“”Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type,” reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. “This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to “properly annotate death information in its database” per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven’t been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating “not marked as dead in a database” with “received benefits”—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.””
Elon Musk thought Covid would remain under 100 cases in the United States, and was extremely confident about this belief. Disagreements over this ended his relationship with Sam Harris.
Elon would publicly insult Sam over misleading clips of Sam that misrepresented what Sam said. Sam would email Elon explaining the context, and Elon would tell Sam to fuck off.
Trump’s speech was filled with falsehoods. Does he lie to make Republicans repeat what they know is a lie as a sign of loyalty? Is he flooding the zone with bullshit to overwhelm society so that it can’t effectively fact check him? Could he possibly believe all the falsehoods he says?
Lindsey Graham, along with many Republicans, have turned over all integrity and honesty for Trump. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, and over Republican Senators who used to have strong independent opinions, is amazing.
“A former FBI informant charged with fabricating corruption allegations about President Joe Biden and his son has agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges to resolve two pending federal criminal cases against him, according to a court filing.
Alexander Smirnov, 44, admitted to lying when he told the FBI that he took part in meetings with executives from Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2015 or 2016 about a scheme to pay $10 million to Joe and Hunter Biden. Joe Biden was the vice president at the time of the fabricated meetings, and Smirnov claimed the purported payments were bribes to “protect us … from all kinds of problems,” according to a plea agreement filed Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.”
“Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.”
The Democrats, universities, and media have their faults and have been too woke, but the lies, bullshit, propaganda, and poor error-correction instincts of Trump, RFK Jr, Tucker Carlson, and others is not a better alternative.
“The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.
Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen and Jamelle Bouie, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a “blood libel” for this reason.
The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society — to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.
You don’t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial “other” in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews. The crank presidential candidate Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying that Democrats dismiss Trump’s lies at their peril because “Haitian voodoo is in fact real.”
The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS. I say it’s a lie because there’s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.
“A common myth that I’ve heard is that we’ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that’s not supported,” Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told the local ABC affiliate.
Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.
Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness,” part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.
In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.
On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign.
I’m sure it’s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don’t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.”