Over the course of the traveling sideshow that was Jake Tapper’s book promotion tour, the urge to smash my phone into a trillion shards of plastic and glass steadily grew. With an absence of finesse that telegraphed an utter disdain for the public, day after day Tapper and company forcibly bent, warped, and quadruple-fastened with sophistical duct tape what amounted to an easy to comprehend and coherent narrative whole—the media had known about President Biden’s mental and physical disintegration from day one and covered it up until the summer of 2024, allowing the government to be run by a cabal of unaccountable mystery figures that attempted to shore up the ground work for the foundation of a totalitarian regime—into a grotesque distortion of the truth.

Practically placing his hand over his heart, in interviews Tapper swore his recorded, easy- to-access-and-watch-in-full comments about Biden being “mentally and physically sharp” were taken out of context. Not only was that never his unqualified assessment, he and his colleagues did have misgivings about the mental and physical decline of Biden during his presidency. Though they never deigned to address the issue explicitly, Tapper and his peers had seen and been troubled by clips of Biden falling off his bicycle, falling down stairs, falling asleep at funerals and summits, giving speeches where one eye filled with blood, possibly having shat himself at state events, claiming to have recently spoken with people who’d been dead for decades, attempting to shake hands with phantoms, wandering off during a WWII commemoration ceremony, and publicly announcing, apropos of nothing, the case of cancer which he now verifiably has. 

But, Tapper assured viewers, he and his teammates had failed to believe their eyes only because they’d been tricked. Worse still, they’d been deceived into disbelieving what they’d seen not because of some intellectual shortcoming on the part of their entire profession or because they’d been blinded by their pride. No, you see, they’d been bamboozled because they had their constant and unwavering respect and faith in the position of the Executive in Chief of the United States government used against them by a coven of PR Svengalis in the White House Press Department. 

These diabolical sorceresses—who Tapper insisted on calling out but refused to name or mark for punishment—knew the mainstream media was too smart to fool. So, to trick them, this crew of masterminds instead carefully exploited the media’s overabundance of patriotic and noble-minded trust in the efficacy and sanctity of the office of President to get them to ignore their “reportorial gut instincts.” Too stringent a belief in the honesty and purity of the institution of the presidency—which the press has, of course, Tapper implied, maintained without exception down through the centuries—this was the pierced Achilles heel of Tapper and his colleagues.

And as to the various critics of Biden that had—despite the invincible powers of enchantment possessed by known, 32-degree mentalist and lesbian voodoo high-priestess Karen Jean-Pierre—pointed out that the President was rapidly descending into senility and physical decrepitude, Tapper asserted that those observations had to be dismissed. Because the people saying these things were bad and immoral… perhaps even spies or foreign agents. Or something.

Towards the end of the second week of Jake tirelessly and matter-of-factly broadcast-sowing this bullshit like some Orwellian Johnny Appleseed, right on the verge of destroying my phone, I experienced a revelation. At the almost imperceptibly distant terminus of a monotonous media and entertainment steppe formed of digital screens laid end to end that extended to the limit of my mental horizon, there loomed the media’s mountain of falsehoods. Suddenly behind its cold peak, from out of a pewter gray sky, exploded a brilliant, jagged flash of understanding. Zarathustra was right all along about the root of all evil being deception—and in the several millennia or centuries that followed his death, the world might have been better on balance if the many Achaemenids who were his followers had fought the Greeks to at least a draw.

*

Falsehood is the prime cause of chaos, suffering, and disorder on Earth. This is what Zarathustra asserted when he expressed the divinely communicated reality of Druj to the people of greater Iran some 600 years before the birth of Christ. 

While Druj might have been viewed by some of Zarathustra’s initial followers as a personal failing inherent within all human beings—something akin to what we might consider sin—very early (likely at the onset) in the history of Zoroastrianism, or the Parsee faith, it took a more elevated form. “The Lie,” as Druj most closely translates in English, is a cosmic principle of uncreation and anti-existence perpetuated by Angra Mainyu, the infernal champion of darkness and the eternal opponent of Ahura Mazda, the God of Light.

