The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do it More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy
August 19, 2024
“Republicans lie more and they lie worse,” according to this unbalanced debut from Adair, creator of the fact-checking site PolitiFact. While Adair notes Democrats also lie, he focuses mainly on Republican misrepresentations, which he says PolitiFact knows are more frequent and serious based on an internal tally kept by the organization. These include lies about immigration and crime, as well as “the Big Lie” of Donald Trump’s 2020 election denialism. Adair floats anodyne theories about why politicians lie (to gain political advantage) and why lies work (because partisan media validates them), and lambasts the Trump-era lying of Mike Pence, a former friend. Adair’s discussion is weakened by a frustrating lack of perceptiveness around Democrat mistruths; he devotes three entire chapters to the 2022 furor over the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board and its head, Nina Jankowicz, tagging Republicans with firing a “heavy artillery of lies” when they forced Jankowicz to resign by accusing her of spreading misinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop. This feels like an overly partisan centerpiece case, given that the laptop is an incredibly murky story in which no one involved seems not to have shaded the truth, including Jankowicz, who, while clearly scapegoated, did make statements validating the widely propagated (and as yet unproven) Democrat talking point that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It makes for an oddly myopic view of what constitutes lying.