VIEWPOINT / THE LIARS CLUB

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

I urge you to read Sissy Bok’s Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. What comes of a lie? The disruption and replacement of truth and reason when lying becomes endemic, institutionalized, official, and normalized. Fox has a financial incentive to lie. Lying has become integral to its bottom line. Trump and his MAGA followers have a vested interest in lying: power, acquiring it and keeping it. Once we have reached this point, no institution of society–legal, religious, business, or social–will be able to engage its members by simple truth-telling.

The counter-narrative replaces the power of truth and reason. The election was rigged. Trump won. Alternate electors are electors. Alternative facts are facts. Trump was protecting Melania. Prosecuting Trump for hush money is an abomination. Fani Willis is the real criminal. Alito: It’s all my wife. She put up the flag. Biden is behind these political prosecutions. The insurrection did not happen—just people peacefully protesting. No one tried to stop the transfer of power—it was all legal. Elections were rigged. Congress needed to return it to the states. Pence is a traitor. He refused to do what was needed to stop the steal.

The GOP is the new Liars Club. Trump has co-opted the core voting block built by lie after lie, starting with Richard Nixon. The House that Nixon Built is now Trump’s House. He owns this constituency. The Party can’t rid itself of him. They would be destroying the House they’ve constructed over decades.

It becomes impossible for many working people, perhaps the majority, to distinguish the difference. Listening to media interviews makes it painfully clear that followers and supporters of Trump believe that he is the victim, he is being persecuted, and the court system is rigged against him. No amount of truth or reason penetrates. Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has been sounding the alarm (Strongmen- Mussolini to the Present). Some of us know how to distinguish truth from fiction. I fear we represent a minority of Americans, and we are not getting through.

When lying becomes endemic, few feel attached to facts, evidence, or the truth.

All politicians stretch the truth. Every administration attempts to hide things that make them look bad. But the GOP has perfected the art of the Big Lie (the last election was stolen from Trump; Trump is the victim). They have made it a central element of their effort to stay in power. But the stolen election lie is not the Biggest. The biggest lie they concocted is that the GOP is for the working class; they are the saviors of the wage earner; they are preventing liberals from brainwashing our children, putting naughty books in school libraries, encouraging our children to become homosexuals, taking away our guns, and opening the border.

We start with historic fact. The Republican Party exists to make sure government distributes privileges to the privileged. The government gives alms to the poor. That is undeniable. However, the same government gives far more alms to the wealthy. The purpose of this column is to dissect how the Republican Party stays in power although it serves a small minority of the voting public. There is only way to do this. The Party must convince voters who are harmed by its policies to vote for them. Therefore, the GOP as a Party must continuously deceive and mislead their core voters. This is their ticket to winning and retaining power.

The Republicans take repeated votes at the state and federal levels that demonstrably hurt the working-class voter. In doing so, they claim the opposite. Tax cuts create jobs. When you let the job creators have the money, they will look out for you. All the while they are hiding the fact that tax cuts reduce funding for the following working-class benefits: education at all levels, child tax credits, elder care, Medicaid, Obama Care, and affordable housing. These are all bad for the working class as they cause the soaring national debt. This is a lie, of course. Five Republican tax cuts have added trillions to the debt. The 2017 tax cut alone has added an estimated $4 trillion to the national debt. Importantly, at the same time the Party claims victory for banning abortion, IVF, transgender treatments, DEI efforts, and unlimited gun access to protect you from the hordes of killers crossing the open border. These are all efforts intended to show the working class that the GOP delivers for them.

The GOP appointed Supreme Court Justices were put there to ensure victory for the culture wars. But were they? They have delivered on abortion but at the same time they have delivered for corporate executives who lobby them. The rollback of EPA, OSHA, and Labor regulations has helped one class of Americans—executives and investors. They have harmed the average American by removing workplace safety protections and spoiling the rivers and atmosphere with pollution.

