We got more lies this morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They’re now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense. To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran.
A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn’t own and can’t fire, struck a girls’ elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read. And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.
And now the corporate media will spend two days on this
and then move on to whatever shiny object the White House throws next. That
isn’t an aberration: it’s the GOP’s entire strategy. This is who they are and
have been since Reagan pioneered the scam: a PR machine front for an
iron-fisted oligarchy.
I’ve been studying authoritarian movements for forty
years, including in my book The Hidden
History of American Oligarchy. I’ve written about how Hitler rose to
power, how Mussolini consolidated his grip on Italy, how the Confederates took
over the American South, how strongmen from Budapest to Brasília have used the
same playbook again and again.
And the first page of that fascist and neofascist
playbook is always the same: “Destroy the concept of shared truth.”
Not any particular truth. Not “this lie” or “that lie.”
The concept of truth itself. Make people so exhausted, so confused, so beaten
down by the constant barrage of contradictions, lies, and naked bullshit that
they give up trying to figure out what’s real. Make cynicism feel like wisdom
and encourage your “influencers” to make it cool. Make “nobody knows anything”
feel like a reasonable way to understand what’s happening.
Because once you’ve done that, once you’ve convinced
enough people that truth is just whatever you say no matter how outrageous or
transparently false it is, you can do pretty much anything.
— You can bomb a school full of little girls and blame
the victims.
— You can try to rig an election and, when you lose, call it stolen from you.
— You can watch a million Americans die and say the virus is just going to
disappear.
— You can claim that tax cuts for billionaires will help average working-class
people.
— You can say that increasing poisons in the air and on our crops will Make
America Healthy Again.
—You can argue that destroying unions will increase working people’s standard
of living.
— You can claim that taking people’s healthcare away “encourages individual
initiative” and “independence.”
Trump didn’t invent this. But my G-d, has he ever
perfected it.
Trump also didn’t build this lie machine all by himself.
Most of it was built for him, over a period of fifty years, with billions of
dollars, by morbidly rich people who never appear on television and never have
to answer for any of it.
In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote
a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that became the
blueprint for the takeover of America by the richest men in the country. Powell
told the business community that they were losing America, that universities,
the press, and the courts were all turning against “free enterprise,” and that
if corporations didn’t fight back systematically and aggressively, capitalism
itself was at risk.
What followed was one of the most consequential
fifty-year projects in American political history, every bit as nation-changing
and dangerous as the Confederate movement of the 1840s.
— Think tanks were funded to produce “alternative”
academic research that would always reach the “right” conclusions.
— Conservative media was built from the ground up, from 1,500 AM talk radio
stations to Fox “News” to the rightwing takeover of social media, all to create
an information ecosystem where Republican voters would never have to encounter
an uncomfortable fact.
— Public schools and Civics classes were defunded and attacked, because an
educated citizenry asks too many questions.
— Local newspapers, the institutions that actually hold local power
accountable, were starved out of existence.
Charles and David Koch alone spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding distrust in climate science, in government, in the very idea that collective action could solve collective problems. And they were just the tip of a massive iceberg. This wasn’t an accident; it was a strategy. And that strategy had one ultimate goal: to create a population of Americans so skeptical of institutions, so distrustful of expertise, so certain that everyone is lying all the time, that they’d be willing to believe anything.
Donald Trump didn’t create those people. They were created for him by these cynical billionaires. And that means that removing Trump from power won’t dismantle the machine. Unless it’s defeated along with Trump, it’ll just produce another Trump, a smarter one, one who doesn’t make his lies and corruption quite so obvious.
The numbers around this project are staggering. Thirty
thousand naked lies or misleading statements Donald Trump made during his first
term alone. The Washington Post counted them: over thirty thousand.
That’s a man who woke up every single morning with the intention of deceiving the American people. That isn’t occasional dishonesty or spin: it’s a psychopathy — pathological lying — deployed as a governing strategy. And it worked for Trump, just like it worked for Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán before him.
— He told people that Barack Obama, a man who released
his birth certificate, a man whose Hawaiian birth was verified by state
officials, a man who graduated from Harvard Law, was secretly a Kenyan.
Millions of people believed it then and millions still do to this day.
— He told people three million illegal ballots were cast
against him in 2016 and that he won in 2020. While repeated investigations by
reporters, federal agencies, and even courts (including the Supreme Court)
found no evidence, he keeps saying it anyway.
— He told people Covid would disappear. “One day, like a
miracle, it’ll just go away.” Over a half-million Americans are in the ground
because of the lies Trump told during those early critical months when action
could’ve saved lives.
— And then he told us all the biggest lie of all, the lie
that almost ended the American experiment with democracy. When he lost in 2020
— lost fairly, lost decisively, lost in a contest that his own Attorney
General, his own Homeland Security officials, his own judges said was
legitimate — Donald Trump told his followers the election had been stolen.
