News Flash: Conservatives Lie!
But why is lying so fundamental to conservatism?
Have you noticed that conservatives lie? If not… by George, you may be a conservative. Or simply just not paying attention.
If history were taught correctly anywhere, which it’s not, every student would learn how wrong conservatives have been for the past, oh, five thousand years… at least. Not just factually wrong… but, far more importantly, morally wrong. To put it in historical terms, conservatives have permanently situated themselves on the wrong side of history… and truth.
Were you taught that conservatives killed Socrates? Conservatives killed Jesus? Conservatives killed Hypatia (and burned the great Library of Alexandria)? Conservatives killed Bruno? Conservatives killed Joan? Conservatives killed Olivetsky? Conservatives killed Campion? Conservatives killed Hus? Conservatives killed Askew? Conservatives killed Cranmer? Conservatives killed Latimer? Conservatives killed Manz? Conservatives killed Vanini? The list goes on and on and on and on. How were they killed? Oh, you know the usual: hanging, beheading, garotte (strangling), drowning, burned at stake, boiled in oil, quartered. Vanini’s tongue was cut out, then he was strangled, then he was burned… guilty of blasphemy.
Conservatives persecuted Copernicus, Galileo, da Vinci, Spinoza, and many, many, many other scientists and philosophers. Meanwhile, American conservatives have run amok into utter depravity over and over and over again. And now again! Look at us… the United States of America, the current second (after Russian) leading nation terrorist!
Every stitch of moral progress the world has ever made was achieved by the liberal, i.e. “sharing,” impulse. And each and every one of these little stitches was opposed, often violently, by conservatism: the Ideology of Selfishness.
Read that short paragraph again. It’s one of the most black and white truisms in all of human history. It’s a stunning revelation. It’s the essential warning for each and every culture. It’s both human history and human nature… in a nutshell. And you probably never learned it… possibly up to this very moment. And some of you (ahem, conservatives and some mushbrained “centrists” who also struggle to discern good from evil) will reject it out of hand.
But the truth is crystal clear. The record, yesterday and today, is atrociously inarguable. And so we have a clue as to why the lie.
Conservatives have to lie. They have no choice. They have to cloak both their past doings, and their current schemes.
History is a real problem for them. That’s precisely why conservatives are so keen to rewrite, ignore or deny history. And why they are so uncomfortable around science, art and higher learning. It’s why some conservatives particularly discourage “too much learning.”
Too much learning might just inform about that hidden history, as well as the latest hidden agenda the conservative elites are plotting against humanity and the world. The conservative rabble, often kept in line by religion, are fine with both efforts, dumbly unaware that they, too, are on the chopping block.
It’s all in the service of not God or country or “family values,” but selfishness.
As pretty much everyone has probably experienced, the selfish child is willing to do pretty much anything to obtain (or retain) some advantage over the other kid(s). Most of them have heard about how sharing is better for everyone. But they don’t like this idea. They don’t care about “everyone.” They prefer to indulge their selfishness. But how?
The best friend of toddler tyrants, criminals and conservatives, which are all pretty close to one and the same, is… lies.
That makes sense, then, right? The Ideology of Selfishness is, innately, going to be based upon… lies.
Preschool bullies, as Donald Trump freely admits he was and has never changed, quickly learn how to lie, and are frequently astonished by how well they get away with it. It cannot be said that proudly and defiantly still a preschool brat Donald Trump is bad at everything. He’s certainly bad for everything and everyone else, but he will go down as one of history’s most successful serial liars. He lied himself right into the White House… twice. And he discombobbled and confabulated over 70 million idiots to vote for him, the most votes for a Republican in American history. See, lying works! If enough people are gullible enough.
Your next problem, if you’re still thinking clearly, is how does this happen?
The answer is also kindergarten-level simple. The liar lies to serve his selfishness… and it turns out that there is no shortage of people eagerly willing to believe his lies… so long as they think there is something in it for them. So the believers believe in order to serve their own… selfishness.
Hey! What a pairing! Willing, sometimes skillful, liars… and eager believers of such lies. There is a socio-economic-political-religious clan for such perfect partners: conservatism.
Of course liars have a heavyweight enemy. Can you guess what that would be? Bingo, you got it: Truth.
Truth has a penchant for not going away. It can be doubted, it can be denied, it can be denigrated, it can be danced around, it can be ignored, it can be hidden, it can be exiled, it can be called out as stupid (you know, not “common sense”), irreverent, blasphemous, unpatriotic, treasonous; it can be shut down, scorned, tortured, put to death. But it turns out only the messenger was harmed, or killed… the message, truth, is immortal. Sooner rather than later, it will be back, stronger than ever.
Truth bugs conservatives… that’s why they are its perennial tormentors. They overwhelmingly prefer to believe in myths. That’s why they are suckers for religion, the most convoluted and harmful myths ever invented by humans. If you can believe that hooey, you can believe anything. And believe they do… usually without a scintilla of skepticism, of wondering, of questioning, of pushback, of critical thinking, nor (regularly) a single soul in their tiny orbit there to suggest any other option.