They have spun the fiction for years that right to work laws help the working class by creating jobs. They’ve been equally good at selling the lie that higher minimum wages kill jobs. The net outcome over the past four decades is lower purchasing power and downward mobility for the very group that the GOP is pretending to help. This is the Big Lie. By comparison, Stop the Steal was a small lie.

Immigration at the Southern Border is an essential element of the Big Lie. Not only do refugees threaten to take your jobs, but they threaten to take your lives. They are dangerous terrorists, murders, and rapists. Being armed is your only hope. Any person or group placing restrictions on your means to defend yourselves are your enemies. Your troubles would be over if we banned all immigration at the Southern Border. That, of course, is  also a lie. More illegal immigration results from visa overstays than crossing from Mexico. Closing the border will do two things: cause a huge buildup in Mexico with attendant chaos as migrants continue moving north despite the closing, and it will have a limited effect on illegal immigration because most of those living here illegally entered the country legally.

Anyone spending time in Key West would know this is the truth. These people do not negatively impact wages and they are not taking jobs from American workers. They are in effect creating new jobs simply because they are educated, have skills and are willing to work hard. Jobs migrate to places with an educated workforce. Employers are able to expand in Key West because they have a labor supply. This is a world-wide phenomenon and well researched. The Big Lie must convince the American working class that immigration is bad for the economy so they can make it an issue they can fix. The GOP can claim victory anytime they force temporary border closings or reductions in refugees seeking asylum. They perpetuate this lie even though they know it is deceiving their voters.

We all lie to an extent. Usually, we do it to avoid embarrassment or hurting someone’s feeling. Politicians exaggerate. They all do it. But what about the Big Lie. How is it different? The Big Lie involves an organized effort to continuously deceive in order to gain power and knowingly harm those who are promised help. In this sense, Big Lies involve a conspiracy to mislead for personal gain, and to cover up the harm our actions are doing to those we promise to assist. We become members of a conspiracy that rewards us with power and enrichment, while damaging those who give us that power.

All of the truth-tellers in the days after Jan 6 have reverted to lying, a tactic they apparently think keeps them in good standing with the core voters of the Party and their cult leader, Donald Trump. Those voters will happily accept banning abortion, IVF, and books about gay children, rather than getting out of the downward economic spiral the GOP has put them in.

I don’t blame their core voters who lack education and the cognitive complexity to grasp what is happening to them or what is causing it. I blame people such as William Barr, who knows he is lying and that his lying will bring harm to the very people who now vote for the GOP–except the top 5%, of course, who benefit richly from liars like Bill Barr. He ought to be ashamed of what he has become. But, alas, he knows full well what he has become, and he continues to do it because he also knows exactly what his Party stands for–extending more alms to the rich while winning the votes of working-class Americans.

The propensity of Republicans to lie is now without limit. Nikki Haley announcing that she would vote for Trump, gave the following reason: “As a voter, I put my priorities on a president who’s going to have the backs of our allies and hold our enemies to account, who would secure the border, no more excuses,” Haley said at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. “A president who would support capitalism and freedom, a president who understands we need less debt, not more debt.”

Her statement, in its entirety, is a lie. Trump’s relationship with our allies was a complete disaster. The Europeans laughed at him behind his back. The economy is growing faster under Biden than any Republican president before him. The Dow has doubled, and 15 million new jobs have been created. Trump created more debt during his four years than any President before or after. Trump’s economy was a disaster because of the mishigas he made of COVID-19. By “securing the border,” Haley is not only endorsing the separation of children and parents under Trump, but she is also fighting her own irrelevance. Irrelevance is the punishment. If you contradict the Big Lie, you can expect the political equivalent of death, i.e., irrelevance.

