Why is everyone in such a dudgeon about Brian Williams’s helicopter lies?

Williams himself has disavowed responsibility for the lies, in part by saying, “I would not have chosen to make this mistake...I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

How can we justify the condemnation of people who are not responsible for their actions?

Obviously, Williams told a lie he did not choose to tell.  So how did the lie come about?  The answer is as clear and as solidly supported as Williams’s journalism: Williams is a victim of long-standing government mind-control.  The government inserted the lie into his mind and compelled him to utter it repeatedly – probably via some form of low-frequency stimulation.

Of course, the defense of Williams would be wise not to rest there.

Another aspect of the defense should begin with the recognition that the Williams unit has been lying since its installation as successor to the Brokaw unit.  In fact, is that not what he has been paid to do?  Has he not been compensated very handsomely indeed to disseminate government propaganda and actively suppress government lies?

The helicopter lies surely amount to nothing next to, for example, his lies of omission.  Do you recall his award-winning reports on Obamacare lies or his sparkling series on the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups?  How about his stunning exposé of Fast and Furious – do you remember that?  Me neither.

Surely you comprehend the operational context the Williams unit labors so assiduously in.  It’s a realm chock-full of fantasy and denial, repression and displacement, and wall-to-wall, morning-till-evening lies – all of which is more than enough, one supposes, to render any human being with a shred of honesty and a sliver of remaining willpower mentally unbalanced. 

Gradually, such a human being might come to the stark, and harrowing, realization that, 10 million a year and all, he is in reality but a marionette, a puppet, naught but a very expensive propagandist.

Trained to lie and expected to lie, the marionette/unit invents and repeats unscripted lies and thinks it’s just part of the job description.  Personally lived realities and experiences are distorted, and the fictitious distortions are integrated with the “Face” – the inherently deceitful and totally manufactured construct that is the MSM News Anchor – but not with the asymptotically vanishing remnant of humanity that bears names such as “Brian Williams.”

Surely we can now see how, as the marionette put it, something “screws up in the mind” of such a personage. 

The Williams defense therefore contends that Williams was, after all, a victim of a form of mind control – the kind where all semblance of independence, critical thought, and integrity are voluntarily sacrificed at the door of MSM news buildings – well before a “victim” is “lucky” enough to be plopped down in the anchor chair.

If the Williams unit is dismissed, the hollow MSM people who put him there will crow that doing so was grievously sad but an ultimately necessary consequence of unwavering scrupulousness and adherence to principles of integrity. 

Wouldn’t that be, for all parties concerned and the American people in particular, profoundly sad and uproariously funny at the same time?

Such are the times we live in.

Dr. Jason Kissner is associate professor of criminology at California State University, Fresno.  He is the author of “Are Active Shootings Temporally Contagious?  An Empirical Assessment,” which will appear in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology.