Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

In 1835, readers of the New York Sun were surprised and interested to learn that a world-famous astronomer, Sir John Frederick William Herschel, working at a new technologically-advanced telescope at an observatory in South Africa had detected life on the Moon. As the weeks went by, fascinated readers were regaled: it was sapient life, the Moon people had cities, and some of them even had wings and could fly. Shades of Dick Tracy’s Moon Maid!

In the end, of course, readers learned that the whole thing had been a hoax. There was no advanced observatory in South Africa, and the world-famous astronomer, Herschel, associated with it was a (mildly amused) victim of the hoax, as well. But it sure sold newspapers, it increased circulation (that never went down afterward), and a good time was generally had by all.

“Journalism” has taken the lesson to heart.

In 1915, the discovery was announced of the fossil remains of “Piltdown Man” the 500,000 year-old “missing link” between apes and human beings. The discovery was British, but it caught everybody’s imagination. In fact, what was “found” was a small skull pasted together from human remains and those of an orangutan, although the hoax was not unmasked until 1953, and set back the study of human evolution by decades. A similar hoax, where the footprints of human beings were “discovered” in a Texas riverbed, next to those of dinosaurs, were proven to be a hoax—footprints of smaller dinosaurs had been altered to resemble those of people. Although they were thoroughly debunked in 1938 by the great Roland T. Bird, of the American Museum of Natural History, I heard them just last week being cited on Ancient Aliens as “proof” that dinosaurs and humans lived together on the Earth.

In war-jittery 1939, an entertainment radio program (radio, if you don’t remember it, is TV for blind people) pretending to be a news broadcast told horrified listeners that alien spacecraft had begun falling in New Jersey (of all places), and that Earth was being invaded by hostile Martians. Millions, it is said, panicked. But it was only bad-boy actor-producer Orson Welles, retelling H.G. Wells’ classic story War of the Worlds on a production meant for Hallowe’en.

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States found itself involved in a pointless, senseless war in the former French colony of Vietnam. As the bloody and irrational conflict seemed to drag on endlessly, and U.S. forces were hindered as seriously by American politicians—and news media fully as corrupt as they are today—as they were by enemy action, strategy and tactics were thrown out the window; in a confession of abysmal political and military bankruptcy, the new measure of battlefield success and failure as far as Congress, the Pentagon, and the public were concerned, became enemy body-count. However before the war was over, it was revealed that the body-count being reported included the bodies of enemy chickens and pigs.

Neither last nor least, our own era has been dirtied by perhaps the greatest of these hoaxes. Unsupported by anything except shamelessly faked evidence, bald, petulant assertions, and a deep and simmering hatred for individualism and the accomplishments of private capitalism, and after their laughable failure to convince anybody that Earth was headed toward a new Ice Age, the world’s socialist saboteurs—again supported by countless network news-floozies and gentlemen-of-the evening—decided on “global warming” as a the latest anti-capitalist lie to push.

I said “perhaps the greatest” because a newer lie has done more to destroy capitalism and industrialism than any previous environmentalist/collectivist ever dreamed. The dreaded corona virus pandemic is a hollow fraud—I’ll say it again: the dreaded corona virus pandemic is a hollow fraud—demonstrably less dangerous than the common cold or the flu (look it up, I did). The measures being offered—which is to say, illegally forced on us—by celebrity medico-political fascists to “combat” the threat seem more designed to shatter American prosperity and destroy human society. It is increasingly clear to this observer that the authors of this ridiculous shut-down—which has quarantined exactly the wrong people—are, in fact, our mortal enemies and perhaps the allies of our enemies.

The next twenty-five years are going to be preoccupied with endless criminal investigations, Constitutional and personal lawsuits, and, hopefully, with the eventual incarcerations of sketchy characters like Gretchen “sieg Heil!” Whitmer, Ralph “Blackface” Northam, and the laughing mass-murderer Andrew Cuomo. But an even greater problem is this: in the light of all these hoaxes, what are we going to do about the fact that, in this land of the free and home of the brave, so many of our fellow citizens are such gullible cowards?