The one way to cut through the Republican propaganda machine

Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing, getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics.

Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment. Having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them.

As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people.

That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused.

That party is dead.

Today’s Republican politician quite literally lies for a living, as you can see on any of the Sunday political shows or whenever a Republican is interviewed on CNN or Morning Joe. Consider just a handful of the pre- and post-Trump versions of the GOP.

Before Trump, Republicans largely only shaded the truth:

• Ronald Reagan repeatedly claimed his tax cuts “paid for themselves,” a misleading but not entirely fabricated notion since some revenue returned via economic growth, though far less than claimed.
• George W. Bush’s administration asserted “we know” Iraq has WMDs. The statements danced on ambiguous intelligence, carefully presenting suspicions as certainties.
• Their “War on coal” job-loss talking points made blanket claims that Environmental Protection Agency rules would “kill jobs” even though labor data and research consistently showed EPA regulations were a minor layoff driver relative to collapsing demand for coal in the face of a gas fracking boom.
• Reagan’s “welfare queen” rhetoric was based on one egregious fraud case (Linda Taylor) but was then generalized to stigmatize all welfare recipients and wielded as a racialized caricature.
• Republican pitches for the Keystone XL pipeline claimed it would create “42,000 jobs,” but those were just short-term construction and support jobs; the long-run permanent jobs were only in the dozens.
• The Bush administration defined “torture” in legal terms that excluded waterboarding, technically denying “torture” while knowingly permitting harsh practices.
• Paul Ryan’s claims about Obama “raiding Medicare” to fund the Affordable Care Act gracefully omitted that Obamacare’s cuts were to overpayments, not to benefits.
• Sarah Palin’s “death panels” warning about Obamacare referenced end-of-life planning provisions, not anything like “death panels,” but skirted the border of outright fabrication.
• GOP messaging around the Clinton tax hikes of the 1990s predicted economic downturns, assertions based on selective economic forecasting, not contrary evidence.
• Republican officials regularly portrayed the estate tax as a “death tax hitting family farms.” Cases of family farms being lost were extremely rare, but not fabricated entirely.
• President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner described the end of major combat in Iraq, failing to clarify that significant fighting remained; it was misleading but not untrue.
• Claims that the ACA was a “government takeover of health care” overstated federal involvement but weren’t outright invented; private insurance remained intact.

But then Trump came into office and started lying on his very first day as president.

On Jan. 20th and 21st of 2017, he claimed as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration, far above all official estimates; lied that it never rained during his speech, though weather reports and visual evidence proved otherwise; accused journalists of deliberately misreporting on crowd size “to sow discord;” suggested a rift with the intelligence community that was not supported by evidence; and, most disgustingly, at CIA HQ lied about disagreements with the intelligence agencies and the number of times he had appeared on magazine covers.

As the Washington Post documented, during his first four years in office Trump told 30,573 verified lies, a record he’ll probably easily beat in his second term. And Republicans in Congress clearly got the memo. Lying was to be the GOP’s political strategy.

Consider their record with these Post-2016 direct, easily disprovable lies:

• Trump and top Republicans lied that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election even though there’s not a shred of evidence to supports the claim.
• Lies that Democrats want to “open borders” and “abolish ICE” are utterly false but have become standard Republican Party rhetoric.
• Lying that Biden had hired 87,000 “new IRS agents to harass you.” (This lie was often told using the phrase “jackbooted thugs,” compounding the damage to the agency.)
• Trump repeatedly lied that he “created the greatest economy ever,” contradicting all metrics.
• To this day they lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, a story invented out of thin air and repeatedly disproven.
• Repeated lies — now being used to push back against the government shutdown — that Democrats want to “give a trillion dollars to illegal aliens for health care” was invented without referencing a single actual legislative proposal or law.
• Lies of “total exoneration” by Robert Mueller’s probe of Trump’s many connections to Russia are easily contradicted by simply reading the actual contents of the report.
• Stating that windmills cause cancer and kill birds, coal is “clean,” and climate change is a “hoax” are all baseless lies presented as facts during speeches including Trump’s at the United Nations last week.
• Lying that COVID-19 was “totally under control” at the start of 2020, leading to the unnecessary deaths of a half-million Americans, despite internal warnings and contrary facts.
• Lying that they “passed the Veterans Choice” law when it was enacted under Obama.
• Insisting Mexico would pay for the border wall when they knew full well that Mexico never agreed nor would pay a single penny.
• Trump, Republicans, and Fox “News” personalities repeatedly lied that “Dominion voting machines switched votes,” knowing there was no evidence; Fox hosts internally acknowledged the lies and it cost the company hundreds of millions.
• They repeatedly lied that “China pays the tariffs” when anybody paying attention knew import tariffs are always paid by Americans and American companies.

For reasons unknown, our mainstream media is allergic to using the words “lie,” “lies,” and “lied.”

They overlook the fact that telling lies is a classic fascist strategy to so confound the public that it becomes impossible to know what’s real and what’s not, causing people to check out of following politics or challenging them.

They also overlook the fact that the last time Democrats engaged in systematic lying was when LBJ got us into the Vietnam War. That burned the party badly, and they’ve largely kept to the truth ever since.

That’s not to say Democrats are perfect, blameless, or the solution to all our nations problems. But at the moment, they’re what we have. We need to push them hard.

Nonetheless, like the media, Democratic politicians until recently have kept talking about how their “friends on the other side of the aisle” are engaging in “falsehoods,” “deceptions,” or “misinformation.”

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke with that tradition, telling Joe Scarborough that Trump, Vance, Johnson, and other Republican politicians were “telling an e----- lie” when they said Democrats were filibustering the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open because Dems were demanding “trillions for healthcare for illegal aliens.”

Bravo, Chuck. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

Not only that, Republicans could pass their continuing resolution through the Senate and reopen the government today without a single Democratic vote. All they need to break the Democratic filibuster is 50 votes to change the Senate rules, which they have, and they’ve used that process to break filibusters and install judges (both Supreme Court and lower) and executive branch appointments in the recent past.

They’re pretending to be helpless because they think this shutdown theater will help them and gives them a great excuse to eviscerate our government.

It’s way past time that Democrats, our news media, and the rest of us start telling the truth about the nearly-continuous firehose of modern Republican lies.