Druj is a conception of falsehood as the source of all evil and the worst thing which a human being can do—the literal source of all envy, lust, wrath, and greed. Opposing it was the motive force behind the conduct, discipline, and governance of what became one of the foundational sources of Western Civilization. Every advance the Achaemenid Persians and Parthians achieved—from the creation of federalism, the first recorded declaration of human rights, the abolition of debt slavery, and even the creation of the postal service—was done in the context of increasing order throughout the mortal world by combating Druj. 

To the majority of Achaemenids, the chief obstacle to accomplishing that order from the terrestrial on up to the cosmic realm was the most complex form of falsehood—lying. Murder, torture, rape, theft, these were secondary one and all to lying in the hierarchy of evil. Why this is so isn’t necessarily clear through Zoroastrian texts or historical accounts from the period. However, one possible explanation is that some form of deception is required to lure someone into a trap where they are murdered, raped, assaulted, robbed, or defrauded—and more often than not that deceit comes in the form of a lie. 

In the event each of those crimes is enacted without the initial deployment of a lie, they are one and all almost always followed up with one. It takes very little imagination to surmise the impact on crime levels across all categories that would follow from the inability of people to lie when questioned about having committed a crime by armed agents of the state or empire. Absent both before and after a crime, a world without lies and other non-verbal deceptions would necessitate open conflict and brute force to achieve the criminal’s desires. That would put the realization of all desire down to exercise of strength, intelligence, and courage, and in the process makes the prospect of breaking laws or codes much less appealing for criminals—for to get what they want they have to not only violate the right of control won by force by those in charge, but ultimately overpower those in control.

If the effects of the criminal applying Druj to himself are also considered, you can then potentially extend the argument to the point where even naked, forthright acts of criminality are impossible without lying. All but the stupidest of criminals—who are exempt on the grounds of not being able to accurately judge even their own thoughts—must offer up a crude justification for his use of naked force that absolves his conscience of responsibility. Shy of living and dying by “might makes right”—and any criminal unable to lie about what he is done when questioned by authorities would have to die or take over the entire kingdom in which he violated the law—to commit any crime the criminal must first successfully deceive himself. 

He must self-hypnotize to the point where he genuinely believes, contrary to even the basic, divinely conceived and believed scruples which surround him in a functioning, highly religious state, that this or that individual or group within the society is deserving of violence—or that he is deserving of extracting vengeance, luxury, or riches, regardless of how others are affected. In that light, deceptions—the most complex form of which is lying—can easily be seen for what they are: illusions conjured with the aim of supplanting the targeted group or individual’s God-given empirical and intuitive understanding of reality. 

Lies are a series of words spoken to confuse a targeted victim into being unable to act, or to enchant them into unconsciously assenting to having their will overridden by the will of the liar. The purpose of a lie is to create the most convincing illusion possible in order to acquire something desired or avoid something dreaded. This is the essence of black magic. Those most skilled at lying, however, do not swindle you with tiny illusions that get you to unknowingly assent into redeeming your gift cards. Their ambitions are bigger—big enough to rival the divinely created order of the Master who, through his words, spoke their and everyone else’s reality into existence. 

In the past four decades alone, the list of lies that approach, match, and in some cases dwarf the scope and audacity of Tapper’s include (but are by no means limited to):

• The origin, treatment, and vectors of transmission for AIDS 
• The impetus of the first Iraq war 
• The Oklahoma City bombing 
• The cause of 9/11
• The terms and conditions of healthcare “reform” in the United States
• The frequency, nature, and origin of illegal immigration for all Western countries
• The ineradicable, biological realities of human sex differences
• Russiagate
• The origins of Covid-19
• The cause of George Floyd’s death and the incarceration of Derrick Chauvin
• The causes and particulars of January 6.
• The efficacy and safety of the Covid-19 vaxx
• The origin and nature of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Until about halfway down that list, however, a fully developed and reliable means of unearthing, displaying, and exposing them—as is being done with Jake’s lies—didn’t exist at mass scale. Before digital video and storage, the public spread of internet use to the point of ubiquity, and the appearance and rapid adoption of social media, it was your memory and word against a multibillion-dollar industry with the ability to reach into the homes and automobiles of every American. 

