The Politics Of Lying

When I was teaching, Free Speech discussions would frequently evoke a question from students appalled by the massive amounts of disinformation enabled by the Internet and social media: “Can’t we at least outlaw lying?” I would have to explain that courts would have great difficulty determining the difference between what is a lie and what is a mistake, etc. The practical problems of such an effort would be insurmountable.

More to the point, the First Amendment rests on reliance upon the “marketplace of ideas.” Bad ideas and lies are to be countered by better ideas and facts. It is a theory that depends upon the participation of We the People.

It isn’t working very well right now, and I see no simple solutions. Neither does Bill Adair, who founded Politifact. In a recent essay for the Atlantic, he explored the failure of that fact-checking site to combat the firehose of propaganda and lies that  distort our political lives.

For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.

I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood.

After exploring some theories about why politicians lie–the calculus that they apparently apply to determine the ratio of risk to reward– Adair notes that today’s extreme political polarization encourages them to do little else.

Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.

Adair notes that partisan media, especially on the right, fosters lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. These outlets expect politicians to repeat favored falsehoods as the price of admission. If you’re not willing to participate in the twisting of facts, you simply won’t get to speak to the echo chamber.

Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”

Adair uses Mike Pence as an example of the way today’s political incentives change people. They had been neighbors when Pence was in Congress, and Adair saw him then as “a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth.” When he was Indiana governor, Adair watched his lies grow. “By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.”

The question, of course, is “what can we do?” Here are Adair’s closing paragraphs:

If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.

But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.

Amen.

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Will Texas Corruption Spread?

Recently, the New York Times ran an article focused on politics in Texas. It began by describing a legislative primary battle between Republicans, and a tactic that has become prevalent nationally–the accusation that the incumbent was a “RINO,” or a Republican in name only.

The article then reported on the two men behind what has become an effective and organized effort to drive non-theocratic members out of the GOP, and to ensure that Texas is controlled by the Christian Nationalist Right.

Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. They are also Christian pastors.

Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the Statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”

These men aren’t clones of the Koch brothers and the other conservative billionaires who want to slash regulations and taxes, although they certainly want to do those things. As the article documents, their endgame is far more radical: they intend to steer government toward their version of Christian rule. 

Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.

Dunn and Wilks refuse to describe themselves as Christian Nationalists, a label that Dunn rejects as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.” But their rhetoric places them firmly within that movement.

Like most Christian Nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.

A scholar at Rice University who has reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks, believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. The article quotes a Republican activist who knows them personally, and agrees:

“They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)

The two pastors differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn’t celebrate Christmas, which he considers a “pagan holiday” — but they share a vision of a radically transformed America. And thanks to their money, that vision is spreading beyond Texas.

Lawmakers they’ve funded have introduced bills linked to Project Blitz, a coalition of Rightwing groups that want to advance the role of (their version of) Christianity in public life. One bill requires educators to hang posters of the Ten Commandments  in the classroom.” Another requires schools to display “In God We Trust” placards.

After Texas passed a law allowing the work of licensed mental-health counselors in public schools to be done by unlicensed chaplains — representatives of “God in government,” one of the bill’s sponsors called them — a dozen other states introduced similar bills.

The lengthy article has much more, and it’s hair-raising. Worse, recent research tells us that more than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalist beliefs.

Unless we want to inhabit a theocracy, large numbers of Americans need to vote Blue.

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The Scorecard

There’s a standard sentence in investment prospectuses: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

That is obviously a fair point when you are considering the purchase of stock; it’s far less persuasive when you are casting a vote. In fact, when one candidate is an incumbent, checking past performance is usually an excellent guide to the positions that candidate will take in the future.

Recently, an article in The Indiana Citizen highlighted a Common Cause scorecard on an element of past performance of Indiana’s Congressional delegation–their votes to protect the country’s democratic institutions.

The fifth biennial scorecard compiled by Common Cause rated seven of Indiana’s nine U.S. representatives and two U.S. senators as doing little to preserve democracy during the 118th Congress.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog, focused on 10 democracy-related bills in the U.S. Senate and 13 in the U.S. House, covering such topics as voting rights, election security, ballot access and ethics reform for the U.S. Supreme Court when rating the federal lawmakers in its 2024 Democracy Scorecard. Then the organization examined the record of every congressional member to determine whether he or she took a “pro-democracy” stance on these issues.

Reps. Frank Mrvan and Andre Carson, Democrats representing  the 1st and 7th congressional districts, respectively, were the only members in Indiana’s congressional delegation who achieved near-perfect scores. Carson took a pro-democracy position on 12 of the 13 bills while Mrvan took a pro-democracy position on 11 of the 13 bills, according to the Common Cause scorecard.

Unsurprisingly, three Hoosier Republicans –- Sens. Mike Braun and Todd Young and Fifth District Rep. Victoria Spartz– rated a zero. Braun is currently running for Governor, and Spartz–despite indicating earlier that she didn’t intend to run again– is once again a candidate for the 5th district seat.