Add several Pinocchio’s to John Bolton’s defense of Justice Samuel Alito and his flag problem. To be honest, I’ve never really been able to get on the same page with Bolton. He is either incredibly smart or incredibly dense. Read the following exchange with Wolf Blitzer on CNN News in which Bolton refuses to entertain such obvious clues as when, exactly, Alito openly displayed his love of the flag carried by rioters on Jan. 6. “The January 6 people flew a lot of flags,” Bolton said, before offering some examples. ”They don’t have the right or the ability to expropriate a patriotic symbol of the United States, and then have everybody else say it belongs to them and condemn Sam Alito or anybody else for flying that flag.

“I think what’s unacceptable is this rush to find some reason to criticize Alito,” Bolton added.

Even Judge Alito’s own defense was a blatant lie. He told Fox News that the flag was put up by his wife in response to an angry confrontation with a neighbor. Turns out the angry confrontation was a month after the flag went up. Multiple Pinocchio’s for Alito.

CNN’s Blitzer repeatedly pressed Bolton on the fact that the flags now do have political implications to certain groups, and he noted supporters of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement have celebrated the reporting about the flags at Alito’s homes. Bolton grew increasingly animated as he insisted that the flags did not have political implications and chastised those saying otherwise, adding, “They do not. That’s just wrong. That is just wrong,” and “Well they don’t have political implications to me.”

“It’s controversial for liberals who have it in for Sam Alito. It’s not controversial for me, and I’m as against Donald Trump as anybody I know in this country,” Bolton said.

Bolton said Alito should “certainly not recuse himself” from the Jan. 6 upcoming cases before the Supreme Court.

Of course, Bolton closes with a lie.

“There’s no indication that it was intended to express any support for January the sixth. And I’ll tell you, those who are using this tactic against Alito now, it will come back to haunt them,” he said. Bolton again ignored the fact that the flag went up during the January 6 insurrection.

What role is Bolton playing here? He is more of an apologist for the main cogs in the Liar’s Club. He is integral to the whole conspiracy of lies working to keep votes coming but perhaps not a member. I see William Barr in the same way. The whole GOP apparatus benefits both of them. They are millionaires and when government passes out alms to the rich, they don’t turn them down. My big issue with them is on moral grounds. They know what they are doing hurts the working class, but they keep on doing it.

Barr, after testifying that Trump was a moron, that he lost the 2020 election and could not be trusted with state secrets, now finds Trump a better choice than Biden. Barr told the world who he was and what truthfulness meant to him when he preempted the Mueller Report with his blatant lies, err, mischaracterization of the facts in the report. When Barr testified under oath to the House Committee on January 6th for a brief moment, he came to his senses. That fleeting moment seems to have evaporated. Now he is saying that Trump’s trial in New York was an abomination. Bolton, Barr, and George Will fit the same role in the perpetuation of lies. They provide intellectual cover for the actual Liar’s Club members who make the apparatus work. They along with Think Tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society make the GOP look respectable. They contribute to the Big Lie, nonetheless. They launder the lies that keep the enterprise working. They make it seem as though the lies are issues that bear deep examination and debate.

Let’s examine other perpetuators of the Big Lie. These people are the essential cogs in the culture of lies that now defines the Republican Party. Without them, Trumpism and the web of lies propping it up would fail. The strategy of stirring up the fears and hatreds of the working class requires these players to do their jobs. They are integral to the conspiracy. Among Trump enablers we find Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Jeffery Clark, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, Peter Navarro, and others on the fringe such as Alex Jones. The Party has plenty of in-house operatives such as Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Mike Johnson, Scott Perry, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Ron Johnson, and Jim Jordan. Add the declining and frail Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio as loyal member of the Liar’s Club. McConnell did everything in his power as Senate Leader to defeat unionization in Kentucky. He did so, he claims, to help the working men and women at auto plants in his home state. McConnel and others like him could not retain power without working class votes. What price have they paid for pimping Trump’s absurd lies? For some, nothing yet. For others, not so lucky. Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, Rudolf Giuliani and Mark Meadows are being charged in several states with election interference and fraud. Peter Navarro is already in jail and Bannon is headed there. Jones has declared bankruptcy.

