“The malice of the wicked was aided by the weakness of the virtuous.”

Steve Schmidt quoting Winston Churchill, who was commenting on Hitler’s Germany and the rise of fascism.

Former US President Donald Trump has announced plans to launch a new social media network, called TRUTH Social.

He said the platform would “stand up to the tyranny of big tech”, accusing them of silencing opposing voices in the US.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which he chairs, also intends to launch a subscription video-on-demand service.

Mr Trump was banned or suspended from social networks like Twitter and Facebook after crowds of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in January.

He and his advisers have since hinted that they were planning to create a rival social media site.

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The big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth, used especially as a propaganda technique.^[1][2] The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Hitler claimed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and bring about the Holocaust.

Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie propaganda technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.^[3] Herf further argues that the Nazis’ big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at international Jewry, which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and it used these claims to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews as self-defense.^[4]

In the 21st century, the term has been applied to Donald Trump‘s attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. The big lie in this instance is the false claim that the election was stolen from him through massive electoral fraud and voter fraud, and the scale of the claim’s proponents eventually culminated with Trump supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol.^[5][6]

(continued from Wikipedia)

By Ronan O’Connell 11th October 2021

Until the 1900s, when people in Ireland got sick, they would get naked and disappear into steamy saunas. Now, a new project is aiming to uncover timeworn structures’ secrets.

Naked and sweaty, they laid inside grass-covered stone igloo-like structures in the remote fields of Ireland. Some were ill, others may have been having hallucinations, hatching plans to distil illegal alcohol or imagining they were the Vikings who once raided this country. By the time these addled folk emerged from the structures back into the fresh air of 19th-Century Ireland, they had been through a jarring mental and physical journey. One that still holds many mysteries.

“Some people reckoned the cure was worse than the disease,” archaeologist Aidan Harte told me of this sweltering experience, as he stood atop a 150-year-old Irish sweathouse in Killadiskert, an isolated corner of County Leitrim. “Part of the reason there’s crazy theories about hallucinations and making alcohol is because we just don’t fully know the truth about sweathouses and all their uses. They’re a bit of a riddle that we’re now trying to work out.”

(full story)

Notice the similarity of the Irish sweathouses to the American Indian version: