“Talking Smart and Telling Lies.”

Posted on | December 1, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

On the back end of Thanksgiving celebrations with family, and in a reflective mood, I came across a United Methodist Insight publication from a year ago with the title “Remembering Big Lies Told at Church Pancake Suppers.” It was written by John Sumwalt, a retired United Methodist Pastor from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.

In the piece, Sumwalt recalls a Church supper in 1954 that resonated on many levels with my own upbringing at the time, and our views of right and wrong.

He writes: “What I remember most was the simple pleasure of sitting at the long white-linen-covered tables that were strung together in three rows across the width of the community building. I would listen to the neighbor men talk smart and tell lies. I didn’t know they were lies at the time and maybe those good men didn’t know either. But they were more than the common-place tall tales that old men tell with twinkling eyes. They were whopping speculations and exaggerations about threats to the nation. Now we would call them conspiracy theories. It was the time of the ‘big lie’ propagated by one of our Wisconsin senators, the now-infamous Joseph McCarthy.”

The date was June 9, 1954. This was over a year after Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The history shows that he had “rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies.” Clearly a psychopath, he escaped control of moderating voices, biting off ever larger targets, including now the U.S. Army.

“Judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one”, was how Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold described him. In 1954, McCarthy accused the army of “lax security at its top-secret army facilities” which he claimed were infiltrated by communists. The army responded by hiring veteran Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to defend itself.

As documentarians reported, “Mothers who never watched TV during the day were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.” McCarthy’s right-hand chief council that day was lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn. Pragmatic, ruthless, and evil to the core, Cohn’s career was launched by McCarthy, and his tainted touch destroyed lives and weakened the U.S. government for three more decades, straight up to the moment of his death from HIV/AIDS in 1986.

His style and tactics are widely felt today to be the strategic scaffolding of our Executive Branch’s attempted takeover of the US government. Not surprisingly, a direct assault on the control functions, values, and traditions of the US Military are a leading wedge in these attacks. They have literally exploded in the past week with revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself gave the go-ahead on a “kill them all” order that ultimately engulfed two survivors of a rocket attack on an alleged drug transporting speed boat.

In a 5-minute summation of the televised events of June 9, 1954, you (along with our leaders) are able to witness the historic takedown of McCarthy by Welch (with Cohn as witness) – the “slaying of the dragon” that finally destroyed McCarthy once and for all.

Cohn had reached an agreement with Welch that McCarthy would avoid attacking one particular Army service man as a communist if Welch remained civil. But Welch had laid a trap, and purposefully needled McCarthy into loosing his temper, and on camera, violating the agreement and “attacking the good lad,” who an outraged Welch tearfully defended in his historic and well-prepared retort.

As historian Thomas Doherty recalls, “It was as if the entire country had been waiting for somebody to finally say this line, ‘Have you no sense of decency.’” To which Jelani Cobb adds, “At the end of it, all the illusions, the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated about himself, had effectively been dispelled.”

As Welch pounced on his victim, Cohn winces as his dragon is slain. As Congress grapples with a situation that has veered dangerously out of control, we can only hope that this time “history will repeat.”

In the meantime, Cynthia B. Astle, Editor and Founder of United Methodist Insight, in the face of ICE raids and inappropriate use of the military and National Guard, recently wrote, “In light of recent events in which United Methodists have been actively resisting efforts by the Trump Administration to foment violence for the sake of enacting a police state, United Methodist Insight will post these guidelines from professor Timothy Snyder, author of the book, “On Tyranny.” We will leave this card posted at the top of Insight’s home page for the foreseeable future.

Pastor Sumwalt completes his piece by telling a story about how the “pancake loving” parishioners (and himself included) had not challenged the false fact that Martin Luther King was a Communist (because why else would the FBI bug him?) Regretting that he had remained silent and not challenged “the big lie,” he quotes MLK himself with this useful reminder for our perilous times:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

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One Response to ““Talking Smart and Telling Lies.””

Mike Magee
December 1st, 2025 @ 2:09 pm

“Lawmakers warn Hegseth may have committed war crimes following second-strike report”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/30/war-crimes-hegseth-venezuela-strikes-00671160

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“Talking Smart and Telling Lies.”

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