Sixty-plus lawsuits, thrown out by every court that heard them. Even his own people told him the fraud claims weren’t true. Nonetheless, he lied about it anyway. Louder. On repeat. For months. And on January 6th, 2021, his mob stormed the United States Capitol, our Capitol, the symbol of 250 years of democratic governance, because this twisted man had spent months pouring gasoline on their rage and then lit the match at a rally a few blocks away.
People died. Police officers were beaten and four of them died. Members of Congress hid under their desks. And Donald Trump giddily watched it on television and did nothing for hours. That’s who’s running the United States of America right now.
His supporters will tell you, as they always tell you,
“That was then.” Move on. Stop living in the past. But here’s the thing: he
never stopped.
— Back in power, he’s now claiming inflation was at
record levels when he took office. It wasn’t.
— He’s claiming gas prices have dropped below two dollars in some states. They
haven’t.
— He says climate change is a hoax; it’s not.
— He’s reviving the zombie lie that undocumented immigrants vote in American
elections, a claim that multiple rigorous studies (including by the Heritage
Foundation) have demolished but Republicans keep reciting, because it serves
the GOP’s purpose of making Americans distrust their own elections.
— He’s pushing discredited claims linking vaccines to autism. He’s the
President of the United States and he’s telling parents not to trust medicines
that have saved millions of lives, based on a sham study that was retracted
decades ago because the author fabricated the data.
— He’s claiming America
pays for nearly the entire NATO alliance. We don’t. We pay a significant share,
but twenty-nine other nations contribute. This isn’t a matter of
interpretation; it’s arithmetic.
These aren’t gaffes or misstatements. They’re
deliberate lies. Each one chips away at some aspect of American life and
governance, at trust in elections, trust in science, trust in institutions,
trust in the basic idea that we can all look at the same facts and reach the
same conclusions.
That’s the goal of these billionaires who fund the GOP
and put Trump into office. And their buddy, Vladimir Putin, whose bots so
heavily populate our social media. It’s always been their goal. And it was
their goal long before Donald Trump came down that escalator.
And then there are Trump’s toadies and lickspittles,
the hangers-on. Let’s not let the enablers off the hook, because this machine
doesn’t even remotely run on Trump alone.
Pete Hegseth, an alcoholic wife-beater whose own
mother called him “an abuser of women” who, she wrote,
“belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and
ego” was handed the most powerful military in human history despite having no
meaningful qualifications for the job. He was confirmed by Republicans in the
Senate in what future historians will call one of the greatest acts of
institutional cowardice in American history.
This is the man who stood in front of cameras after
Minab and said Iran was the only side targeting civilians. One hundred and
sixty dead children. Footage of an American Tomahawk missile. And Pete Hegseth
looked America in the eye and lied.
Hegseth, Vance, Noem, Bondi, Miller, Vought, et al, aren’t
confused or mistaken. They absolutely know what they’re doing and what lies
they’re telling. And they’re counting on enough of us being too tired, too
overwhelmed, too beaten down by 50 years of relentless Republican dishonesty to
push back.
Don’t be.
Democracy isn’t a building. It’s not a flag or even a
Constitution, as important as that document is. Democracy is a shared
agreement, an agreement that we’ll resolve our differences through votes and
not violence, that we’ll be governed by facts and not whoever yells the
loudest, that when we disagree about what happened we can at least look at the
evidence together.
That agreement didn’t just happen into existence; it took
over three centuries to build. It was, as I write in The Hidden History of American Democracy,
built on the Enlightenment and Native American idea that reason matters, that
evidence is meaningful, that human beings are capable of governing themselves
when they’re told the truth and well-informed.
This fifty-year project I’m describing has been a direct
assault on that very idea of self-governance. Defund the schools. Kill the
local press. Teach people that experts are “elitists,” science is opinion, and
government is always the enemy. Then stand back and watch what
happens to a democracy that’s been hollowed out from the inside.
Donald Trump is what happens. CBS is what happens. An
unprovoked war against Iran is what happens.
Our nation’s Founders and the Framers of the Constitution
understood this. They knew that a free press and an educated citizenry aren’t
luxuries: they’re the load-bearing walls of the republic. Knock them out and
the whole thing comes down.
We’ve been watching someone kick at them for fifty years. Trump is just the most recent, least sophisticated, and grossest wrecking ball they finally decided to throw at us. And a hundred and sixty children in Minab are dead, and the men responsible are pointing their fingers at the country they bombed and saying, “Iran did it.” Trump is basically inviting Iranian partisans to attack America with the ferocity and style of 9/11, hoping it’ll provoke a “rally around the president” moment like Bush got and the Reichstag Fire did.
As fascism expert Timothy Snyder writes: “A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming Congressional elections.”
This is what it looks like when a democracy is in genuine danger. The rightwing lie machine was built to make you feel like nothing you do matters. Like it’s all just too big. Like you’re way too small. Like the liars always win, so, “Why bother?” That’s both the first and the last lie they need you to believe. Don’t.
