Book Review of: Lies the Government Told You

Myth, Power, and Deception in American History

Price: $14.50
List Price: $24.99
You save: Your dignity as a citizen.

(You can print this review in landscape mode, if you want a hardcopy)

Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 6,000 articles.

If you are a citizen of the United States, this is a "must read." It is a "must read" because if you don't understand the message contained herein, you are powerless over what's being done to you.

Your single greatest cost, financially and in many other aspects, is the federal government. You should know the truth behind about what your sacrifices in freedom, property, and dignity are buying you.  Novocain is great when you're having dental work done, but "mental Novocain" that deadens your political nerves exposes you to egregious harm.

If you are one of those folks who votes for candidates put forth by The Party, think of this book as the red pill (thanks, Morpheus). Seeing reality empowers you. Not seeing it allows others to enslave you.

Which is why the federal govt uses lying and deception as its basic modus operandi and has done so ever since Andrew Jackson left office (there's a reason why they sent not one, but FIVE assassins after him).

No doubt, some folks will have an emotional rather than factual response to Napolitano's book and dismiss it out of hand. Not due to logic or reality, but due to the dissonance that comes with having delusions and beliefs challenged by what is the reality rather than what you've been told is the reality.

How accurate is Napolitano's take on things? He's hitting the mark at 100%, in terms of the evidence he cites, the logic he uses, and the major points he makes.

Disagreements

I do disagree with him on some issues. For example, he believes a government is wrong to ban certain ingredients in food. Hydrogenated oil is not a risk factor, but a cause, of colon cancer. It's a recognized poison. It is not a new law to ban this in food. It's enforcement of existing laws against deliberately poisoning people. A poison doesn't have to be immediately lethal to be illegal to use on someone. Deb Green is serving life in prison, and her story involves poisoning her husband over time.

Our author says that, in the case of food ingredients, people have the right to choose. I don't know anybody who grills the staff at a restaurant to get a list of all of the ingredients of the food, every condiment, every sauce, bread, and so forth. Try doing that sometime, and see how your dinner companions react and if they ever invite you out with them again.

People aren't making this choice. When they are poisoned, it's a unilateral action. It isn't a nanny state to protect people from being poisoned. He cites antismoking laws as similarly intrusive, but these laws aren't there to protect people who suck cigarette butts. These laws are there to protect innocent bystanders from being forced to breathe in deadly poisons as a condition of participating in society.

Aside from these misconceptions on Napolitano's part, he's written essentially a Citizen's Guide to Wading Through the Propaganda and Manipulation.

History: fact vs. fiction

I caught the history bug back in the early 1970s and have been a voracious reader of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources--those beyond the grip of our state-owned writers of fiction who call themselves "historians" (in contrast to actual historians) and beyond the grip of the statist mudstream media. The commonly accepted versions of history and the history visible in the actual records are starkly different.

I didn't have to look at the extensive and bibliography of well-regarded sources to see that Napolitano did his homework and wasn't regurgitating some political dogma. This reliance on reality was evident throughout the book. The lies and excuses surrounding every major initiative of the federal government since Andrew Jackson left office were told, and are still told, for a reason. Napolitano correctly identifies that reason in this book.

Many people refuse to look at the truth, because they want to believe their government is benign. The language manipulation is also a barrier to "going outside the Matrix." The United States never had a Civil War, for example. By definition, such a war means an insurgent power attempts to seize the controls and institutions of government. In Lincoln's War (a very bloody one, at that, and one that was patently illegal), the South seceded because the North acted in gross violation of the Constitution. The South had its own government at the time that Lincoln's forces invaded it. So, it wasn't a civil war. Fiction writers posing as historians call it that to serve an agenda.

Now, here's a kicker for you. Read the autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant. Remember, he was the Union General who defeated the South and he was the US President who succeeded Lincoln's hapless VP. Not once did Grant use the phrase "civil war." He called it "the war between the states." This is an important distinction.

Not once in this book does Napolitano fall prey to false labels, and I find that quite impressive. No fiction for this guy, only the facts.

Another concept he gets is that laws are not always legal. In fact, most of the laws passed in the past 100 years are not legal. Of all the laws passed since 1980, the percentage of legal ones is probably less than 1%. If you doubt that, start reviewing them. You'll probably quit in exhaustion before finding one that's legal.

In any organization, all of the rules must flow from the bylaws. It doesn't matter if you're a bowling league or a chess club. If the rule conflicts with the bylaws in letter or in spirit, it's not legal. It's "outside the bylaws" and therefore cannot bind the members of the organization. When an organization is a sovereign state, we call its bylaws a constitution. In the USA, we have Amendments that are outside the Constitution. Unfortunately, our system requires that the courts correct the errors of the executive and legislative branches but this is not something the courts are always willing to do. So we have illegal alterations to our Constitution and illegal laws flow from those.

We also have illegal laws with no basis in the Constitution or its illegal amendments, and we have illegal laws that directly contradict the Constitution. Relying on the courts to fix these is like fixing car defects after a car is built, rather than fixing problems as soon as they arise during the process of building it. For example, a bent frame comes on the assembly line and you address that only after the car is built (study modern manufacturing methods if you don't understand this example). This creates a great deal of waste and cost, just like our broken government does.

The solution is to fix the legislative process. Napolitano correctly states this, as well.

Just how broken is our legislative process? Napolitano gives a good example in his discussion of the incorrectly named "Patriot Act," which had nothing to do with patriotism and which provided zero benefits to the American people. The bill was written expressly to eviscerate the Bill of Rights. Members of CONgress were given a printout of the bill only a couple of days before voting on it. The bill was 342 pages of complex material in tiny type--simply massive. Obviously, nobody had enough time to read that monstrosity, much less understand it, in so short a time. Yet, this bill passed almost unanimously.

Anyone looking at the contents of the bill can see it should not have gotten a single vote. But nearly every member of CONgress voted for it, without bothering to find out what the bill even meant.

One way this travesty was sold to CONgress was it had a four year sunset on it. The bill is completely illegal, yet it has been renewed not once but twice! The second time was during the Obama misadministration, by the Democrat-controlled CONgress. Anyone who doubts D = R needs to wake up, and the history of this bill is a very strong pot of coffee.

To sum up: if you want to be an informed citizen, make this book part of your collection. If you want to be a diligent citizen, you need to be quoting from this book and discussing its facts and contents with your "elected" (mis)representatives and with other people who vote. Not in a dogmatic way, but use the truth you gain from this book to get others to question the lies we are constantly, brazenly told.

This book consists of 17 chapters and a Conclusion, presented in 316 enlightening pages. It has 24 pages of densely-packed notes that would expand to about 50 pages if written in the same font as the text (Can you say, "He did his homework?"). These weren't 6th-tier sources, either. The solidity of the source material is unusual and impressive. And it shows in the quality of the text.

Each of the 17 chapters discusses a particular lie. It goes into general and specific cases, refutes the lie with verifiable facts, asks questions, exposes logical fallacies, and so forth. In all, excellent analysis of each of these lies. This book is well-researched, well-written, and badly needed in our time of Constitutional crisis and rampantly illegal government activities.