Lies

So much lies over just the last week.

September 29, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

Late Friday night, Tennessee House Republican Caucus chair Jeremy Faison posted “President Biden has finally approved [Tennessee governor Bill Lee’s] state of emergency request,” making it sound as if the delay in federal support for the state during the devastation of Hurricane Helene was Biden’s fault. In fact, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina all declared emergencies and requested and received federal approval of those declarations before the hurricane hit, Governor Lee did not.

Instead, in keeping with an April joint resolution from the Republican-dominated Tennessee legislature calling for 31 days of prayer and fasting to “seek God’s hand of mercy healing on Tennessee,” Lee proclaimed September 27 “a voluntary Day of Prayer & Fasting.”

Lee did not declare a state of emergency until late on September 27, after flash flooding had already created havoc. President Biden approved it immediately.

The extraordinary damage from Helene in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia continues to mount. At least 91 people have died, and search and rescue teams are at work across several states. More than 2 million people are without power, and western North Carolina is isolated after its roads washed out. A fire at a chemical facility in Conyers, Georgia, outside Atlanta forced the evacuation of 17,000 people nearby. The National Weather Service office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, wrote to the residents of the western Carolinas and northeast Georgia: “This is the worst event in our office’s history.”

Faison’s implication that Democratic president Biden, rather than Republican governor Lee, was to blame for the slow federal response to Helene in Tennessee illustrated the Republicans’ attempt to create a fake world to motivate their base with fear and anger while leaving Democrats to come up with real world solutions. And since those solutions are popular, Republicans are claiming credit for them.

In the past two days, Republican lawmakers who just days ago voted against funding the federal government and who have railed against government spending have been out front claiming credit for getting federal disaster relief.

Republican presidential nominee Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance have been claiming that it was Trump who capped the cost of insulin at $35 a month. Vance has accused Vice President Kamala Harris of lying when the Biden administration takes credit for it. Vance’s statement, itself, is a breathtaking lie. Trump signed an executive order in July 2020 establishing a temporary, voluntary program that let some Medicare Part D prescription drug plans cap monthly insulin copayments at $35. The program ran from January 1, 2021, through December 31, 2023.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August 2022, required all Part D plans to charge no more than $35 a month for all covered insulin products. All Democrats in the House and the Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, and all Republicans—including J.D. Vance—voted against it.

As Republicans have lost the support of suburban women for their attacks on reproductive rights and embrace of the misogyny of the MAGA movement, they have tried to beef up the idea that they are the country’s true supporters of women and families. Trump, who has been found liable for sexual assault, has been trying to assure women: “I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector.” With him back in office, he said at a rally in Pennsylvania, women “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

Journalist Jessica Valenti noted that antiabortion activists are running advertisements blaming the deaths of women in states with abortion bans not on those bans or those who passed them, but on the Democrats trying to protect reproductive healthcare. Women have died when doctors would not give them lifesaving care out of concerns about prosecution under states’ abortion bans or were unable to access abortion care. But the ads, using the names and images of women who have died under antiabortion regimes, claim that lifesaving care is still legal but doctors don’t know they can use it because of misinformation from pro-choice activists.

Antiabortion Republican Derrick Anderson, who is running to represent Virginia’s seventh congressional district, has appeared in campaign photographs with a woman and children posed as if they are his family, but they are not. He is unmarried and childless, and the family is that of a friend.

That last one is really weird, but the biggest lies from the Republicans concern immigration, especially as voters blame the Republicans for killing a strong bipartisan border bill earlier this year after Trump demanded they keep the issue open for him to campaign on. J.D. Vance was among those who voted against it.

There were the lies Vance spread about Springfield, Ohio, of course, attacking the legal Haitian immigrants there who have been credited with revitalizing the city. On Friday and Saturday, Trump lied that Vice President Harris had let 13,000 or 14,000 convicted murderers enter the U.S. in the past three years, who “freely and openly roam our country,” a lie that Elon Musk called “true.”