All myths are not created equal. Some “myths” are poetic or literary allegories depicting real truisms. They can teach us valuable lessons about humans and the world and how the twain doth meet. These are not the myths conservatives champion. Instead, they self select (and vice versa) some of the most untruthful stories known to humankind, with mean and dastardly “lessons,” cruelty and violence as “good,” life as cheap, innocent people and other living things as fodder for exploitation and/or destruction, and supernatural beings breaking the laws of nature and strictures of any reasonable morality with impunity. And these are not to be assumed “allegorical” or “symbolic” by the fundamental believer, but rather as rock-solid truth, actual events and real people and deity, doubted at the peril of shunning or death, and dallying with anyone of a different viewpoint on these essential matters tantamount to the greatest of treason!
Religion is just a subset of greater conservatism; you don’t need religion to be conservative (as Stalin and Mao plainly proved), but it has served as a great beacon and model to elite liars through the ages who have noted the ease at which it profitably packages and sells its own lies. Confident audacity, grandiose promises, solemn, stern delivery, existential consequence, rote repetition, aires of superiority and righteousness, rites and rituals, pomp and circumstance, loyalty demanded, carrot and stick reward/punishment, authoritarian leadership… all like honey (which actually turns out to be glue) for the hive mind.
Psychology and neuroscience are overflowing with scholarly studies that prove that conservatives and liberals have very different brains. Conservatives think with their amygdala, the primal fight or flight response part of the brain; liberals think with their prefrontal cortex: the brain’s more advanced critical thinking module. Again, the question becomes: Nature or Nurture?
A little of both it would seem. Humans are animals. All animals are selfish. Humans are inarguably the most selfish animal that ever lived. No other species has become such an insatiable predator, so fouled its own nest, repeatedly conducted the most horrific torture and terror campaigns against its own tribe, kills other life forms just for the thrill of it, and has brought the planet to multiple possible (many would say likely) end-time scenarios: including nuclear or global warming extinction of civilization as we know it.
At the same time, social animals are capable of trust, cooperation, sharing, compassion, altruism, sacrifice for the tribe, or even for each other.
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So are we born to be conservative or liberal? Or are we taught to be?
The human brain is the most complex thing we know of in the Universe. It’s far from a “blank slate” when we are born, as once was postulated by some researchers. Tens of millions of years of species (plural) awareness is encoded in our DNA. As any mother will concur, we have a “personality” when we pop out into the world. We have instincts, desires, curiosity, feelings, consciousness that did not just click on with our first breath… it was all baking in the oven of the womb, and will continue well into adulthood, possibly, if we are open to it, the rest of our lives.
It’s perfectly likely that some people are born hard-wired to be selfish, to be the toddler tyrant, and never really grow up. Some of these will end up hardcore criminals. At least one will become President of the United States. But far more human infants are like a yeasty dough. What kind of bread they become depends upon what other ingredients (i.e. “culture”) are added.
Here’s the crux. All social animals crave to be social, to belong. Humans didn’t invent culture, almost all social animals have a culture of their own. And being true to that culture is critical to survival. The individual has to accept culture to be accepted by culture. This formula is written in our DNA.
So it’s both natural, and easy, for individuals to acquiesce to whatever culture demands. The problem with human cultures, as opposed to other social animal cultures, is that ours are often largely cray-cray.
Animal cultures, while wildly colorful and funny, to us, is that they are rooted in the real, natural world. They work well for that species, otherwise, that species would be extinct. With our big, “superior” brains, a whole lot that passes as “culture” for human clans has “jumped the shark” (literally and figuratively) beyond the natural and into the realm of absurd fantasies and wonderful/awful whiz-bang technologies. Indeed, we have inadvertently decoupled from natural, biological evolution, and for the past five million years have been culturally evolving instead. That’s what has kept us from going extinct (though it did not save the other species of hominins that we likely pushed beyond existence).
Of course, we should say this cultural evolution has saved us from extinction… so far. There’s every reason to believe that it won’t be too long before we off ourselves by way of environmental, military, or perhaps some kind of plague-ish catastrophe we selfishly mishandle, taking thousands of other species down with us. Odds are very good that this very self-important group, this sanctimonious, sermonizing, “God’s favorite creation” will end up a colossal cosmic joke.
And it’s all because of “culture.” Many and much of which are based upon… lies.
Cultural lies are impossible to ignore; they are omnipresent… and incredibly enticing to a majority of citizens. Being conservative is so easy… you just fall into line. You just conform. You become an automoton. No thinking required. In fact, best to not even try. Just believe, and do, what you are told. Don’t ask questions. Don’t think questions. Trust us. We are the authority. We are the moral compass. We are the good guys.
Those “others,” whoever they are, are different from us; they don’t look like us, they don’t act like us, they don’t believe like us; they cannot be trusted; they are dangerous; they are the bad guys; if they could, they’d attack us; better we just attack them first, or just distance ourselves from them… forever.
