I was told by a teacher of mine, “Algebra is going to be FUN!”