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Heck, most of us here know this innately, but we all grew up with that indoctrination from an early age.

Including me.

I went through most of my life nodding in agreement that, yes, Senator McCarthy was a very bad man who should be relegated to the trash heap of history and forgotten.

It was only when I was older, and heard a different version of McCarthy and events surrounding him that was so polar opposite of all I had ever heard, that after I listened to it, thought “Someone is not telling the truth here.”

Both accounts could not be correct. In particular, was the portion of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 where McCarthy was, in the widely accepted version (in history textbooks, movies, and media) accused of badgering and slandering an innocent person prompting the lawyer Joseph Welch to utter the immortal line “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Well, this observation on my part was about perhaps 10 years after the Internet became a thing, so I was able to go to the Library of Congress website and download the actual transcripts of the hearings (they were not easy to find on that website at the time) and read those actual transcripts.

What I found from reading the transcripts was that the long accepted version of events was complete and utter leftist BS, and the account I had read was far more aligned with the actual events and dialogue that took place.

I became very interested in that time frame and subject, and have read several dozen books on the era, and have come to the conclusion that we have been lied to about this our entire lives.

It was extremely disillusioning for me. In much the same way that reading the Whittaker Chambers book “Witness” had a profound political effect on me, this knowledge also had the same effect. After that, I became nearly universally skeptical of anything I read in school textbooks or heard on the news.

If I heard a reporter say the sky was blue, I would glance up to ensure it actually was.

Overall, that has had a positive effect on me, but I didn’t enjoy the concept of being forced to reevaluate everything I had been told since childhood, even though that has been a positive thing as well.

One of the cleavage points between Leftism and Conservatism is Introspection.

We, as Conservatives, are forced to constantly examine our belief systems to test and validate them against reality, and we are forced to do this as a matter of course because we are under constant assault due to our beliefs. So those of us who are serious about it engage in a significant amount of introspection.

Leftists feel no such desire or need for introspection. Their views are not only not assaulted, they are lauded and reinforced by a willing and compliant Media/Big Tech/Entertainment/Education that never examines the foundations of their belief systems, but without any supporting logic or analysis, simply states it as “good” and “fact”.

Leftism is a haven for lazy people and intellectually challenged people who cannot think for themselves. It is why they have a hive mentality.

And we, as Conservatives, in general do not.