The End of Lying
Something May Have Changed in the Last Week
Twenty-one years ago, Al Franken wrote a book titled Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. This was just a few years after he left Saturday Night Live and right before he ran for the Senate in Minnesota. This is what he writes in the introduction:
The members of the right-wing media are not interested in conveying the truth. That’s not what they’re for. They are an indispensable component of the right-wing machine that has taken over our country. They employ a tried-and-true methodology. First, they concoct an inflammatory story that serves their political goals (“Al Gore’s a liar.”) They repeat it. (“Al Gore lies again!”) They embellish it. (“Are his lies pathological, or are they merely malicious?”) They try to push it into the mainstream media. All too often, they succeed. (“Tall Tales: Is What We’ve Got Here a Compulsion to Exaggerate?” New York Times, October 15, 2000.) Occasionally, they fail. (Despite their efforts, the mainstream media never picked up the Clinton-as-murderer stories.) But even their failures serve their agenda, as evidence of liberal bias. Win-win. You got to admit. It’s a good racket.
It’s depressing to read that paragraph today. Not only does it ring true, but it describes a golden age before social media increased these patterns exponentially.
My title today is an homage to one of my favority Neil Postman books, The End of Education. His book had two purposes: to critique the nature of education in the 1990s and, relatedly, to bemoan the lack of telos or end goal of our educational endeavors. I no longer have the book, but I remember (in paraphrase) one of my favorite lines: “What good does to it do to make the trains run on time if you don’t know where you want them to go.” Rather than tinker with strategies (this was before No Child Left Behind’s testing revolution), we need to first determine what the overall goals are for an educated populace.1
Let me try to connect Franken and Postman. I want to explore what the point of the lying is and explore some specific examples. Then I want to question whether or not the lying has the potential of becoming counterproductive.
The Washington Post’s factchecker, Glenn Kessler, estimated that Trump had lied over 30,000 during his presidential term. Others, like the tireless Daniel Dale of CNN and Aaron Rupar of Public Notice have kept the more current lists. Trump’s rallies are filled with made up stories and abrupt transitions (The Weave) and outrageous accusations. As the New York Times reported, they are twice as long as his 2016 rallies and operate at a lower level of vocabulary. It can be hard to interpret Trump’s intent/purpose2 in these rallies so I’ll focus on a couple of more concrete examples.
What was the point of Vance’s Springfield “eating the pets” claim? What is served by this lie that local industry, the mayor, and the governor all said that never happened? Vance claimed that he was only responding to concerns from his constituents. (Apparently his office has some way of confirming that those who called were really his constituents. Or are they just reacting to calls they receive from anywhere without asking for evidence?) Eventually he confirmed to CNN’s Dana Bash that these stories forced “the media” to pay attention to the impact of migrants on housing, social services, and medical infrastructure.
The “pet-eating” lie was intended to make the Haitian migrants “others”. They were unlike regular Ohioans and were making life more complicated. “Real Americans’ were suffering because these folks had moved to town (and taken jobs others didn’t want and been great employees).
If only Springfield residents had a sitting Senator who could advocate on their behalf to get transitional assistance to cover the infrastructure impacts of an sizable in-migration! Maybe there were avenues that could be explored with HHS or HUD. But Vance wasn’t concerned about the social structure challenges. Not when he could use this story to argue that the Haitians didn’t belong there in the first place.
Here’s the most recent example: The Biden Administration and FEMA didn’t provide the assistance the residents of Western North Carolina needed after hurricane Helene. The either diverted funds to help immigrants or gave people $750 and told them “tough luck”. Or, in the MTG version, directed the hurricane into Republican areas.3
These lies have the purpose of demonstrating that the government (under Democratic leadership) is corrupt, incompetent, wasteful, or all of the above. This is a trope that goes back to before Reagan.4
The lies work to create chaos, to raise emotional levels, and to discredit opponents. Because they are so frequent, it’s hard to run any one of them to ground before the next three lies appear.
We also lose perspective on lying. In the midst of all these lies, journalists worrying about “balance” need to ask Tim Walz why he misspoke when he said he was in China in June of 1989 when he didn’t arrive until August. What purpose would be served by that mistake? And didn’t the democracy crisis run longer than the actual confrontation in Tianenmen Square? Walz’s response that he can be a “knucklehead” might be one of the truest statements this election cycle.
Let me return to the other meaning of my title. Maybe the lying isn’t working as well as it has in the past. It’s been interesting to see Aurora leadership pushing back on Trump’s claim that gangs have overrun the city (he will repeat those claims at a rally at the elite Gaylord of the Rockies — technically in Aurora — on Friday). Republican governors went before cameras to explain that they had all talked to the Biden administration, that money and resources were flowing, and that guard troops had been actively rescuing people and resolving access issues. It was remarkable to see the Charlotte Observer put this on its editorial page.
There will likely be outlandish claims as Hurricane Milton barrels toward the west coast of Florida. But there’s reason to believe that people will be less likely to take those at face value.
We’’ve got four weeks left until election day. Maybe, just maybe, we can stay focused on the actual stakes of the election rather than the latest claim from those lying liars Franken wrote about.
I’m pretty sure “workforce preparedness” was not the ideal Postman was hoping for!
Beyond Steve Bannon’s intent to “flood the zone with s&#t”
Which doesn’t explain why they wouldn’t have protected Ashville
“I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.“