What struck me this week was the stunning magnitude and sheer audacity of some of the lies coming from Republican Leaders.
I’ll give a few examples.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted this after the Derick Chauvin verdict:
Her tweet proven false in real time as residents of DC read her Tweet, looked around, and posted photographs and testimonials to social media. The Council of D.C. tweeted this:
To take another example, Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan tweeted this:
Marjorie Taylor Greene never offered evidence and never budged from her lie even as the lie was disproven.
To take an example of another outrageous lie, Senator Ted Cruz said this about the Supreme Court: “You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game.” As if we don’t remember the Republicans refusing to allow Barack Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice because it was the spring of an election year and we should wait to see what the people wanted in the election. Then, four years later, when a Republican was president, the Republicans rammed a Supreme Court justice through in a matter of weeks just before the election. Seriously. Does he think we forgot?
To take one more example, without a touch of irony, Kayleigh McEnany, who was former president Trump’s press secretary chided Biden and said that “presidents should not inflame the tension.” I mean, come on. What did Trump literally do constantly all those years? He inflamed tensions.
Or how about this one:
Biden’s insurrectionists? She has to be joking, right? (Spoiler: She’s not joking)
There’s an inclination to laugh and make fun of some of these lies, even though we know lies of this magnitude are dangerous. Democracy is based on rule of law, which requires truth. Totalitarian regimes are built on lies, as we all know from twentieth-century history, and from authors like George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and others.
The magnitude and audacity of the lies we’re seeing right now from right wing leaders inspired me to reread this book:
Author Finchelstein takes a deep dive into how these lies work. For me, the book built on what I previously learned from classic authors Paxton and Richard Hofstadter and others.
One question Finchelstein answers is: Do the liars know they are lying, or do they believe their own lies? (Spoiler: The answer isn’t straightforward as you might think).
Finchelstein says this:
It’s a good point, right? Certainly, while some of these leaders know they are lying, some must believe their own lies. Who, after all, is willing to die for a lie?
Finchelstein explains that fascists understand that they are lying in the sense that they know that their lies do not correspond to the factual world, but they believe their lies are in service to a higher truth or what Finchelstein calls a “simple absolute truth.” In other words, they intuit a truth about the world. This truth is articulated by the Leader. They then lie in service to this higher truth. He calls these the “ideological lies,” the kinds of lies that bring fascists to power.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders herself tried to explain this. When fact checker Daniel Dale pointed out another lie Trump had told, Sanders said, “The lie is pointing out an important truth. Do you not care about this important truth?”
The problem is that “higher truth” is also a lie. Finchelstein explains that this “higher truth” is the lie that “humans are hierarchically divided into master races and inferior races. It is based on the purely paranoiac fantasy that the weaker races aim to dominate the superior races.”
Tucker Carlson recently came right out and endorsed this paranoiac fantasy when he talked about “replacement” theory. “Replacement” theory, also known as “white genocide” holds that people of color are replacing white people through immigration in the western world:
I remember the first time I heard this theory. I was 17 when a classmate said to me that if whites were not careful, they’ll soon find themselves in the minority. I thought, “so what?” I didn’t answer because I really didn’t know what to say. Finchelstein teaches us that some people have such a world view. So when Trump warned that migrants were coming to invade our country and defile our nation, it resonated with his followers because it corresponded to what they believe is a reality.
This explains the Holocaust and cruelty fascists have toward members of minority communities: Fascist believe they have to preemptively kill before they are killed. They believe they have to keep minorities in their places to prevent themselves from being “replaced.”
This gets interesting: Finchelstein explains how the fascists enact policies that create the reality they believe already exists. To take one example, the Nazis first called the Jews vermin, and then put them in concentration camps where they became disease-ridden.
Another example: Police arresting Blacks for the slightest infraction while overlooking the wrongdoings of whites, and then pointing to the “high crime rate” among Blacks to “prove” their worldview. And yet another: Remember when Russia bombed Syria, and Syrians were indiscriminately bombing Syrian civilians? A Nato commander explained that these bombings created the refugee crisis to destabilize Europe and which allowed Putin to weaponize the migration crisis.
In other words, fascist lies produce the reality that they believe exists.
Given that the fascist view is that people are hierarchical and those at the bottom are constantly seeking to displace those at the top, it makes sense that they reject democracy. Finchelstein says that fascists identified existing democracy as a lie because they don’t believe that electoral representation can truly represent the desires of the people. They think only the leader (who expresses this higher truth) can represent the people.
Democracy, which seeks to treat all people equally, directly contradicts the world view that there is a hierarchy among people and races with people at the bottom trying to replace and dominate the people at the top.
There are religious overtones to fascist lies — they come close to worshipping the leader who articulates what they feel to be a transcendent truth. Finchelstein says that fascism “denounces self-awareness and puts in its place a Godly truth supposedly emanating from a purified self.”
Let’s look back at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s lie.
You almost get the feeling that she was hoping for an acquittal so that there would be protests so that she could say look: Black Lives Matters is the strongest terrorist threat facing the nation. In her distorted world view, Black Lives Matters threatens her wellbeing. I similarly had the feeling that Trump was delighted by the migrants in 2018 so that he could whip up people’s fears.
What Laura Ingraham said was that the “real insurrectionists” are “Biden and the well-heeled powerful forces who want us to lose sight of what made America great in the first place. It’s not our diversity. It’s our freedom.” The dangers, for her, are not the violent insurrectionist who stormed the capitol but the people who want to “erase” whites. See how once we look at these lies through Finchelstein’s lens, we understand what’s behind these outrageous lies, and why so many people believe them.
Okay, so. Do they know they are lying? Finchelstein quotes Goebbels’ definition of propaganda. Goebbels defined propaganda as the art, not of lying or distorting, but of listening to the soul of the people and speaking to a person in a language this person can understand. In other words, he didn’t actually think he was lying. He thought he was presenting this higher truth in a way that could be grasped by the masses. It seems to me that this is why Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t bothered if her words don’t correspond to reality. She thinks her words correspond to a higher reality.
All of this reminded me of the time a friend told me that her mother liked Trump because he “tells it like it is.” Given that very little Trump said corresponded to factual reality, this comment stumped me. Finchelstein’s explanation is that Trump spoke to something she believed to be true.
There is more. Finchelstein also touches on how fascists equate truth with power. He cautions us not to dismiss the leaders as crazy and the followers as simply confused because this overlooks what makes these fascist leaders successful. Similarly he says that focusing on psychiatric disorders of the leaders adds to the misunderstanding of why they succeed in attracting so many devoted followers.
Finchelstein also says that questioning these lies is “important to the survival of democracy.” We need to constantly point out and question the lies.
What I wonder is this: How do we persuade the liars to stop lying? How do we show them that what they are saying isn’t true?
It seems to me that when people not only tell big lies but actually believe these lies because they speak to some kind of “inner” truth, logic and facts cannot work. This is because such a belief is inherently illogical. If Trump “tells it like it is” but “it” is not something that can be proven, but is only felt, the position is inherently counterfactual. All we can do is mobilize and outvote those who tell (and believe) these lies.
Similarly, if some of the leaders know they are lying and are telling big lies for political gain, no amount of argument or persuasion will stop them. They will only stop when it is politically expedient to do so.
This blog post started out as a video, which you can see here.
