They will defend disinformation to your death
It’s been an article of conservative faith for as long as I can recall that government ought to be run more like a business. On that topic….
A long time ago, in a high school far, far away, a decade before the breakup of Ma Bell, I read a book about corporate rip-offs.
It included a tale of a private school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC that (IIRC) had a run of burned-out clutches in its fleet of brand new buses. Despite his repeated complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the maker’s regional manager who claimed that no other customers had experienced similar problems. This was a lie. The owner had contacted other fleet owners by long distance and letter (remember when this was) and had a file of receipts. Yet the regional manager insisted the breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers.
The money quote went something like this: “He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
As you may have noticed from the political faction that wants our government run more like a business, lying is now company policy. During the vice-presidential debate last week you watched J.D. Vance tell transparent lies and, when called on them by the moderator, double and triple down on them. He was lying, We knew he was lying. He knew we knew, etc.
When Gov. Tim Walz challenged Vance to acknowledge that Joe Biden won in 2020, Vance dodged and accused Kamala Harris of suppressing the free speech of Covid deniers.
Will Bunch observes:
Let’s be clear, though. On the free speech battles that matter most — in our beleaguered public libraries or in our high school classrooms — Republicans like Vance are on the side of government repression. It’s only on the right to tell Americans that public health experts are lying about wearing masks or the efficacy of vaccines that they discover their inner James Madison — even after studies showed that unvaccinated people in heavily GOP counties had higher death rates.
God Bless America. They will defend to your death their right to spread disinformation.
“Republican commentators and officials with a stake in the recovery effort have decided to play both sides against the middle: calling out lies to facilitate the recovery, but suggesting all parties are to blame,” Brian Beutler writes. This lie-fest over Hurricane Helene response is a dry run for Insurrection 2.0:
Now imagine it’s Election Day. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are posting and reposting lies and rumors about election workers destroying ballots or stuffing ballot boxes, illegal immigrants voting by the hundreds, while turning away red-hatted Republicans.
By then it will be too late for mainstream media to make any particular pattern of behavior a major issue for undecided voters. Republican state officials will continue to have it both ways, condemning lies in an intentionally ineffective way. The die will be cast. And then, if Trump slips behind in the vote count, the stage will be set for insurrection 2.0.
Trump’s allies, corporate ones among them, know they are spreading lies, and do so dutifully.
Helene lies serve two mutually reinforcing political purposes: saddling Biden and Harris with the same reputation for incompetence that Trump earned in his single term (sapping the Harris campaign of enthusiasm) and fueling right-wing hatred of Democrats and the government (fueling GOP turnout). To the extent that it actually interferes with command structure and emergency-management logistics, all the better. If they can make the relief effort chaotic, they can lay blame at the feet of the people who are legitimately in charge.
Lies about fraudulent voting lay groundwork for rejecting election results, quite possibly also for retributive violence in Democratic strongholds.
“Democrats should try to prime the public to expect what’s coming,” Beutler warns, “so they aren’t caught flat-footed as they were by lies about Helene.”
There is anecdotal evidence that when MAGA lies are as blatant as they are about Helene recovery that there is a growing backlash among Republican voters here who are living among the truth. Let’s hope that’s real. But real or not, MAGA Republicans won’t change. Lying is company policy.
Where’s Lockjaw when you really need him?
In the Black Forest, lives an ogre named Lockjaw. Lockjaw doesn’t like children Who tell lies. Late at night he stalks the houses of the fibbers and the Falsifiers, and before they can cry out from their beds, he nails their jaws Open with a rusty nail, using his head for a hammer. You may escape him for a While and think you fooled him, but he’ll get you in the end. He’ll get ya! He’ll get ya!!