But somewhere around 2014, social media and various digital A.V. and communications technologies matured to the point each “big lie” the media told could be reconstituted—clips played side-by-side that showed deviations from the present narrative and rewritings of history—by everyday individuals possessed of a bit of technical knowhow. In the face of this, the media’s ability to quietly dissolve fabrications at the outer edge of time’s mists and the fading light of recollection—to unobtrusively steer the majority of the public into “disremembering” its lies—began a collapse into inoperability. 

The probable threat of its complete and final collapse in the 2020s plays a substantial part not only in the increased brazenness of the media’s lies, but also accounts for what is truly unprecedented in this make and model of falsehoods—their explosive increase in frequency and quantity and their progressively bellicose and righteous tone. Each bit of unceasing and repetitive “coverage” is now keyed into a shrill pitch of faux-moral-hysteria and genuine sanctimoniousness that is without precedent in the history of the world. 

Both of those attributes are a response to an unforgivable violation of what is the mainstream media’s sacred motivating principle, core justification, and psychological armor against criticism—a hypertrophied, bedrock belief in the very Greek, and thoroughly un-Persian, concept of the Noble Lie.

*

“It’s not true. At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind.” – Tucker Carlson

Supposedly first espoused by Plato and undeniably most clearly demonstrated in the life of his near-contemporary Alcibiades, the Noble Lie is a falsehood deployed by the ruling elite of a given society or civilization. It is deliberately and systematically propagated under the auspices of promoting and maintaining social harmony, encouraging citizens to consciously or unconsciously accept their explicitly stated or implicitly understood roles within that society. The idea is that this regal species of lie operates as a defender and enforcer of the greater good that fosters a sense of belonging which “gently herds” individuals into willingly, if often unconsciously, fulfilling their societal roles and creating a harmonious society. 

Essentially, the Noble Lie presents itself as a necessary and altruistic exception to the rule which undergirds almost every advanced civilization in the history of the world—lying is bad and must be punished. Lying must be punished because it sows doubt about what is and isn’t real, which creates distrust in one’s own mind and one’s neighbors, which ultimately obliterates the capacity for cooperation and, often, sense making. The Noble Lie does not avoid this outcome. At best it pushes back the collections date on the ruinous consequences of lying. 

What the Noble Lie does accomplish it accomplishes through being a Meta-Falsehood, or a lie about the very nature and outcome of lies. Seen from this vantage point, it can be perceived as a sort of Ur-Lie from which all others flow or as a White Knight of deception riding to the rescue of every species of bullshit known to man. Promoting the greater good is not its foundational purpose. As with every other form of lie, its real purpose is the reduction of the sort of volatility (outright opposition) that could complicate or doom the acquisition and subsequent maintenance of power (or any other thing desired) by the liar and/or the fostering of the liar’s personal safety through a short-term minimization of the likelihood of reprisal. 

At both the psychic and material level, the existence of modern legacy media is dependent upon an unwavering belief in the salvific power of the Noble Lie and its liberal application.

For example, the only way that the mainstream media—with particular emphasis on figures like Tapper—are capable of psychologically squaring the circle of their self-assessments as “fearless and necessary truth-tellers” with their incalculable profusion of half-truths and outright falsehoods is by privately conceiving of every lie they tell as a species of Noble Lie. 

However, the abandonment of their ostensible duty of reporting the truth for the priestly or cinematic “calling” of creating a “Grand Narrative”—a modern myth dressed up as sober, secular scientific thinking that provides meaning for man in a cold and (for the mainstream media and their patrons/bosses) a conveniently, pointless cosmos—means each individual noble lie has to be carefully arranged within and harmonized with an overarching, panoramic, reality-encompassing Noble Lie. There’s not enough space to get into it, but the past decade has provided ample evidence to support the following assertion: despite variances in specific detail, I take the general outline of that overarching Noble Lie to be the establishment of a sick and unimaginative form of Utopia. Most likely, that Utopia is a crudely stitched together version of Lenin’s ideal Communist state and the Miltonic Satan’s insistence on achieving perfect freedom through the total inversion of God’s natural order.

