The devious purpose behind MAGA's incessant lying
Creating a fog of confusion is a feature, not a bug.
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Earlier this month, JD Vance claimed on Fox News that 40 percent of people calling the Social Security hotline are “actually committing fraud.”
This is a completely discredited lie, and it’s impossible to believe that Vance doesn’t know better. In fact, he admitted not so long ago that he likes “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.” In other words, he thinks false propaganda is a good way to advance his reactionary agenda.
More, Vance’s Social Security balderdash is a lie with a long history. The right has for close to 150 years used charges of fraud and corruption to target social programs and disfavored groups.
These lies are effective because they leverage anti-government sentiment and prejudice. They also work because opposition politicians struggle to recognize and call out fascist bad faith.
If Democrats are going to defend Social Security, the social safety net, and even cancer research, though, we need to get accustomed to saying unequivocally that lies are lies, and comfortable recognizing them as a deliberate effort to confuse and demoralize people.
The MAGA war on “fraud”
Vance is hardly alone in his fraudulent attacks on “fraud” in the Social Security program.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for example, made the outrageous claim recently that anyone who called Social Security to complain about a failure to receive a check should be suspected to be a “fraudster.” Trump’s billionaire Nazi-saluting co-president Elon Musk called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”. Trump himself has said that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security. This is, again, a lie.
In order to combat this fake fraud, Trump and Musk propose increasing administrative burdens. For example, the Trump administration was planning to make massive cuts to Social Security phone service. Reporting on the scheme and subsequent protest led Trump to abandon these plans.
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But as Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan explain, there are many other ways that the administration can and is planning to make Social Security less effective and less accessible. Staffing cuts have already caused chaos and website crashes.
“Other proposed policies, such as requiring work-authorized non-citizens to visit field offices will further overwhelm the system,” Herd and Moynihan write.
Nor is Social Security the only program or agency that the administration has singled out in this way. Musk, through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), targeted the vital foreign aid program USAID for destruction by falsely claiming, with no evidence, that officials at the agency were stealing funds. The elimination of USAID is expected to lead to two to three million entirely preventable excess deaths every year.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided an unintentionally frank explanation of how Trump and his hench-thugs use lies for their own ends. When asked by a reporter to provide examples of fraud, Leavitt pointed to, among other things, a diversity, equity, and inclusion program at US Citizenship and Immigration Services and a program to fight climate change in Sri Lanka.
“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent,” she said. “They are wasteful and they are an abuse of the American taxpayers dollar.”
Leavitt made no effort to argue that anyone had stolen money from the programs; she did not argue that any crime had been committed. She simply said that she (and the president) thought the programs, which Congress had funded, were unworthy.
In short, “waste, fraud, and abuse” for the Trump administration simply means, “money is going to programs and people we don’t like.”
Fascism and corruption
This misleading, mendacious definition of “fraud” as “money for things we don’t like” didn’t originate with MAGA.
In his 2018 book How Fascism Works, philosopher Jason Stanley noted that “publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and anticorruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements.”
Stanley continues:
Corruption, to the fascist politician, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.
In other words, when Trump and Musk say that USAID is “corrupt” what they mean is that it is a violation of racial hierarchy to spend money to save the lives of millions of non-white poor people. When they say that Social Security is “wasteful,” what they mean is that it is wrong to spend money to protect the elderly poor.
Stanley notes that false charges of corruption were at the core of Southern ideological attacks on Reconstruction. Former Confederates and white supremacists lied that the interracial Reconstruction state governments established after the Civil War were riddled with graft and theft, proving that Black people were unfit to hold office.
Historian and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois explained in his pioneering work Black Reconstruction that “the center of the corruption charge … was in fact that poor men were ruling and taxing rich men.” He added:
The south, finally, with almost complete unity, named the negro as the main cause of southern corruption. They said, and reiterated this charge, until it became history: that the cause of dishonesty during reconstruction was the fact that 4,000,000 disfranchised black laborers, after 250 years of exploitation, had been given a legal right to have some voice in their own government, in the kinds of goods they would make and the sort of work they would do, and in the distribution of the wealth which they created.
The myths of Reconstruction corruption were thoroughly debunked, but they never really died. They reappeared again in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when President Ronald Reagan (and then-Sen. Joe Biden) claimed that “welfare queens” — that is, Black single mothers — were defrauding the system by deliberately having children to increase welfare payments.
These claims were lies — there was no widespread welfare fraud. But they were an effective propaganda tool, and eventually resulted in Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” that significantly damaged the safety net.
Racist corruption charges surfaced again in the Obama era. They fueled the birther lie that Obama had not been born in the US and was therefore an illegitimate president. Trump of course embraced this racist conspiracy theory enthusiastically and spent years suggesting Obama did not have a valid US birth certificate.
Calling out the lies
Looking at this history, and at the rank corruption of Trump in office, it’s very clear how much projection there is in the MAGA charges of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Yet Democrats have struggled to reject the administration’s lies forcefully and consistently. For example, when DOGE was first proposed before Trump’s inauguration, Bernie Sanders claimed “Elon Musk is right” about waste and corruption, then suggested Musk should target the Pentagon for budget cuts. (Musk was never going to target the Pentagon for budget cuts.) Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz and other House Democrats also initially expressed interest in working with DOGE to cut spending and fraud.
But as the full extent of the DOGE assault on the social safety net, the Constitution, and on Congress’s spending authority became clear, Democrats backed off their Musk-curious approach. Sanders has attacked Musk ferociously. Moskowitz has been engaged in a good bit of backpedaling.
It’s good that Democrats eventually recognized DOGE for what it is. But swallowing the bait was unwise. It gave Musk unnecessary legitimacy and credibility.
Democrats don’t need to pretend that Trumpworld’s purported concern with corruption is in good faith; they don’t need to waffle and mutter about how of course they are opposed to government waste. The record of the right, in the US and abroad, is clear. Fascists are corrupt liars, and they lie about corruption in order to crush their enemies and subjugate marginalized people.
Musk is not at war with corruption; he’s at war with equality and liberty. And he sees equality and liberty as corrupt because they undermine the pure, untrammeled, rule of billionaires, fascists, and kings.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
I was taught that the best defense is attack. That means not just calling out MAGAs as liars, but creating legislation that goes far far in the other direction. For example, not just calling for expansion of Social Security, but large expansion like Elizabeth Warren is doing to make up for the pension losses. I would add in medicare too, and talk about expanding it to cover people from birth to death. Don't call it universal health care, attack the idea that people should have to switch insurance programs when they are done working, and that their health care is tied to work. It should not be. It should follow you wherever you go. No new forms to fill out, just verify your information. Then, there is no need for medicaid, or private health insurance, but these companies can exist if they can provide for things that the medicare does not cover. Democrats need to be pushing the envelop now while Trump's policies are starting to sink in. How about saying," instead of tax breaks for billionaires, let us have health coverage for everyone. or better yet. "Let's have health care for everyone in one program, instead of tax breaks for billionaires." Who is drafting that legislation? How about tuition from from kindergarten through adult work training. Now is time to push those program. Who will do this? Whether work training is at a university, or a work training program for plumbing. These are the kinds of ideas that should be out there. Also, no sending anyone abroad to prison no matter what. ICE cannot go after citizens. Citizens are sovereign.
Absolutely spot on