The other six members of Indiana’s congressional delegation – all of whom are also Republicans – received low scores, although not zeros. Reps. Rudy Yakym, of Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District, Jim Banks, of the 3rd District, James Baird, of the 4th District, Greg Pence, of the 6th District and Erin Houchin, of the 9th District took pro-democracy stances on just one of the 13 bills. Retiring Rep. Larry Bucshson, of the 8th Congressional District, earned a score of 2 out of 13.

The article quoted Aaron Dusso, chair of the Department of Political Science at IU-Indianapolis, and his reference to the 2018 book, “How Democracies Die.” That book was published in 2018 by Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and it was widely reviewed and discussed. It focused on measures of democratic health, and especially on four major threats to democracy– rejection of democratic rules; denial of political opponents’ legitimacy; tolerance of political violence; and willingness to curtail freedoms, particularly of the press. Since 2016, MAGA Republicans have increased their support for all four, ramping up efforts at vote suppression and gerrymandering, supporting Trump’s “big lie while making phony claims about non-citizens voting and his threats to jail political opponents, telling pollsters that violence “may be necessary” and unremittingly attacking the mainstream media.

Elected GOP officials aren’t doing the people’s work, either.

The scorecard is rating the members of the 118th Congress, which Common Cause called “one of the most dysfunctional in American history.” Through Aug. 15, 2024, just 78 standalone bills – or 0.5% of all the bills introduced in the 118th Congress – have become law, according to Common Cause. This compares to the 116th and 117th Congresses, in which 2% of the bills introduced became law and the 114th and the 115th Congresses in which 3% of the bills passed to the president’s desk.

In fact, Common Cause asserted that in its first year, the 118th Congress turned in the least-productive first year performance of any Congress in nearly a century.

Dusso pointed out that politicians typically act and vote in ways they think their constituents want. When lawmakers continue getting elected, they are justified in thinking that they are fulfilling voters’ wishes.

“It’s probably our fault that this is what’s happening,” Dusso said. “We’re willing to tolerate these types of things and we continue to elect individuals and we continue to elect a Congress that isn’t able to pass bills in any real serious way. And, that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.”

I know Aaron Dusso to be a brilliant scholar, but I’m hopeful that his last sentence is wrong–that this will be the year when We the People begin a long-overdue change, the year we eject incumbents who have failed to respect either the Constitution or the democratic process.

Mike Braun and Jim Banks are clearly unworthy of the promotions they seek, and the others who have failed to protect American democracy should not be returned to Congress to do more damage.

We can do better.

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It’s Getting Harder To Ignore

A few days after Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris, an article in The Atlantic focused on his increasing incoherence. It began by noting Trump’s routine boast about passing a cognitive test.

The former president has repeatedly bragged over the past several years that he has passed various mental-status exams with flying colors. Most of these tests are designed to detect fairly serious cognitive dysfunction, and as such, they are quite easy to pass: They ask simple questions such as “What is the date?” and challenge participants to spell world backwards or write any complete sentence. By contrast, a 90-minute debate that involves unknown questions and unanticipated rebuttals requires candidates to think on their feet. It is a much more demanding and representative test of cognitive health than a simple mental-status exam you take in a doctor’s office. Specifically, the debate serves as an evaluation of the candidates’ mental flexibility under pressure—their capacity to deal with uncertainty and the unforeseen.

The author–a psychiatrist–readily admitted that he was not in a position to diagnose either candidate and was not offering any specific medical diagnoses, having never met or examined either of them.

But I watched the debate with particular attention to the candidates’ vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics—all signs of a healthy brain. Although Kamala Harris certainly exhibited some rigidity and repetition, her speech remained within the normal realm for politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points. By contrast, Donald Trump’s expressions of those tendencies were alarming. He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.

Trump’s mental decline is finally being widely noted. As a recent article from the Daily Beast reported,

An increasingly incoherent and profane former president Donald Trump, 78, is rambling at his rallies at previously unheard-of lengths and showing signs of confusion that could indicate mental decline, according to a New York Times analysis.

An average rally speech by the elderly Republican nominee for president—who has promised to release his medical records and cognitive tests and then refused to do so—lasts 82 minutes this election cycle, nearly double the 45 minutes he averaged in 2016, a computer analysis by the newspaper found.

In addition to Trump’s well documented rambling, repetitive and winding addresses—punctuated with strange asides about things like his “beautiful” body—among the potential signs of cognitive change are that he curses 69 percent more in speeches than he did in 2016. That could be a sign of disinhibition, a kind of impulsivity that is sometimes attributed to mental decline in old age, the Times said.

Of course, Trump didn’t exactly occupy a high place from which to decline– intellect has never been his strong suit. (One clue– he threatened to sue his university if it disclosed his GPA.) The article quoted a linguistics expert who questioned whether Trump had declined by pointing out that his “starting point” wasn’t particularly high.

