Charles Goyette’s Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole arrived at an uncanny moment. For months, Americans were told that the military buildup around Venezuela and extrajudicial strikes on its vessels were all about stopping drug trafficking. President Donald Trump added ominous warnings that the country was “emptying its mental institutions” into the United States. Diplomats — whose job is supposed to be normalization and negotiation — leaned instead into escalation, quoting human-rights violations by the Nicolás Maduro regime and his daring to have relations with other nations, while brushing aside accusations that Washington was pursuing regime change.
Then came 2026, and the pretense was dropped. Following Maduro’s abduction on January 3 — an operation that left dozens of people dead — President Trump said the quiet part out loud: “We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” he told reporters. He then declared what lay ahead would not be a brief intervention but a long-term U.S. occupation, stating, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
The candor was, in many ways, another slap in the face to voters who expected Trump to rein in foreign entanglements. Yet instead of confronting the betrayal, prominent right-wing influencers rushed to explain it away — the same voices who only yesterday condemned interventionism and hailed Trump as a “peace president.” Their answer was to dust off the Monroe Doctrine and dress it up as sober statesmanship: “Our hemisphere, our rules.”
Meanwhile, the public is supposed to forget the accusations of “narcoterrorism” as the Department of Justice quietly dropped a claim about Maduro’s alleged cartel involvement. Forget humanitarian talk; the real motive had finally been spelled out loud and clear, yet hardly anyone in power appeared bothered.
In the meantime, new lies about other countries are offered as pretext for more interventions. Iran poses a threat. So do Cuba, Mexico, and Canada. Greenland should be taken — by force, if necessary.
At times, the White House appears fatigued by the need to articulate a compelling rationale. Asked why Iran should be attacked if its nuclear facilities had already been “obliterated” by previous U.S. strikes, press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered only that “there are many reasons and arguments that one could make for a strike against Iran,” without naming one.
So, at what point does the justification for unilateral aggression stop mattering, and only the intervention remain?
This is precisely where Goyette’s book becomes essential reading. Empire of Lies is not just about individual interventions and their failures. While replete with familiar faces from both parties, it describes the machinery that makes deception routine. Goyette characterizes America’s posture of perpetual intervention as a “full-time occupation” that requires compelling stories.
Ordinary Americans have grown weary of foreign adventures. They feel the costs: massive drains on the treasury, inflationary pressures, and the erosion of liberty at home through emergency powers, surveillance, and measures like the Patriot Act. They see the human reality — millions of civilians killed or displaced in faraway lands, and the radicalization of survivors who experience American power not as liberation but as despicable brutality.
No one could sell that picture honestly. So Goyette argues, something else is sold instead. He shows how 9/11 trauma was harnessed to justify conflicts unrelated to the original attack. As part of this larger story, he revisits Iraq’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” — a notorious case where the public was marched into war on false premises, and the architects later joked about with shameless brazenness. Even uncomfortable questions about allies like Saudi Arabia were brushed aside because the narrative demanded simplicity over nuance.
Go back further: the Bay of Pigs exemplifies interventionism colliding with reality and unresolved tensions about who truly directs American power.
Goyette does not write as a partisan; he shows a system that transcends parties. For example, Barack Obama rode a 2008 promise to wind down Iraq but kept America engaged long after the rhetoric faded. Trump ran as a critic of “forever wars” yet discovered his inherited machine was easier to use than dismantle. The “Deep State’s warlords,” in Goyette’s terms, are institutional forces that continuously push toward planetary projection of power — to the detriment of both the world and the United States.
If the war machine is the engine, the press is the gearbox. One of the book’s sharpest themes is media’s role in laundering official narratives. Instead of adversarial watchdogs, outlets behave like faithful stenographers. Debate confines itself to tactics and execution; questioning the premise becomes fringe or unpatriotic. Propaganda can be crude or sophisticated — built on anonymous officials, classified briefings, and unverifiable assurances — but the effect remains the same: a public that would resist intervention learns to accept it — even cheer for it.
That illusion is reinforced by how war is presented. In official narratives, it’s wrapped in ceremony and heroism — flags, speeches, solemn tributes to sacrifice in the name of freedom. Goyette insists on forcing readers back to physical reality: war as trauma, death, severed limbs, shattered families, starvation, cities reduced to rubble. Politicians then smile for cameras, presenting results as success and casualties as the “price worth paying.” The gap between myth and reality is not accidental; it’s strategy. Without the myth, none of it would be tolerable — and thus politically feasible.
What makes Empire of Lies powerful is how it collects these episodes into fragments that reveal a deeper pattern. Interventions are not isolated mistakes but predictable outputs of a political economy rewarding force and a culture convinced of moral superiority.
Goyette is especially effective when he pauses between narrative and consequence. He shows how domestic emergency measures become permanent architectures of control, how yesterday’s lies vanish into the “memory hole,” and how each intervention plants seeds for the next crisis — eventually justifying more interventions.
Some readers may find Goyette’s tone severe, but severity becomes difficult to avoid once the pattern is visible, whether in Venezuela, Ukraine, or the Middle East.
Empire of Lies is not merely a record of hypocrisy. It portrays a system that has grown ruthless, insulated, and dangerously detached from consequence. Goyette does not pretend it will stop because someone appeals to virtue; he shows it does not stop — it adjusts language, finds new rationalizations, manufactures necessities, and moves forward as if nothing has been learned.
And this is where the book quietly turns the question back on readers: Many of us have grown accustomed to short-lived narratives and noble explanations. Disoriented and confused, we often take refuge in soothing rhetoric from preferred politicians and media personalities, choosing the comfort of illusion over the burden of truth evident in the aftermath — the wreckage at home, the bloody chaos abroad, and the facts that slip into the “memory hole” again and again.
Which leaves an urgent question hanging: What becomes of a nation that learns to live on lies?