With this grand and Noble Lie in mind (even if only vaguely or subconsciously in mind as the sort of “automated luxury communism” fantasy of a mid-to-low-level corporate media flunky), each “altruistic” little falsehood is enameled and placed to form a mosaic fata morgana that will produce a perfectly tiled and grouted map that points the way to Utopia. But beyond that, there is the thoroughly demented implicit notion that this mosaic map to nowhere and no place will eventually—as enough people adopt it—come to govern, reshape, and ultimately supplant our accurate interactions with the territory of physical, day-to-day life. 

This Ultra Noble Lie—call it the Imperial Lie—to which all other noble lies are ultimately subservient, seeks to usurp, depose, and liquidate reality as we know it. Each tiny square of mis-and-dis-information must fit snug and symmetrical to produce a curated, panoramic image of life on earth that, as it expands, the mainstream media feels assured will come to supplant the baser, more animalistic perceptions of 99% of the 8.5 billion “so-called humans” littering their earth. And it is all, of course, for the good of those ten-toed ungulates that they constructing this globe swallowing Imperial Lie. 

The tone of screeching righteousness detectable in Tapper and his comrade’s voices whenever some crack team of internet anons digs up and ships out the clips that prove they were wrong about something like Covid from the start—and were lying the whole or the majority of the way through that hideous, planetary exercise in psychospiritual torture and revisionist mental cartography—is a product of the corporate press’s obsession with getting people to accept an illusory reality as a means of making it the actual reality through mass consent, of hoodwinking people into, yet again, attempting some impossible, sadistic, and deadly experiment in utopian living. 

Some independent journalist or anon or “renegade expert” pointing out that none of these lies are noble—and that any Noble Lie is also Druj—is viewed as have perpetrated a maximally wicked undermining of the carefully stage-managed procedures for conjuring the manifestation of “heaven on earth.” Pointing out the corporate media is lying is an act of sacrilegious vandalism on the painstakingly executed, essentially magickal, operations that have been pieced together tile-by-tile in order to raise the behavior of what jornos and their deep state masters categorize (at best) as bovine-esque protohumans, to their idea of a more harmonious mode of being. 

Perhaps worst of all, telling this truth is seen as a blasphemous assertion that nobility of a lie has nothing to do with their perceived social status as titled—or in the modern context, credentialed—aristocrats. 

*

There is a legend that Akkadian Babylon fell because everyone—from the Sakkanaki down to the street sweepers—was practicing black magic. For purposes of statecraft on through to the settling of feuds and the avenging of perceived slights, an unceasing crossfire of curses and hexes ripped through the palaces, streets, and bazaars at all hours. Eventually these trajectories hardened into the astral equivalent of vegetal arteries—a skein of totally imperceptible but very real and sinister desires winding through and choking out every square inch of psychic space in the world’s metropolis until its mental and spiritual foundations were undermined. 

As the version of this tale I encountered explains, on the individual level this led to ruined lives. On the collective level—localized to the city-state—it resulted in the mechanics of Natural Law governing cause and effect, or ground and consequent, short circuiting. The combined effect was powerful enough to distort the divinely ordained standard operating procedures for material reality—generating a torrent of what might best be referred to as maleficent or ruinous synchronicities that spiderwebbed throughout Babylon—to the point where causality began to experience brief but sharp and noticeable glitch-outs that precipitated chain reactions of disaster. 

Through the profusion of black magic, religious ritual in Babylon came to be approached in an increasingly avaricious and mechanical light. Framing it in modern terms: any one of Babylon’s many “successful” practitioners of a few hexes began to sub-consciously view the secret, normally inaccessible precincts of the supernatural aid they solicited through prayer and ordained sacrifice as a cross between late 20th century arcade machines and the coning station of a nuclear sub. 

