Lying certainly is nothing new, which is why millennia ago already we were given the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Yet in recent years prevarication has reached new heights (or depths, actually) in our society, with blatant falsehoods uttered with a brazenness that would make a disbarred lawyer-turned-used car salesman blush. But what was the worst lie of 2022? There’s a lot of competition, but what follows are 10 top contenders (not necessarily listed in order of egregiousness).
1. “Vladimir Putin destroyed his own natural gas pipeline to Europe.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson mentioned this as a lie of the year last week. Now, by blowing up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, “Putin crippled his own economy and weakened his own strategic position in the middle of a war, but he did it anyway because, well, just because that’s the kind of evil behavior Vladimir Putin is famous for,” noted Carlson. “He’s so evil. He’s not only a threat to us, a direct physical peril to Omaha, Bangor and San Jose; Vladimir Putin is so evil, he’s an existential threat to himself. Stop that man before he blows up more of his own pipelines.”
2. “In 2022’s second quarter, 1.1 million jobs were created.” So said the White House, with Joe Biden claiming July 8 that “we created more jobs than in any quarter under any of my predecessors in the nearly 40 years before the pandemic.” The problem? The actual figure, we learned only after the election, was 10,000. This may seem like Soviet-level prevarication, as the USSR was infamous for completely fabricating economic numbers. But, hey, as any accountant will tell you, being off by more than 99 percent is a simple rounding error.
3. “COVID is a pandemic of the ‘unvaccinated.’” This claim has been blown up worse than Putin’s pipeline — by one of the people who made it. CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen, who once stated the “unvaccinated” should be denied freedoms, recently cited the CDC and admitted that “unvaccinated” people who recovered from prior infection were far less likely than the “vaccinated” to catch the China virus or develop serious disease. Now we should ask her about today’s rampant lying: What group is it a pandemic of?
4. “January 6 was an insurrection.” (Yes, this is a continuation of a 2021 lie.) It was the first modern insurrection attempted without firearms, too, despite the participants being of the group (conservatives) that owns most of America’s guns. If J6 was an insurrection, Kamala Harris is Marilyn vos Savant.
5. “We’re not in a recession.” The Left widely claimed that “two consecutive quarters of declining growth” — precisely what we experienced in 2022 — wasn’t actually the definition of “recession.” Yet in a 2019 column, Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein had admitted that this is, in fact, what a recession is “typically defined as.”
6. “Sam Bankman-Fried is the J.P. Morgan of crypto.” Or maybe he was the “Michael Jordan of crypto,” the “Jay Gould of our era,” or the new “Vanderbilt,” “Harriman,” or “Carnegie.” All this praise was heaped on him by the mainstream media, in some cases just days before SBF’s FTX house of cards collapsed and we learned he was in reality the Bernie Madoff of crypto. But, hey, when you’re actually something else — the new George Soros of political donors, giving tens of millions to Democrats — the praise will flow like CO2 from the now ruptured Nord Stream pipeline.
7. “Inflation is ‘transitory.’” Use such an intellectual-sounding word, as opposed to “temporary,” and people just may fancy you smart and take your word for it. But it turned out that the only thing transitory was the claim’s believability. Pro tip: Next year try the term “ephemeral.”
8. “Biden and his party were tackling high gas prices.” The mainstream media obscured “the fact that President Biden shut down American oil and gas production and refining factories,” wrote AMAC (the Association of Mature American Citizens) in November. “When President Trump handed Joe Biden the keys, he left him with an America that was an energy exporter, and Biden took that, shut it down and made America reliant on foreign oil again.”
9. When the Second Amendment was crafted, “you couldn’t buy a cannon.” Biden made this statement while attacking gun rights and trying to justify prohibitions against AR-15-style weapons. But even the left-wing Washington Post gave the claim “Four Pinocchios” in June. Perhaps, however, Biden got this information from Corn Pop or sniffed it out while his nose was in some little girl’s hair.
10. “‘Lia’ Thomas and other ‘transgender’ men are actually women — and have no advantage over females in sports.” The Washington Examiner called Thomas, a man masquerading as female and who won women’s titles while competing on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team, “2022’s Man of the Year” for bringing wider attention to this lie and inspiring policy changes. In reality, there’s no such thing as “transgender,” not any more than there is “trans-species” status, because you can’t change your sex (and “gender” is a concept that should be reserved to grammar).
Sadly, though exhausting to compile, the above list is far from exhaustive, as too many creative minds today have been turned toward demagoguery. So what do you think is missing from the list? And what do you think is 2022’s actual Lie of the Year? Let us know. We love hearing the Truth.
