The Republican Party’s Leviathan of lies poisons American society

A campaign email from third ranking House Republican Representative Elise Stefanik 

of New York lied when it claimed that the Justice Department was targeting parents

as “domestic terrorists” for challenging critical race theory teaching

Credit...

A new York Times article focuses on blatant lies that at least some Republican candidates now routinely employ to help them raise money for campaigns. The NYT writes:

A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.

It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.

Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.

The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.

But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.

At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.”

Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.

The people behind campaign emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “The more that it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”

The messages also underscore how, for all the efforts to compel platforms like Facebook and Twitter to address falsehoods, many of the same claims are flowing through other powerful channels with little notice.

[One expert commented to the NYT:] “Politicians and the consulting firms behind them, they know that this kind of messaging is not monitored to the same extent, so they can be more carefree with what they’re saying.” 

Mr. Luntz, the Republican pollster, runs frequent focus groups with voters and said they tended to accept misinformation uncritically.

“It may be a fund-raising pitch, but very often people look at it as a campaign pitch,” he said. “They think of it as context, they think of it as information — they don’t necessarily see this as fund-raising, even though that’s what it is. And so misleading them in an attempt to divide them from their money is pure evil, because you’re taking advantage of people who just don’t know the difference.”

The NYT article comments that one democrat they contacted about false information responded by saying it was a mistake and future emails would be more carefully fact checked. At least there is some respect for truth in that. By contrast, Republicans and the GOP refused to comment to the NYT about lies by Republicans. That probably means the Republicans are not going to stop lying. The Republican Party leadership arguably is in a state of full-blown moral rot, with respect for inconvenient facts and truths almost completely gone. 

Winning, power and wealth are the only moral values left in the GOP leadership now that the moral rot has finished its job. All that is left is a stinking husk of what used to be a reasonably principled political institution. 

Question: Is it pure evil as Mr. Luntz said to deceive people by enraging them or instilling terror in them with lies (emotional manipulation[1]) to raise money for campaigns, or for that matter anything else?

Footnote: 

1. I constantly use the phrase emotional manipulation here. It is useful to understand what I mean by that phrase. I mean it to refer to an emotional state of mind, most commonly from unwarranted fear and anger, but also from unwarranted distrust, moral outrage and disgust. The reason that propagandists appeal to negative emotions is because an emotional state of mind is well-known in cognitive science to cause minds to be more open to the messages that accompany emotion triggers. These emotional states of mind are fact and reason killers and all professional propagandists and high-level politicians know it. Speaking to emotional minds is much a more effective way to get what one wants, including money and votes. Making up anger- or fear-inducing lies is usually the best way to establish the pliant emotional state of mind that propagandists need to do their dirty work. Sometimes truth can establish fear and/or anger, but truth and reality is usually less effective.

A post here from last February focused on this issue in the context of emotions in preaching to Evangelical Christian congregations. To increase congregation size and cash donations, pastors are told to instill fear and anger. The emotional manipulation tactic is not limited to just politics.  It also causes moral rot in religion, commerce and probably most everything else.