Michelle Goldberg and the Art of the Big Lie
1st November 2021
Lies come in all shapes and sizes, colors, odors, textures and tastes. Some are only little white lies, but more often the accompanying adjective suggests something unpleasant. Damnable lies used to be the most condemned, but today the foulest of all perfidious, incarnadine, silken and sulfurous lies are Big Lies.
Thus when New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wants to reassure progressive voters that they can ignore the story about a ninth-grade girl who was raped (i.e. forcibly sodomized) in a girl’s restroom in a Loudoun County, Virginia school, she serves up her diversion under the title “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.”
Among the attraction of calling what happened in Virginia “the Big Lie” is that Times readers know the term so well. Times writers have used it tirelessly during and after the Trump years. A year ago, before the election, Times columnist Paul Krugman served up “The War on Truth Reaches Its Climax: Trump is telling two big lies, and a third will come soon.” Per Krugman, “The first big lie is the claim that America is being menaced by hordes of ‘rioters, looters, arsonists, gun-grabbers, flag-burners, Marxists.’” The other Big Lie, Krugman nominates, was Trump’s “dismissal of the pandemic threat, his mocking of precautionary measures like mask-wearing,” actions which Krugman explained “have done a lot to help the coronavirus spread.”