Misdirection
Now to show you how this works in the real world, I need to tell you a story about a real man named Robert Wayne Jernigan. I guarantee you this story will make you very angry, but this is the kind of world we live in today.
Robert Wayne Jernigan is now 28 years old. People who knew him said he was quiet, somewhat stand-offish. He was not widely liked in high school.
Four years ago, a witness reported seeing Jernigan enter a building in a remote suburb of Dallas with an axe. Four people were found dead at the scene, including a nine year old girl. No charges were filed. Less than two days later, Jernigan turned up again, this time at the scene of a suspicious fire in a day care center. Miraculously, no one was injured. But it was just a matter of time.
During the next several weeks, it is possible to place Jernigan at the scene of no less than thirteen suspicious fires. Eleven people died. Eyewitnesses were unshakable in their determination that Jernigan had been on the scene. And yet the police did nothing.
Jernigan had long been fascinated with fire. A search of his apartment revealed fireman-related magazines, posters and memorabilia. Despite the deaths of fifteen people, despite repeated eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence placing Jernigan at these fires, no criminal charges were ever filed against Robert Wayne Jernigan. He remains a free man to this day.
And rightfully so. Because Robert Wayne Jernigan is an ordinary fireman for the Dallas Fire Department.* He is not a serial arsonist at all.
Now re-read the previous paragraphs and tell me where I lied.
Everything I told you was factually true. But the spin, the context, the misdirection. The press always reports serial killers with all three names. Robert Wayne Jernigan sounds a hell of a lot more ominous than Bobby Jernigan. Quiet, stand-offish, not widely liked. Instant psychopath, if you read the papers. Entered the building with an axe oooh! That ought to get the blood boiling. That the people had died from smoke inhalation I decided was irrelevant to the story.
And so on. And so on.
This is how you lie by telling the truth. You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that they advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.
I have long admired Noam Chomsky. It must be absolutely intoxicating to be able to write so free of any ethical constraints. Chomsky flitters and darts through the vast expanse of human experience, unerringly searching out those few, isolated data points that run contrary to the unimaginably vast ocean of facts crashing ashore in the opposite direction.
Here's a Noam Chomsky moment for those of you without enough duct tape to wrap around your heads to keep your brains from exploding while you actually read his works:
Let's say we stand overlooking the ocean along Pacific Coast Highway. From high atop the cliffs, we look down to the waves and the sand below. I ask you what color the beach is. You reply, reasonably enough, that it is sandy white. And you are exactly right.
However, there are people who cannot see the beach for themselves because they are not standing with us on this very spot. This is where Noam earns his liberal sainthood. Noam takes a small pail to the beach and sits down in the sand.
If you've ever run sand through your fingers, you know that for all of the thousands upon thousands of white or clear grains, there are a few dark ones here and there, falling through your fingers. With a jewelers loupe and an EXCEEDINGLY fine pair of tweezers, you carefully and methodically pluck all of the dark grains you can find, and only the dark grains, and carefully place them, one by one, into your trusty bucket.
It will take you a long time. It has taken Chomsky decades to fill this bucket, but with enough sand and enough time, you will eventually do so. And then, when you do, you can make a career touring colleges through the world, giving speeches about the ebony-black beaches of Malibu, and you can pour your black sand onto the lectern and state, without fear of contradiction, that this sand was taken from those very beaches.
And what you say will be accurate, it will be factually based, and you will be lying like the most pernicious son of a that ever lived.
Why do so many people take this hocus-pocus at face value? Because, like any audience at a Magic show, they want to believe.
Do this long enough, and you will become an Icon. No more hours spent sorting sand for you! No sir! And finally, after a few decades as Icon, you may manufacture whatever data you need to make your case, and not one of your followers will call you on it.
