Government descends from Latin gubernare, to steer or pilot a ship, borrowed from Greek kybernan. The same Greek root gives cybernetics, the science of steering systems. Plato already called the statesman the ship's pilot, 2,400 years before the meme.
Assessment: Fully documented. The metaphor of rule-as-navigation is older than most constitutions.
Interesting claims
Govern plus mente, control the mind
A claim popularized by Jordan Maxwell splits government into govern and mente, Latin for mind: to control the mind. It spreads because it is memorable, bilingual, and confirms what many already suspect.
Assessment: False anatomy. The -ment is the Latin noun suffix -mentum, as in fragment or ornament, not mens, mind. Latin speakers would not parse it that way. The suspicion the word attracts may deserve investigation; the word itself is innocent.
Stories
The meme that went to the protests
The govern-mente claim circulates as image macros, protest signs, and talk-show monologues, always told as a discovery, always with the confidence of a key turning. Its spread through 2010s social media is itself the story: a false etymology that behaved like a true one because it felt true.
Assessment: Documented as a viral phenomenon. The meme's career is a case study in why etymology matters: the claim needs no evidence because the word's everyday menace supplies it.
Sources and further reading
Plato, Politicus 292a, kybernetike as the art of rule
OED, government, from Latin gubernare via Old French governer
Worth asking
If the true root of government is the same as cybernetics, the steersman, which story serves whom: the conspiracy reading, or the maritime one?