In fact, as CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out, it is a lie. The Department of Homeland Security clarified that the data to which Trump appeared to refer lists individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years—including during his own term—committed crimes in the U.S. rather than their country of origin, and either are currently incarcerated or have served their sentences but can’t be deported because their country of origin won’t accept them. Such individuals are monitored.

On Saturday, Julia Terruso of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a woman in a Philadelphia suburb received a letter that looked like an official document from the fake “Pennsylvania Congressional Office of Immigration Affairs” telling her that she was expected to provide living space to five migrants under a program “written into Law by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.”

As Terruso wrote, “No office exists, nor does such a government-mandated housing program, but the letter, doctored to look like an official government document, provided specific details designed to mislead someone less attuned to a scam—and laid the blame for the fake program at the feet of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris during a heated and close election in which immigration has increasingly become a focal point.”

Lies establish dominance over people being lied to, because lies take away a person’s right to make good decisions about their own life. So what’s the purpose of the Republican lies?

...

 

More lies from yesterday.

September 30, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com)

And yet, the hurricane has become the latest topic of disinformation for MAGA Republicans. Social media today is full of accounts claiming that the federal government is not responding to the crisis in western North Carolina because it prefers to spend money in Ukraine and on undocumented immigrants. Newsmax host Todd Starnes claimed that FEMA’s “top priority is not disaster relief” but to push diversity, equity and inclusion. “So, unless you’ve got your preferred pronouns spraypainted on the side of your submerged house—you won’t get a penny from Uncle Sam. Western North Carolina is just too Conservative and too Caucasian for FEMA to care.” The House Judiciary Committee posted that “Joe Biden was at the beach.”

These posts echo Russian disinformation, and Trump was on board with it. Touring Valdosta, Georgia, today, as a private citizen where people are still without power amidst the devastation, Trump said he had spoken to Elon Musk to get his Starlink satellites into North Carolina; FEMA has already provided 40 of the systems to North Carolina. He claimed that Georgia governor Brian Kemp is “having a hard time getting the president on the phone. They’re being very non-responsive.”

Kemp himself told reporters that Biden had called yesterday. “And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Kemp told him, “We got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things that we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.” South Carolina governor Henry McMaster, a Republican, called it “a great team effort…the federal government is helping us well, they’re embedded with us. There is no asset out there that we haven’t already accessed.”

Republican governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin told reporters that he was “incredibly appreciative of the rapid response and cooperation from the federal team at FEMA.” Asheville, North Carolina, mayor Esther Manheimer told CNBC “We have support from outside organizations, other fire departments sending us resources, the federal government as well. So it's all-hands-on-deck, and it is a well-coordinated effort, but it is so enormous….”

FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg responded to a post claiming that FEMA was refusing to help certain Americans, saying: “This is a lie. We help all people regardless of background as fast as possible before, during and after disasters. That is our mission and that is our focus.”

In contrast, numerous posters today noted that Trump repeatedly withheld federal aid from Democratic governors—including that of North Carolina—after disasters in their states. After the Trump campaign organized a fundraiser for victims of the hurricane, David Frum of The Atlantic reminded readers that in 2019, Trump was fined $2 million and three of his children were ordered to take classes as a penalty for taking for their own use funds from charities they ran.

When a reporter asked President Biden and Democratic North Carolina governor Roy Cooper to respond to Trump’s accusation that they are ignoring the disaster, Biden responded: “He's lying. And the governor told him he was lying…. I've spoken to the governor, spent time with him…. I don't know why he does this. And the reason I get so angry about it, I don't care about what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we're not doing everything possible. We are…. I assume you heard the Republican Governor of Georgia talk about that he was on the phone with me more than once. So that's simply not true. And it's irresponsible.”

 

And of course, more lies in the past week:

• Lies about FEMA (in fact, Trump did what MAGA Republicans falsely claim Biden is doing—he diverted FEMA funds to immigration)
• Lies about the economy
• Lies about endorsements (I mean, really?)

