Telling lies is wrong. They can be harmful to innocent people. The following are only two examples that show how lies damage large groups of Americans.
Vice President Vance spoke during a Turning Point USA meeting at the University of Mississippi on October 29, 2025. He claimed that when settlers arrived in the New World, they “found a lot of civilizations that were murdering babies in weird religious rituals. It was Christianity that said, ‘We don’t kill children just because they’re somehow inconvenient to people’” (dailykos.com/stories/2025/10/30-JDVance- and-Childhood-sacrifice-Forced-Birth-propaganda-at-TPUSA).
Vance added, “Christian civilization ended that practice” (dailykos).
Factual history tells a far different story. It was actually the “settlers” who killed countless thousands of Indigenous children.
“Archaeologists, including those specializing in North American history, are calling this [Vance’s statement] a flat-out lie. There is no evidence of widespread child sacrifice among First Nations. To say that about Indigenous people is historically false, deeply racist, and disgustingly revisionist” (dailykos).
Bartolome de las Casas gives the first historical evidence to support my claim that the first ones who came to the New World were the killers of babies. He was born in Seville, Spain, in 1484, studied canon law at the University of Salamanca, and was ordained a priest later.
His father was part of Columbus’s second expedition, and young Bartolome witnessed the return of Columbus with Indigenous captives. This influenced his decision to come to the New World (worldhistoryedu.com/Bartolome- de-las-casas).
Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 and became a landowner and encomendero (in charge of the royal court), where he participated in the forced labor system that characterized Spanish colonial rule.
He joined in expeditions, including the conquest of Cuba in 1513. However, in 1514, after reflecting on a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes, he underwent a profound moral transformation and renounced his encomendero status, choosing instead to advocate for Indigenous rights (worldhistoryedu).
In 1515, Ferdinand the Catholic granted Las Casas an audience, where Bartolome lectured him at length about the destruction, greed, and violent deaths visited on native inhabitants by Spain. Ferdinand referred the matter to Juan Rodriquez de Fonseca, bishop of Burgos.
When Fonseca learned of the slaughter in Cuba of seven thousand children in three months, he replied, “And how does that concern me?” (Introduction xxiii, “Bartolome De las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” Penguin Books, United Kingdom: London, 1992).
Among the many abhorrent atrocities Las Casas observed was this one. “It was in this kingdom (Yucatan) that a Spaniard who was out hunting deer or rabbits realized that his dogs were hungry and, not finding anything they could hunt, took a little boy from his mother, cut his arms and legs into chunks with his knife and distributed them among his dogs. Once they had eaten up these steaks, he threw the rest of the carcass on the ground for them to fight over” (De Las Casas, p. 74).
Bartolome wrote in the conclusion of his book, “I completed it in Valencia on the eighth day of December 1542, at a time when the violence, the oppression, the despotism, the killing, the plunder, the depopulation, the outrages, the agonies and the calamities we have described were at their height throughout the New World wherever Christians have set foot” (De Las Casas, p. 127).
Scalp-hunting began in the mid-1670’s by white settlers in Massachusetts. Bounties were paid for Native American scalps. A male scalp was worth more than a female scalp, and a child’s scalp brought the least (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of The United States,” Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014, pp. 64-65).
“Scalp-hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalping hunts: redskins” (Dunbar-Ortiz, p.65).
That is where the offensive term “Redskins” originated.
CNN’s Dana Bash confronted J. D Vance on September 15, 2024, about his claim that Haitian Americans in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. Vance said that he and Trump had to “create stories” about migrants eating pets “so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people” (npr. org/2024/09/15/vancefalse- claims-haitian-migrants- pets).
Vance showed no concern for the anguish he caused those honest, industrious Haitians who were here legally. He showed no remorse for the pain he inflicted on our Native Americans.
Which is worse, denying history or inventing falsehoods? In my view, they are both equally abhorrent. Lying by Trump and his administration is rampant. The harm to our democratic republic and innocent individuals is immeasurable.
It seems clear that historians will look back at this era and ask, “How did people believe those outrageous lies?”