On the other hand, Pennebaker said Trump has relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures going back to the days before he was president, suggesting he has simply always been an incredibly simplistic thinker.

One analytic metric he used—which tends to place presidential candidates in the 60 to 70 range—placed Trump speeches at 10 to 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

References to sharks and his preference for death by electrocution, admiration for Hannibal Lecter…and still, the MAGA base remains solid. I have frequently referred to that base as a cult, and its continued idolization of an obviously mentally-ill,  uninformed and unintelligent 78-year-old man supports that characterization. Wikipedia tells us that cult members submit to absolute authoritarianism without requiring “meaningful accountability,” and that they have no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry. That description certainly fits.

As he sinks further into incoherence, Trump also engages more and more in projection. As The Hill recently noted, his attacks on Harris’ intelligence are especially telling.

Innate and acquired intelligence is clearly not Trump’s long suit. He has demonstrated a staggering ignorance about American history. He has alleged that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer and that vaccines cause autism. He doesn’t understand that tariffs raise retail prices on imported goods, in essence imposing a national sales tax on all Americans….

Those of us in the “reality-based community” look at Trump’s babbling, his third-grade vocabulary, his slurring of words and his increasing incidents of projection, and cannot understand why any rational voter could seriously consider returning him to office.

The only conclusion: the Trump cult isn’t rational. The open question is: how many of them are there?

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About Those Polls

Those of us who are obsessed with the upcoming election–now less than a month away–tend to focus on the the daily polling results. I have previously explained why I don’t think today’s polls are particularly predictive–while they can show which way the wind is blowing, I simply don’t trust their “likely voter” assessments. (As I’ve explained, all pollsters have developed methods for determining who is likely to vote–and their polls are almost always based upon the preferences of those “likely” voters–not the entire universe of registered voters.)

I feel reasonably confident that we will see a lot of votes cast by “unlikely” voters this time around.

But there is also something new–and dishonest–that has emerged in the polling during this election cycle, as Simon Rosenberg recently reported in his Hopium Chronicles. (Paywalled) He calls them “Red Wave Pollsters.”

Red Wave Pollsters Stepped Up Their Work This Week – The red wavers stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is.

While they released polls in many states this week the states that have received the most red wave polls over the past few weeks are Montana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Over the past 10 days, depending on how you characterize the pollsters, they released at least 5 and as many 7 polls in Pennsylvania alone. Their recent flood of polls in NC and PA tipped the Real Clear Politics polling average for each state to Trump, which then in turn got Trump to 281 in their corrupt Electoral College map. Yes, in Real Clear Politics Trump is now winning the election due to their gamesmanship.

I now count 27 Republican or right-aligned entities in the polling averages: American Greatness, Daily Mail, co/efficent, Cygnal, Echelon, Emerson, Fabrizio, Fox News, Insider Advantage, McLaughlin, Mitchell Communications, Napolitan Institute, Noble Predictive, On Message, Orbital Digital, Public Opinion Strategies, Quantus, Rasmussen, Redfield & Wilton, Remington, RMG, SoCal Data, The Telegraph, Trafalgar, TIPP, Victory Insights, Wall Street Journal.

Rosenberg says it’s time for those who publish their analyses of polls to acknowledge the emergence of this type of poll , which he describes as “red wave, right-aligned narrative polling that only exist for a single purpose – to move the polling averages to the right.”

They are exploiting the “toss it in the averages and everything will work out philosophy” of these sites to once again launder these polls and game the averages – and thus our understanding of the election. Party leaders should expect them to keep these polls coming, and keep working the averages until it looks like Trump is winning in all polling averages. It is what they did in 2022, and it worked. They are doing it again this time, and once again it is working as the averages are moving and everyone is treating this movement like an organic rather than a deeply corrupt process.

Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier of TargetSmart were the only two pollsters who predicted the non-emergence of the widely hyped “red wave” in the 2022 midterms–a wave that was widely forecast partly on the basis of voting history and partly on the basis of similar “red wave” polling.

Reputable pollsters face a number of daunting challenges–the shift from landlines to mobile phones, the reluctance of many (if not most) people to answer calls when they don’t recognize the number, evidence of the increasing willingness of respondents who do answer to lie… Despite those challenges, nearly all reputable pollsters find Harris ahead nationally by somewhere between 2 and 5 points. While I’m reluctant to rely on their numbers, I do think they demonstrate that the Democratic ticket has the momentum–that the electoral “wind” is blowing in the Harris/Walz direction.

What we do know with certainty is that this will be a turnout election. Early voting is open in most states right now, and the most effective thing we can do is vote early and work to make sure that every Blue voter we know gets to the polls. As the GOTV experts tell us, every solid Democratic vote that is cast early means that the GOTV effort can concentrate on getting those who are farther down the “reliable voter” list to the polls. 

We’re down to the wire, and as the saying goes, the only poll that counts is the one on election day.

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