Just like in Springfield, OH, these politically motivated lies aren't victimless. Local Republicans in the impacted states are begging MAGA to stop them so that the people affected can access the help they need.

@AroundTheWorld @Salvy @Scarface281 @Astrodome @ROXRAN


October 4, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com)

MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republican lawmakers reject the strong border bill a bipartisan group of lawmakers had hammered out.

The federal response to Hurricane Helene has drawn bipartisan praise, with Republican governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina thanking Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.

But on Sunday, September 29, two days after the hurricane hit, the right-wing organization started by anti-immigrant Trump loyalist Stephen Miller posted: “Billions for Ukraine. Billions for illegal aliens. And what for the Americans? Reprogram every single dollar that FEMA has dedicated to support illegal aliens to go towards Americans who are facing unprecedented devastation!”

Yesterday, in Saginaw, Michigan, Trump echoed Miller, claiming that the Biden administration is botching the hurricane response because it has spent all the money appropriated for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on “illegal immigrants.” “They spent it all on illegal migrants.… They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them,” he said. Today, he claimed that “a billion dollars was stolen from FEMA to use it for illegal migrants, many of whom are criminals, to come into our country.”

Early this morning, X owner Elon Musk posted to his more than 200 million followers: “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” On Wednesday, Dana Mattioli, Joe Palazzolo, and Khadeeja Safdar of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Musk has been financing groups with ties to Miller since 2022.

But of course, it is NOT happening in front of anyone’s eyes.

On Wednesday, Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in which FEMA is housed, told reporters that FEMA’s disaster relief fund is adequately funded for current needs. But, he warned, “extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity,” and we are not yet out of hurricane season. If another emergency hits, FEMA’s disaster relief fund will be stretched thin.

Congress also appropriated money for a different fund, the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which is part of Customs and Border Protection but is administered by FEMA. Established under the Trump administration in 2019, SSP gives grants to states and local governments to provide shelter, food, and transportation to undocumented immigrants. After Trump’s accusation, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement: “These claims are completely false. As Secretary Mayorkas said, FEMA has the necessary resources to meet the immediate needs associated with Hurricane Helene and other disasters. The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA’s disaster-related authorities or funding streams.”

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post did not leave the story there. “Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would,” Kessler wrote. So he looked into why Trump would have accused Biden “of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants. It turns out that’s because he did this.”

In the middle of hurricane season in 2019, Kessler explains, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and redirected it to pay for detention space and temporary hearing locations for immigrants seeking asylum. “No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants,” the article title reads, “but Trump did.”

As in Springfield, a bipartisan group of lawmakers are begging MAGAs to stop the disinformation, which is keeping people from accessing the help they need and gumming up relief efforts as workers and local and state governments, as well as FEMA, have to waste time combating lies. Scammers and political extremists are making things worse by spreading AI-generated images and claiming that the federal government is ignoring the people and emergencies the images depict.




MAGA Republicans launched another major disinformation campaign today when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released another blockbuster jobs report. It showed that the country added about 254,000 jobs in September, far higher than the 140,000 jobs economists expected. It also revised the job numbers for July and August upward. The unemployment rate dropped from 4.2% in August to 4.1%, and wages have outpaced inflation.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, wrote that the jobs report “cements my view that the economy is about as good as it gets. The economy is creating lots of jobs across many industries, consistent with robust labor force growth, and thus low and stable unemployment. The economy is at full-employment, no more and no less. Wage growth is strong, and given big productivity gains, it is consistent with low and stable inflation. One couldn’t paint a prettier picture of the job market and broader economy.”

Yet MAGA Republicans deny that the economy is strong. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) openly called the jobs report fake. And when a reporter asked Trump, “Jobs are up, the stock market hit that all-time high. Do you acknowledge that the economy is improving?” he answered: “No it’s not.”




