Book Review: Lies My Government Told Me

Title: Lies My Government Told Me 

Author: Robert W. Malone

Date: 2022

Publisher: Skyhorse

ISBN: 978-1-5107-7325-7

Length: 645 e-pages

Quote: "I never really allowed myself to confront the possibility that we might not be the good guys.”

[Kindle's automatic e-footnote: Malone MD MS, Robert W . Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense) (p. 12). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.]  

With a title like that emblazoned in black on red on the cover, you've been warned not to expect a fun read. By the size of the printed book, you're warned not to expect a quick read either. This is a serious book for people who are seriously unhappy about the way our bureaucracy handled the coronavirus panic, and want to do something about it. No conspiracy theories, no advice to prepare for the end of life as we know it on Earth--just sensible facts, and solutions that are easy to implement, in a peaceful and orderly way, if we can muster the collective fortitude to implement them. 

So what's Malone going to ask you to do, you might reasonably wonder. He's going to recommend that you get out of debt, stay out of debt, prepare to homeschool any children you may have if necessary, cultivate a garden, and be a kind, generous, spiritual, liberal-minded person. Politically, he will also recommend reviving the Trump rule that federal employees can be fired.

So watch a certain type of federal employee screech and howl that Malone has gone off the deep end, turned against his fellow bureaucrats, gone off the rails. Those are the ones who need to hear Trump's best known line, and they know it. Malone writes about our nation's capital with love and respect, as one who's lived and thrived in the city. 

"Anti-vaccine." "Anti-government." Are we either of those things, Gentle Readers? I know some people are Orthodox Jews or committed vegans, but most of us are definitely pro-vaccine when it comes to things like rabies, smallpox, or diphtheria. An analogy came to me this evening. I was in this little convenience store that I'd like to see succeed; they'd had a good deal on peanut butter but they'd run out, so I bought some peanut butter candy instead. It was stale. Does choosing not to eat this peanut butter, because I don't need the candy coating and the peanut butter is stale, mean I'm anti-peanut-butter?

I'd propose an amendment more worthy of a President Kennedy, or a President DeSantis or whoever takes the responsibility for stopping the trainwreck toward which the current administration is careening. We don't need all those employees to be fired. They're superfluous, entitled, and annoying but they are, on the whole, good workers with pleasant dispositions and only slightly degraded work ethics. We need to put them on an assignment to learn about private-sector employment. Let them come back to Washington to report on what they've learned a couple of times a year, and pay them for that. Otherwise they're on their own, Let them find out for themselves what the taxpayers are up against. I'd expect that the best federal workers will be the first to recommend eliminating their former jobs from the budget. 

Malone's right. So are the other people who've contributed sections to his book. If you've been reading your daily Defender the first half of the book, which recounts the story of the coronavirus panic from Malone's unique point of view as a federal employee who had worked on "gene therapy: himself, will be a long dry plod through memories you'd probably prefer not to remember in detail. Hang in there. Those events need to be on the record, and Malone's viewpoint adds value to them. 

I particularly like that, although I think everyone in Glyphosate Awareness, the Children's Health Defense, Right To Know, and related movements shares a certain opinion of Anthony Fauci, Malone resists the temptation to make this book another attack on Fauci. It's a very ethical, rational takedown of evil ideas, not of people. Malone reminds us that there are people in the upper echelons of power who laugh at Klaus Schwab and limits himself to one throwaway line about how Schwab seems to be setting himself up as a target for blame. Cool.

I wish he'd written about the more serious, ongoing medical concerns raised by glyphosate and paraquat... "Mercy, Priscilla, are you suggesting that a book that's already 645 pages long needed to be any longer?!" Well, no, I suppose not. Though the last 57 pages are only endnotes. (There's an index, too; in the interest of keeping the book small enough to fit into people's hands, the index is on Malone's web site. If you're going to write about the coronavirus panic in history, later, you'll want to print the index before the Internet implodes.)

If you're alive and would prefer to stay alive, you need to read this book. You don't have to read it all at once. Let a chapter or section a day sink in, over a few weeks. It feels really good to finish reading this book. You'll be glad you've read it.