Transmission unstable. If you can hear this, the truth is already gone.

It started with a myth. A harmless lie, they said. A story to build a nation.

But what happens when the story becomes more real than the facts?

When we stop asking for proof, one belief is enough.

This is how it begins. When we talk about lies in America, we tend to think in terms of spin, of scandal,

of headlines.

But what if the biggest lies aren't the ones we catch?

What if they're the ones we grow up with?

What if the first lie we learn is a lesson?

This is the story of George Washington,

or rather the version of him we created,

the boy with the hatchet, the cherry tree, the confession, I cannot tell a lie,

a neat moral tale, a child's fable, except it never happened. In our very first episode,

we're not starting with a conspiracy theory or a hoax. We're starting with something simpler,

a national bedtime story, one that says more

about what we want to believe than what actually happened, because if Post-Truth America

began somewhere, maybe it began with the way we told the truth about our very first leader.

I am your host, Michael Weelan, and this is Post Truth.

Episode 1, Test Signal, the first American myth.

To understand the myth, we first need to understand the man.

George Washington is often presented to us as a marble statue. Noble, heroic, incorruptible.

But the real man was more complicated, and much more human. Born in 1732 into the Virginia

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