This is the essential worldview of the conservative. Their primary emotion is selfishness, which prompts the escalation of greed, anger and fear. It’s a rather primal existence, but lacking the limited scope of real damage that any other animal could manage. Yet the peer pressure within conservative communities (real or artificial) for this type of acquiescense, indoctrination and uncritical conformity can be extreme. And once one has been shown to their cul-de-sac of belief and locked into the echo chamber, anything at all that seems to counter the “good” narrative is going to be rejected.
Alas, this peer pressure enforces the conformist worldview, which makes ever renouncing it almost impossible to conceive for most conservatives. To deny even one of the lies, could commence a cavalcade collapse of not just belonging, a place in the tribe, but of the very identity of the self.
I know. I went through this very process. Thankfully, my own tribe wasn’t that conservative, or religious, and they had failed to lock the door to our cul-de-sac while succeeding in leaving bread crumbs of books and ideals laying around where I could find them and follow them straight onto the true spiritual seeker’s pathway. Still, it was painful “losing” myself, giving up cherished notions and the self-satisfied glow of just living for your own selfishness, justified by some vague “superiority.” Only later did I realize what a pathetic and meaningless, much less morally bereft, identity that actually was.
The challenge must be much more difficult for those so far wedged into the cul-de-sac and echo chamber that even the awareness that there are other, better, pathways never gets past their amygdala.
We are living in a time where the cognitive dissonance and moral depravity of that castle of lies is being revealed to a degree almost unimaginable just a few decades ago. Through much of modern history (since the Enlightenment), conservative lies had to be soft-peddled to a large degree. There was a recognition that strict statements that defied science or evidence or modern “sense and sensibilities” would result in recrimination for the sect or group. The American conservative political establishment, itself, spent a lot of energy attempting to subdue its more audacious fringe, like the John Birch Society and fundamentalist religious sects, soas to rebuild trust amongst the American voter (after the Republicans had been thoroughly disgraced for causing the Great Depression).
But we should have known better. History teaches us that conservatism, unrestrained, will always get worse. Now, it’s happened. Again. The demagogues, the rogues, the outcasts, the worst of the worst, the true conservatives have gleefluly ripped off the band-aid to reveal the cancerous rot that was there all along. And the lies are flying more fast and furious than ever before (thanks to social media and the ever consolidating and expanding conservative mediasphere).
The Washington Post counted over 30,000 lies by Donald Trump during his first term as president. It ceased counting when he left the White House, and by the time he was re-elected four years later, a conservative billionaire owned the Post and was no longer interested in such public service. So by now, we can figure that he has easily uttered over 100,000 lies since he barged on to the political scene with the big lie that Obama’s birth certificate was fake. Now imagine the millions of lies that have spewed from the great American conservative disinformation machine! It buggers comprehension.
But it’s key to the conservative strategy. Indeed, it’s the only way they can succeed. They lie to divide and conquer. They lie to confuse. They lie to anger. They lie to scare. They lie to stir greed. They lie to blame. They lie to impugn. They lie to win. They have lied about having any intention to defend the Constitution or any other original American ideal (or any “Christian” ideal, either). They have lied us into social strife. They have lied us into hating each other. They have lied us into rejecting science. They have lied as they lecture to not believe your own eyes. They have lied to us as they rigged the economy to favor the richest. They have lied us into suppressing the vote. They have lied as they label the media and true patriots “terrorists” and “enemies of the state.” They have lied as they rewarded great corruption and actual treason. They have lied as they coddle our enemies. They have lied us into screwing our allies. They have lied as they take away rights. They have lied to us into supporting genocide (OK, that was Biden, too, but it’s a conservative tradition going back to Jericho). They have lied us into war. They lied us into distrusting vaccines. They are lying us right out of being a democracy. Just you watch, they will soon be lying that we are so broke we must sell off all our public lands and national parks. They seem to be trying to lie us into another civil war.
The lie, the fake, the mean, the cruel, the violent, the immoral, the bigotry, the sexism, the xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, the fascism, the evil… it’s all in the conservative playbook. The only difference now is that no play is off-limits. We now have the perfect avatar for conservatism at the helm and calling the shots, and almost the entire host of conservatives, all of those faux “rugged individualists,” have bent the knee, kissed the ring and his ass. Donald Trump is the ultimate conservative, the King of Selfishness.
Bravo, conservatism, you found your true prince.
Don’t fall for any of it. They are not the good guys. Expect that every word out of the conservative’s mouth is a lie… and you will be right 99 percent of the time. It’s not that they are just a little bit mistaken. Indeed, whatever they say, presume the precise opposite is closer to the truth. The only time they speak truthfully is when they speak frankly about their own.
Let their actions tell the truth about them. They are selfish toddlers emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. They are moral midgets. And they should never be trusted with anything of importance or value, for they will almost certainly try to steal and corrupt it. The way of the conservative is chaos, oppression, disastrous inequality, hate and violence and disdain for the world.
We all have our selfish side. The best of us, those of sounder character and higher nobility intentionally attempt to tame that bad “wolf” inside us, while feeding the good “wolf” of sharing, sympathy, compassion, love.
Choose wisely the clan you really want to be a member of. A word of advice: shun the liar.
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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.
Copyright 2026, Rusty Reid
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