But, apparently stung, this afternoon Trump posted on his social media site what appeared to be an announcement. After an emoji of a flashing red light, a headline read, “New: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has endorsed Trump for President.” A representative for Dimon instantly denied such an endorsement, saying it is false. According to a spokesperson for JP Morgan, Dimon has neither contributed money nor endorsed Trump, or anyone else, in the 2024 presidential race. But Trump has not taken the post down.

Hugo Lowell of The Guardian notes that Trump has admired Dimon for a long time and likely craves his support. Trump has been unable to attract major endorsements, while celebrities throw their influence behind Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz almost daily. Yesterday, musician Bruce Springsteen endorsed Harris. Today, businessman and former Los Angeles Lakers basketball player Earvin "Magic" Johnson Jr. endorsed her.

The firehose of lies is designed to make it impossible for voters to figure out the truth. The technique is designed so that eventually voters give up trying to engage, conclude everyone is lying, throw up their hands, and stop voting. Holding on to facts combats the effects of the storm of lies.




Finally, tonight, the X account of Trump’s team and the Republican National Committee—now run by the Trump family and loyalists—showed a clip of Biden unexpectedly entering the White House briefing room today, joking with reporters, and saying, “Welcome to the swimming pool.” Referring to “Biden (or whatever’s left of him),” the post suggested his “swimming pool” reference was a sign of mental incapacity.

In fact, the briefing room was indeed originally a swimming pool. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt added the pool to the White House in 1933 after he found swimming helped to keep him in shape after his 1921 bout with polio. Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy (who had a mural by Bernard Lamotte installed around it), and Lyndon B. Johnson used the pool frequently. Richard Nixon did not. In 1970, Nixon had the pool covered and the space converted into the White House Press Room.

Nixon ordered the change made in such a way that it could be easily undone in case he got pushback for covering up FDR’s pool, but his successor, Gerald Ford, who was an avid swimmer, largely ended the conversation when he added a new outdoor pool to the White House complex in 1975.

Biden’s reference to the press room as a swimming pool was a historical joke rather than a sign of mental incapacity. This lie deserves the same scrutiny as the other whoppers from today, though, because as Glenn Kessler accurately observed, Trump’s common pattern is projection.

 

Censorship is definitely a concern. While private social media platforms are legally allowed to moderate content, it becomes a problem when the owner is so skewed that he personally spreads misinformation widely among the public. The issue is even more troubling when the government gets involved. Two of the biggest spreaders of misinformation in the U.S. are Trump, who is a vocal supporter of censorship, and Musk, who claims to champion free speech, but whose actions on X suggest otherwise.

Musk has repeatedly censored people he disagrees with on X, and Trump has openly stated plans to prosecute Google for 'bad stories' about him and his political opponents.

Anyone who truly supports free speech should not back either Musk or Trump.

 

Why do MAGA Republicans lie about everything, big and small? The disinformation is a strategy that goes way back—a strategy used by Hitler, Putin, and other authoritarian leaders.

October 6, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com)

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States... encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,... [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.

 

Worth repeating, since that’s what ATW, a supporter of authoritarian government censorship, seems to believe:

"MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship”

 

More censorship from the left:


Lying Is Loyalty in Trump’s GOP
So how far will his allies go to keep their king happy?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/lying-is-loyalty-in-trumps-gop

Donald Trump, who proved to be deeply dishonest as a candidate in 2016, and as president for four years, is lying with reckless abandon as he tries to return to the White House. Last week, for example, he claimed a fake endorsement from JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. When pressed on the claim, Trump said, “I don’t know anything about it,” and blamed a member of his staff. But the way in which the rest of the Republican Party has subscribed to the Trump unreality show is rapidly evolving into a kind of mass psychogenic disorder. Unlike in 2016, when he was an outlier, Trump now controls the entire Republican Party. You might even say that Trump—whose daughter-in-law is the co-chair of the RNC and whose son essentially picked his vice-presidential candidate—is the GOP, sort of like the Borgias without the religious affiliation.

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