"American Thinker” Doesn't Think

The "American Thinker" doesn't think very much. A recent post titled “The Establishment Ensures That Gaslighting Paves the Way to Marxism” cites our quotation. Its souce is a site that quotes our site, which notes that the quotation is a fake. The “American Thinker” not only takes the quotation seriously, it ignores what the site it takes it from says.

“Propaganda in Focus” is Fooled

"Propaganda in Focus" is the project of a variety of scholars who are good at practicing what they claim to study, but its writers can be as gullible as anyone else. A recent post by Greg Simons titled “Nordstream Pipeline Sabotage: The Propaganda of Interpretation and (Mis)Representation” concludes using rather dubious reasoning that the United States was probably responsible. In the process of building the argument, Simons paraphrases the Goebbels quotation this blog follows:

“According to the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, if one tells a big lie enough and keeps repeating it, gradually it becomes accepted by more and more as the truth. In this context, the truth is the enemy of the state and its intentions. In the contemporary context, the truth is the enemy of US geopolitical aims and ambitions.”

Although it is a paraphrase, the “enemy of the state” comes from the fabricated quotation this blog follows, indicating that Simons thinks it is genuine, even though the source he quotes from notes that Goebbels didn't actually say it. He also is a fan of Tucker Carlson.

Robert Malone is Fooled

Robert Malone, the notorious vaccine skeptic, has published a goofy article titled “Why Did so Many Fall for the Covid Narrative?” He manages two Goebbels misquotations. The first is the quotation this blog follows. He claims the world-wide COVID hoax is an example of Goebbels’s insights. He also cites Goebbels as saying something else, which again Goebbels did not say — it’s from the introduction to a book about Goebbels.

What does one say? I say it tells us something about Malone’s reliability, and it isn’t good.

Mark Twain on Fake Quotations

Mark Twain, who himself is regularly credited with things he did not say, could do it himself. The excellent Quote Investigator blog reports how he won an argument by inventing a quotation. As he said:

"It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it"

 I haven't done an update on the quotation for a while.  The last time I checked on 20 August 2019, Google reported 44,000 hits. A Google search today (11 May 2021) finds 96,000 hits.  Bing, which apparently doesn’t omit anything from search results, finds 1,860,000 pages, down from 3,500,000 in August 2019. As always, the search phrase is “truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

At least my blog page and article debunking the quotation show up on the first page of Google results, and also on Bing, so those who are suspicious enough to check may find enough to make them dubious about the quotation. 

Alpha History Gets an “F”

 Alpha History is an Australian site that claims to be curated by credentialed academics.  Shall we say that they do not provide much evidence to put confidence in their “scholars.” Their post on Nazi propaganda quotations includes the quotation we are following, along with other fabricated quotations.  As usual, they fail to provide sources.  

According to the site:

“Alpha History is written, curated and compiled by qualified teachers and historians. Content on Alpha History is written specifically for students at middle school, high school and undergraduate levels.”

The site has since removed the dubious quotations.

The site also included a lot of copyrighted material from my German Propaganda Archive without credit, but has remedied that.

Astonishing News from Russia

 If you need evidence that the Russian press has not improved since Soviet days, an astonishing article titled “The Great Dog and Pony Show of 2020”  in the 11 November 2020 issue of Pravda will provide it. Allegedly by one Jim Jones, it is a mishmash of deep state nonsense, historical error (did you know that John F. Kennedy was a Republican or that the U.S. had a president named “Ronal Regan”?), and sheer incoherence.  Not surprisingly, it uses the fake Goebbels quotation this blog follows to support a supposed deep state Democratic conspiracy to deceive the world.

It really is an incredible piece, worth reading for amusement if nothing else.