Raised by a hard right parent. Was told that outside the US, every country was basically third world. Even the UK, still living in the mud in medieval times under a tyrannical monarchy or some shit.

A more humorous lie I was told was if you swallowed chewing gum, you’d blow bubbles out of your butt. A family friend who told me that said it happened to their dog.

My health class was taught by our gym teacher and she was terrible at it. Some points I remembered being taught:

• Hypertension is when the hamstrings of your legs shrink because you don’t stretch every morning. Hypertension can kill you, so make sure you stretch.
• All drugs make you hallucinate. Every single one of them. Usually dragons. People die on drugs because they’re trying to get away from the dragons and jump off buildings or run into traffic.
• Babies have super suction power which they use to breastfeed. An adult cannot get milk from a breast because they can’t suck hard enough.

I learned these were wrong after starting secondary school where biology was taught by someone who studied biology. Except for the breastfeeding thing. That one was through personal research.

“I will love you no matter what”

That changed real fuckin fast when i came out as trans

“When you grow up, you can be anything you want to be.”

I wanna be a homeowner. 🫩

With liberty and and justice for all.

“This will go on your permanent record”.

Outrageous lie back in the 80s.

Unfortunately true today with the internet and the surveillance state.

I was little and going through that “ask an unending stream of questions to figure out how the world works / determine the limits of your parent’s patience” phase. At one point during this my mother, who had up until this point used this as an opportunity to teach me how to research things and overall handled it with grace, began to hit her limit. And so one fine morning when I had perkily jammed myself underneath the toilet in a way that startled the living daylights out of her when she came in and I asked how toilets worked, she said in great exasperation “toilet gnomes, and you shouldn’t be down there bothering them”. This of course made perfect sense to me - someone had to crew the little boat, and humans would never fit in there.

I maintain to this day that it was an act of class solidarity that I shouldn’t be mocked for when, several days later, she found me pooping in the yard because I “didn’t want the gnomes to work too hard”.

1. there is a god

2. race is a biological reality

3. men and women are fundamentally different

4. Just world theory

5. America is a force for good in the world

6. The Enlightenment makes Western culture superior

7. The post-war boom where a single income could buy a hose/ car/ and college was a universal reality and not exclusive to white men.

8. Guns make you safe.

• It’s illegal to turn the interior light on in the car while driving.
• If you make that face, it’ll stay like that.
• Sitting too close to the TV will give you square eyes
• If you lie, you get spots on your tongue (would then ask to show you your tongue when they asked you if you telling the truth)
• The Square box in that corner (the maximize window button on a PC) is a camera and we can watch what you do.

Hard work will always lead to success, which is why anyone can be president.

Some really solid teachers in high school were able to cover why that was bullshit just by proper framing of the material.

Oh boy, where do I start? I was raised by racist crack and meth addicts in the rural southern US.

Black people hate white people.

Black people are trying to replace white people on a genetic level (Great Replacement Theory).

Black people have smaller skulls and thus, smaller brains than white people, which makes them more ape-like and prone to aggression.

Black people are taller, run faster, and jump higher than white people because they have three extra muscles in their knee area. Basketball was a white people’s sport before they set the slaves free.

Black people drink and play loud music all the time because “that’s their culture”.

All black people are lazy moochers who cheat the welfare system for free money to drink and smoke crack all day because they feel entitled to it after slavery.

Black people actually liked slavery back in the day because they had a decent, simple life. Many of them begged to go back to the plantations after they were freed because they had nowhere else to go.

The world was a better place when black people were slaves because at least then, they worked. Now, you have them all sitting around, collecting welfare, having white people pay their bills for them. If you think about it, white people are the slaves now.

Just a little crack is fine, as long as you’re not an addict like those black people.

Beer is for white people. It doesn’t get you too drunk so you can still go to work. Black people don’t work, that’s why they drink liquor.

Birds have wings because they’re supposed to fly, that’s what they do. Women have wombs because they’re supposed to have babies, that’s what they do.

Men are supposed to have as many babies as possible because God says to be fruitful and multiply. But women are only supposed to have their husband’s babies to keep the bloodline pure.

I’m sure there are more, those are just the ones I haven’t repressed.

The USA is the land of the free

Much more inconsequential than some of the answers here, but I believed well into my 20s that it was illegal to turn the overhead light on in a car while driving at night.

The classic “if you eat watermelon seeds, one will grow in your stomach.”

My parents were super against lying to kids. We’d hear parents in front of us at mcdonalds tell their kids they couldn’t have french fries because they were all out and we’d ask “is that true?” And mom and dad would assure us no, it’s not true, those parents are just afraid of telling their kids no.

I remember realizing at like 8 that “don’t swallow gum because it can’t be digested and will just accumulate in your gut” can’t be true.