Thanks to Elon Musk, we’ve just seen a historic moment of real importance to our country — and one which is in the genuine best interests of Christians, especially my fellow Catholics. Before I share it, let me point to a few historic precedents to give you a sense of scale:
Remember when we found out that we’d been lied into the first Gulf War, that the “eyewitness” to Saddam Hussein’s soldiers tossing babies out of incubators was in fact spreading fake news? As Jason Jones wrote here:
[S]he was lying. Every word she spoke was crass propaganda, invented by PR professionals to manipulate Americans into launching a foreign war. Here’s how history remembers that testimony:
The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl who was publicly identified at the time by her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to support Kuwait in the Gulf War.
In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah’s last name was Al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيرة الصباح) and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah’s testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.
How about when we learned that we’d been lied into the second Gulf War, goaded by the threat of “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, which the Bush administration had conjured out of thin air, and dodgy intelligence the CIA’s own specialists had rejected? Bush’s team’s real motives were to reshape the Middle East — by bombing it till it turned into Switzerland — and to ship $138 billion in taxpayers’ cash to companies like Halliburton.
Or when the Biden administration accidentally admitted it wasn’t seeking “victory” in the futile war in Ukraine, but only to create a quagmire that bled Russia while enriching U.S. defense companies?
This is a moment like that.
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