I've been studying the merchants’ techniques for deception for more than twenty years, and I probably still don’t know them all.
Lying by omission is one of them.
Direct prevarication is another; they don’t shy away from it.
Deception by structure, which is burying the truth in the fine print, or at the bottom of page 38, after misdirecting readers in all that came before, is another.
Another merchantish technique for deception involves telling the truth! But doing so in an unconvincing way, or by speaking as if through a mouthful of garbage, so that it comes out with a stinking odor that makes people want to disbelieve it.
merchants, in disproportionately great numbers, seem to have a talent for any sort of activity that involves getting into someone else’s mind and turning opinion in the direction they want it to go, even when doing so involves some disregard of the facts.
merchants are frequently good storytellers, and there are many talented merchantish writers of fiction including science fiction masters Asimov and Silverberg and many others in every genre. Not only are merchants often good authors, they are also commonly skillful lawyers, excellent teachers, persuasive advertisers accomplished movie-makers, clever politicians, cleverer propagandists, and good liars. Very good liars. merchants are adapted to their peculiar set of skills, and that’s why they are dangerous to everyone else.
Then there’s the propaganda of intimidation, of which “cancel culture” is a major part. “Carry our message, though you know it to be false, to naïve ears, or we will take away your job and blacklist you!” As I often say, a threat to the paycheck is sufficient to make most people pretend to believe every lie they ever heard.
Hence, teachers who doubt some important historical detail that the merchants want taught as an unquestionable truth are induced, by a fear that they will otherwise lose their jobs, to spread what they secretly believe is a lie.