One of the most extraordinary phenomenons of recent political history is the Democratic party’s ability to present itself as the party of reason and morality, and to be seen as such by the public (and not just in America). The Republicans are evil, the Democrats make mistakes. The phenomenon is arguably the most successful branding of any political party in the world. But it is the result of sheer, sustained propaganda. Witnessing the cognitive dissonance of multitudes of supposedly intelligent people affirm the triumph of appearance over reality is a bizarre, schizophrenic, almost out-of-body experience for anyone with a shred of mental clarity or knowledge. It’s the triumph of rhetoric over action. And it’s been the foundation, the unpainted canvas of American life for decades. The majority of people alive today, in the most disparate of places, have never experienced a different reality. It’s as much a received truth, within reason, as the idea of God in medieval Christendom or Marxism behind the Iron Curtain.

How this situation came about, though, is simple – institutional capture. The fact that our institutions, throughout the liberal democratic West, are philosophically guided by the left, often sometimes the far left, has been hiding in plain sight for half a century, and if, metaphorically speaking, the public sector, the media, the universities, Big Tech and non-governmental organisations had an International Day of Mooning the Masses or Giving the Finger to the Hoi Polloi, we’d think they were being ironic and that it was a post-modern joke. Wokeness is the culmination of this phenomenon and it is the left-wing establishment on steroids.

The ground moves beneath our feet, though, and nowhere have changing perceptions been more apparent than in relation to the great ogre of contemporary politics, Donald Trump. If Trump has done one thing of consequence, it’s bringing the establishment out of the shadows and into the glare of a refined public consciousness. (Before his entry into politics the establishment was comfortable and arrogant).

One reason for the current head-tilted, narrowed-eyed, you-need-to-do-more-to-persuade-me-of-your-bona-fides attitude of the average person is the avalanche of lies directed against Trump. It’s been an extraordinary spectacle witnessing the establishment, in a panicked frenzy, beclown itself since Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency. You can only, though, paper over the cracks before the walls fall down.

Here are some of the greatest hits of the Democratic party/establishment’s war against Trump. In a spirit of generosity, we’ll omit the establishment’s cover-up about Biden’s cognitive decline.

The first example is a minor one but it points to a lie that has been relentlessly claimed by the establishment – that Trump is a Nazi. Trump posted on social media an unofficial video made by a supporter which featured, for a brief moment, and was a part of the program’s software, a collage of news headlines from the late-nineteenth century, one of which featured the term ‘unified Reich’. This was proof of Trump’s Nazism, even though the news story was written fifty years before the Nazis came to power. The Trump-is-a-Nazi trope has finally, after the recent attempted assassination, become unacceptable in polite society. You cannot accuse someone of ‘stochastic terrorism’, blurring the distinction between words and violence, without being liable to the same charge yourself.

In a similar vein, the claim that Trump said that neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were ‘very fine people’, when he explicitly said ‘and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally’ is one of the disgraces of modern journalism. The lie has become so ubiquitous that it was quoted in the otherwise excellent book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind.

Another deliberate misquotation is the claim that Trump said that another Biden term would be a ‘bloodbath’, the implication being that Trump’s supporters would riot in the streets should Biden be re-elected. Trump was talking about the effect of Biden’s policies on the American automotive industry. It’s hard not to laugh.

A more chilling example of deliberately taking a speech out of context was the media’s claim, including on CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, that Trump called illegal immigrants ‘animals’ and ‘not people’ when Trump was referring to the Mexican cartels whose depraved violence would sicken anyone with half a heart.

One of the more ludicrous and blatantly in-your-face dishonest claims was Kamala Harris stating that Trump said he’s going to be ‘a dictator on day one’. What Trump actually said was he’s ‘not going to be a dictator’ except on his first day in office when he will ‘close the border’ and ‘drill, drill, drill’.

In a perfect example of ‘do what I say and not what I do’, the media reported that Trump said that he or another Republican president could use the Justice Department to ‘indict their political opponents’. Considering this is exactly what the Democrats have done to Trump, the irony would be funny if it wasn’t so disastrous for liberal democracy. What he actually said was this could ‘happen in reverse’ but ‘the people aren’t going to stand for it’.

In a delicious example of being caught in the headlights with your pants down, Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman from California, repeatedly lied about the Trump/Zelensky phone call, and when Trump released a transcript of the conversation, which proved Schiff had lied, Schiff claimed his evidence before Congress was a parody. Top marks, though, for chutzpah.

I’ve omitted some of the more flagrant examples of disgraceful behaviour by the Democrats/establishment including the hiring of Christopher Steele, the former MI6 intelligence officer, who Hillary Clinton employed to invent dirt on Trump, including, laughably, that he paid prostitutes to urinate on him in a Moscow hotel. Or the fact that while Biden won the election, it could not be described by neutral observers as fair and transparent. If the same processes happened in Israel or Hungary we’d never hear the end of it.

But you get the idea. Politics is a dirty business and the notion that any political party is moral or uniquely intelligent is nonsense.