The New York Times' news analysis piece titled "The Art of the Lie? The Bigger the Better" puts the blame for January 6 riots, as can be guessed from the title, squarely on lies.

While I don't disagree with this diagnosis, I think the source and nature of lies that led to the riots were rather different from those articulated by the paper.

By promoting a colossal untruth of his own — that he won a "sacred landslide election victory" — and sticking to it despite scores of court rulings establishing otherwise, Mr. Trump has outraged his political opponents and left even some of his longtime supporters shaking their heads at his mendacity.  In embracing this big lie, however, the president has taken a path that often works — at least in countries without robustly independent legal systems and news media along with other reality checks.

Put simply, the lies are Trump's, and on January 6, the gullible hillbillies fell victim to them, refusing to see the truth that was announced to them by our "robustly independent legal system and news media."

But are they reliable?  Is trust in them justified?

I will only speak of what I personally know about the ways the federal Judiciary and the mainstream press operate.  As I discovered in my free speech/property lawsuit (check Overview Books v. U.S. if you want to), judging is done not by evaluating the strength of plaintiff's argument against the defendant's.  If you ever saw a boxing match in which the referee helps one boxer beat up the other, either by hitting him or holding him by his hands, you'll get a good idea of what goes on in the courtroom.  Yes, Judge Roberts told the Senate during his confirmation hearings that judges neither pitch nor bat, but only call balls and strikes; yes, Judge Kavanaugh told senators that judges are umpires.  That's what they are — during hearings.  Once seated, judges feel free to replace in their decisions parties' argument with the utterly bogus argument of judges' own concoction (the legal types call it "sua sponte" argument), pulled out of thin air, to decide cases the way they want to, not the way they have to.  The judge being a lawyer to a party he wants to win is clearly counter to any interpretation of "due process of the law," which demands that a judge recuse himself when his impartiality comes into question.  Yet when I sued judges for fraud, they argued back that in Pearson v. Ray, judges gave themselves the right to act from the bench.

Judging being arbitrary, why would anyone trust judges' verdict that there was no voter fraud?  If the vaunted "independence" of our Judiciary goes so far as to make judges independent of law, of fact, of procedure, isn't the Judiciary too independent to serve the cause of justice — and too unreliable as the source of truth?

Then there is this another source of information — our "news media," including the New York Times.  How honest are they?

Well, the court case New York Times v. Sullivan makes journalistic lies protected speech, thus legalizing lies by commission; the case Miami Herald v. Tornillo removes any obligation from a press outlet to report demonstratively correct information it does not want reported, thus allowing lies by omission.  And papers religiously stick to this court-guaranteed right to feed us the information they want to feed us and deny us the information they want us not to know.  Thinking that a full third of the U.S. government — its Judiciary — is officially and proudly "corrupt and malicious" is an above-the-fold, front-page, Pulitzer-class, sensational piece of news, I contacted literally thousands of mainstream journalists asking them to cover the story, and guess what: they refuse.  Though there is manifest legalized judicial fraud going on in the courts, there isn't any if you read the papers.  By the same token, if you read in the papers that there was no election fraud — how does it follow that there was none?

This leads us right back to the events of January 6.  If people's grievances can't be resolved in the courts because honesty on the bench is optional, judges feeling free to engage in sophistry, in quibbling, in outright lies, in "corrupt and malicious" behavior, to use the language of Pierson v. Ray, what can the people do?

If our press refuses to shed its disinfecting light of publicity on outrages like judicial fraud, what remedy is there? 

The three court cases I mentioned gave two major institutions the ability to lie — the Judiciary and the press — making them unreliable arbiters of what is true and what is false.  Net result: The media and the courts are as responsible for the lies that triggered the events on January 6 as anyone they choose to blame.

Kipling's "Norman and Saxon," a primer in governance given by a dying Norman baron on how to control the newly-conquered Saxons to his son, starts with this observation:

The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. ...
and concludes with this golden piece of advice: "never you tell 'em a lie!"

Our press and our judges lied to us for far too long.  Now they blame Trump and those whose "manners are not so polite" for the events of January 6 — when in reality they have only themselves to blame, the lies causing the riots being, first and foremost, their own.

Image: Adam Jones via Flickr (cropped).