Every day I come across something that makes me think of the Executive Branch / mainstream media untruths about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (In the case of the media, it seems, the untruths were not invented but rather tolerated or encouraged, swallowed whole and then served to readers, listeners and viewers.)

In the face of official mendacity and the media’s mendacity-once-removed, a fondness for truth — or for endeavoring to arrive at it and insist on it — can be contagious. And intolerance of untruths can leach from, say, those about the Sept. 11 attacks to other untruths officially sanctioned for years and years as truths.

So today, while reading a guest columnist’s column in this past Sunday’s New York Times headlined “What if There Wasn’t a Coup Plot?,” I had to stop six paragraphs into it, held up by the author’s apparent ignorance of something that he as a presumably well-informed citizen should be aware of. Actually, three things — at least.

The guest columnist is Christopher Caldwell. He writes engagingly about various aspects of a possible attempted coup d’etat seemingly encouraged by then-President Trump on Jan. 6 of this year when he spoke outside to a crowd of supporters, some of them aiming to storm the Capitol to prevent the Electoral College’s certification of the Biden/Harris victory over Trump/Pence. The burden of the column was about the firm opposition to any coup by most military brass including Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Overall, a fine column. Click HERE for a reprint of it somewhere else.

Here’s the sentence that caused me to stop and wonder before continuing:

“On the one hand, it is hard to think of a more serious assault on American democracy than a violent entry into a nation’s capitol to reverse the election of its chief executive.”

It is?

*  How about the extensively choreographed assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, by coordinated federal and Dallas officials that resulted in the presidency of a man he had defeated in 1960 for his party’s presidential nomination, a man who immediately reversed steps Kennedy had put in place to begin ending this country’s participation in the Vietnam War?

* How about the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy (less challenging to its perpetrators than his brother’s had been five years before) as he seemed bound to win the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nomination and quite possibly that November’s  presidential election? And . . .

* How about the “9/11” attacks which, per Executive Branch accounts, were pulled off by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist band in an impossible scenario only believable by millions — still — because of the lockstep support of controlled media, but which have resulted in significant intrusions of American freedoms thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act and its successors?

These were three much more serious assaults on democracy, in part because they were carried out in complete secrecy, apparently by well-organized elements of the state apparatus itself, rather than in broad daylight by rank amateurs who had telegraphed nearly every step of their attack for weeks in advance.

Barely noticeable sentences like those 33 words in Caldwell’s otherwise well-considered column are serious assaults on common sense and on democracy.

— Mark Channing Miller