In a chat on Real America's Voice with host Steve Bannon, Sidney Powell declared she had been de-platformed by the email service Mailchimp.
"Mailchimp just de-platformed my law firm from blast emails from SidneyPowell.com because apparently, we were talking about defending the republic. They just can't stand the truth, Steve. That's all it is. They want to suppress free speech. They can't stand the truth. They are absolutely terrified of it."
By now every Daily Kos reader knows Powell is a shameless liar. A member in good standing of the family of fabulists comprising the ‘Trump won’ truth deniers. She has done more than the regular Trump-licker. She has taken her show to the courts with dismal results. And worse, she has defamed companies to the point where she is on the receiving end of a billion-dollar lawsuit.
No doubt she has her defenders. Swathes of right-wingers believe as she does. They will agree that Mailchimp is terrified of Powell’s truths. But one witness is devastating to her case. And that is Powell herself. In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the voting machine company Dominion she (and her lawyers) claimed, referring to her multiple slanders against the company,
“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”
In essence, she is saying “I’m a liar, and people are scared of the truths I tell.”
And she is in good company. Kayleigh McEnany started off her career as Trump’s fourth Press Secretary with a commitment to the truth.
“I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,”
Within minutes she had broken her own promise and showed the exact worth of her word when she claimed, in defending Trump’s well-accused Supreme Court nominee,
“I think it was a grave miscarriage of justice with what happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh.”
The allegations have never been proven “verifiably false”. Quite the opposite. Any investigation that might have proved them false was curtailed in scope and duration by a Republican Senate that was all too worried the accusations might prove to be true.
McEnany was carrying on the confabulation of her predecessors which started off with Sean Spicer’s fantasies about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd. In his very first press conference, he offered this howler,
"[It] was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe."
Unusually for a Trump alumnus, Spicer came to regret his lies. In an interview with the BBC, he admitted to having ‘screwed up’. And added "I am not sitting here saying I'm not without fault. I wish I could have done a better job.”
You will not find that sort of introspection from Sarah Huckabee Sanders who told so many lies it is hard to know where to start. So let’s just sample one
"The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary.”
This complete piece of easily verifiable nonsense garnered a solid ‘false’ from PolitiFact who, without even breaking a sweat, found seven instances of Trump doing just that.
But back to Powell. She, like all her fellow conservative social media exiles, blames her fate on a liberal hostility to conservative ideas engendering censorship. But the evidence is not on her side. Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, Ted Cruz, Ann Coultur, James Woods, and thousands of other bottom-feeding conservatives are still tweeting their bile on Twitter.
The problem with social media platforms is not an excessive zeal to silence voices, but rather a great reluctance to take significant action against the tide of lies sloshing around the interwebs.
Conservatives will be defined by both their ‘Big Lie’ and thousands of small ones. If Powell could be honest she would know it is her team that is terrified of the truth. But lying is liking breathing to her. Without it, she would expire.