Behind the passworded blast doors of these spectral realms swirled an array of incomprehensible but efficacious buttons, dials, and levers. With the literally magic words—or a close enough approximation of them applied fervently and ceaselessly—one could brute-force the door. Once inside, anyone with a big enough purse of blood or ether could then feed heinous sacrifices into the slots on the panels. At which point, through the frenzied application of incantations and rituals, they could clumsily play some desperate occult claw-game where they attempted to guide some cold demonic hand to snatch various types of vengeance or luxury from within the city’s chaotic jumble of human suffering. But each fumbling attempt at manipulating Natural Law to clutch or crush what they were after came the with the ever-present side effect of creating knock-on effects of psychic and astral explosions that further warped and disorganized reality. 

As soon as this mindset took hold among the majority of Babylonians, the time-out-of-mind view of reality as operating according to divinely ordained schematics that regulated causal and social relationships was kicked into a burn pit. With every “successful” curse and hex, an increasing portion of the population became convinced there were no God-given operating procedures etched into material reality—at which point the whole of the law became “do what they wilt.” 

When this tangle of perversion and sinister enchantment was finally sundered, it’s little wonder that the Persians were the ones God chose to do the hacking and chopping. It makes perfect sense that black magic—which is substantially nothing more than the uttering of transcendental lies that alter not only the minds of men but erode the material building blocks of reality—was brought to heel by a people who elevated the expression of Truth to the supreme cosmic ideal.

*

Supposing that the latter date for Zarathustra’s life of mid-to-late 7th century B.C. is correct, the period from the establishment of the concept of Druj to the rise of the Noble Lie would have been somewhere between 200 to 215 years—with the fall of Babylon between the two. Soon after the battle of Salamis, I like to imagine some wise old Magi on the far side of the Hellespont tending the wounded pride of an empire and hearing about Alcibiades’ cunning deceits and exploits, then musing to himself that black magic had entered a new era. 

Curious where that would eventually lead and schooled in his own form of sorcery, perhaps he pulled out a crystal ball. With utmost concentration, peering a century thence he sees a wide-shouldered Greek bad-mouthing Alcibiades one moment, and the very next birthing from his skull—in a fashion that mirrored the goddess of warfare after whom his own city was named—the regent and protector of all lies great and small.

Gazing even further into the future, he sees that Noble Lie billow through the millennia like plumes of volcanic ash swept into the upper atmosphere and driven to all points of the globe—with only brief blasts of sunlight breaking through the dim and dark at the resurrection of the Savior, the hoofbeats of a Mongol chieftain, the brave words of a French knight to a trio of witches, or a handful of events attached to other persons that were, in their unique ways, impervious to deceit and enchantment.

Then, just when things have become truly insufferable as his inner eye scans forward to the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty first, into the polished surface with which he has entranced himself martializes the nattering font of Druj that is the smug face of Jake Tapper. Heaving the crystal ball above his head, he makes ready to smash it into a trillion pieces, but with an act of supreme will he stays his hand. 

A few moments of internal struggle, and the Magi realizes that this spiritually grotesque, droopy faced apparition from the future enrages him because it reflects him. Certainly the Magi is not a cretin or toady of this caliber—who could be?—but he too is a human, and he too struggles with Druj. Has he not lied? No, the solution is not simply to kill this man. Remember, he tells himself—the Babylonians were defeated, seemingly saved from their own black enchantments, but Druj then took refuge in the Greeks and became even stronger, despite their admirable intelligence and bravery. 

Whatever other form the battle must take, it must take the personal form of telling the Truth. Resting the crystal ball back on his perfumed carpet, he tosses a silk cloth over it and while casting his eyes to the firmament, to no one in particular, says “By the Lord of Wisdom, Anon—imitate your maker and speak the whole Truth.”

I think I’m going to have ChatGPT produce an image of this scene for me so that I can look at it whenever I’m tempted to fedpost. But first, I’ll have to buy a new phone.