I would be remiss not to mention the mass communicators of the Big Lie. Above the many willing to make money by reporting lies, stands Fox News. They are the all-time spreaders of the Big Lie. They play an essential role. Fox News through its repeated lying on talk shows, selective newscasts, and biased editing keeps working-class voters stirred up and angry as a motivation to vote. Many tune in Fox News in the morning when they get up and keep it on until they go to bed. Fox knows better. Their reporters are not stupid. Like all the others in the conspiracy, they know what they are doing negatively affects most of their audience, yet they do it for profit and power. This is the heart of the Big Lie. It works for the individuals who promote, contribute to it, and deny it. They profit financially and by gaining and retaining power.

I close with the immense disappointment of George Will who seems to have succumbed to the fear of irrelevance. He is now willing to engage in the stirring of passions among the working class to stay relevant in today’s political rightwing. While taking a stance and leaving the Republican Party to become an Independent, he now writes hit pieces to stir up the right—one blaming progressivism for what he calls “faked rapes” on college campuses, and the latest, an attack on Biden and immigration. The winner of a Pulitzer for columns that integrated philosophy and history in the analysis of current issues is now resorting to Tea-Party nostrums, climate denialism, and railing against the evils of progressive thought. He has become still another intellectual apologist for Trump and Trumpism.

Strange for an Oxford Ph.D. not to mention that between 2010 and 2017, 1.7 million undocumented migrants were returned to countries of origin by ICE and by voluntary action, creating a net decline in undocumented residents. He overlooked the fact that visa overstays outnumber the illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. Implied in Will’s column is the idea that immigration will be the nation’s downfall, our number one problem to stop.

This has been the anti-progressive wedge issue for the last two elections. But, what about simple facts. Where do we stand among other nations with immigrant populations? Among 54 nations with 1 million or more immigrants, we are #21 in percentage of overall population that are immigrants. Among all nations with immigrant populations, we are #64. Although much harder to nail down, the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the United States is about 20% of the total immigrant population. Compared to Russia (100%), Germany (6%), and Canada (1%), the US ranks high. Percentage wise, the illegal immigrants constitute about 3% of our total population.

Doing the math tells us that less than 1.5% of the US population are illegal immigrants who crossed the southern border. Is this a real problem or a made-up problem? For border states, accommodating the undocumented immigrants is a real problem. It is a problem because we refuse to address it as a national, not a border state problem. Biden’s bi-partisan efforts were shot down by the Trumpists in the Congress. They don’t want it solved. They want it to fester and remain a political issue they can exaggerate and claim to fix. Shame on George Will to mislead us into thinking we are overrun with illegal immigrants. Will seems to yearn for a return to the Trump and Miller border policies.

Will’s engagement with the rightwing of the Party, scaring core voters to the polls, is immensely disappointing. What has happened to intellectual elitism and morality? Will has become part and parcel of the conspiracy of lies designed to keep the working class voting for Republicans.

I end with these questions: Why is the correlation between intelligence and moral development so negative among GOP leaders? Many of these people are highly intelligent yet find truth telling impossible when it does not benefit them directly. Is this the tendency of all power elites facing decline? Is lying being driven by desperation? The scary thing is that authoritarian regimes rely on lying to win elections and sustain them in power. Is the current state of public lying a clue to what may come? We should read more carefully Dr. Ruth Be-Ghiat, Dr. Timothy Snyder, and the seminal work by Theordor Adorno, the Authoritarian Personality.

Demographics are dictating the future. The white population in America is proportionately declining. It will soon reach minority status. Is the Big Lie a natural response to this fact? Are we witnessing the tactics of a dying power in America? Does that explain the widespread conspiracy to constantly lie? Are these signs we are heading toward a more authoritarian form of government? The American white power elite is now dependent upon the working class to retain their power. Is that alone driving this historic period of Big Lies?

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