Lying To Congress Seems Like A Big Deal, Actually
Perhaps the singularity has nothing to do with the rate of technological production, or artificial intelligence. Perhaps, rather, it’s the terminal point of postmodernism– the point at which truth no longer matters at all. The poststructuralist philosophers would have had a field day with the United States in 2025. Why? Because it is apparently OK for half of the entire presidential administration to perjure themselves before Congress and there are in excess of two hundred duly elected legislators who couldn’t care less. Why? Her e-mails. It’s called Signalgate, apparently.
There are a few philosophical constructs that can help us understand how the MAGA crew thinks. A lot has been written about the affinity for authoritarianism, or the conservative inclination to be, well, scared of things. But several years ago, during the first Trump Administration, I encountered a comment that perfectly encapsulates an ongoing strategy of deflection. It’s not “whataboutism,” a strategy used in Soviet disinformation to deflect from criticism by turning the question around on the critic. It’s similar, though: it goes something like this.
- He didn’t say or do that. (he did).
- Well, if he did, he didn’t mean it. (sounds like he did mean it).
- Well, if he meant it, you didn’t understand the context of it. (I did).
- Well, it’s just not a big deal that he said or did that! Others have done far worse!
I’ve seen this repeated a number of times but the oldest link I was able to find was from Reddit from seven years ago (a lifetime ago, at this point).
Philosophical Background
There are two models that are instructive for us here. One comes from Sigmund Freud’s logique du chaudron, or kettle logic. In Freud’s story, a man is accused of having damaged a tea kettle he borrowed from a neighbor. He begins by first attempting to claim that he had, in fact, returned the kettle undamaged (we know this is untrue). He then shifts his story to argue that the kettle was already damaged when he borrowed it (also untrue, but note that the goalpost has been moved). Finally, he attempts to argue that he never borrowed the kettle in the first place. This is both absurd and vacuous– given that we know that he borrowed the kettle and damaged it.
But it is an important device because it shows how the goalposts can actually move the whole way off the field.
It is also reminiscent of another argument fallacy called the “motte-and-bailey” approach, referring to the castle design of the same name. A motte is a defensible raised area of land– coming from the same Old French root as the word “moat,” a term used exclusively by castle enthusiasts or B-school bros. The bailey– a large, open area within the walls of a fortification- is considered the desirable place to hang out. The motte is some sort of dank castle (and, for the first time, I’m using “dank” in the proper sense, not, well). One does not want to hang out in the motte, but will retreat there if need be. One begins in the bailey (an easier but less defensible intellectual position) and then moves one’s person– or goalposts- to the motte, where it is easier to defend the position by adopting a completely different argument altogether.
Moving The Goalposts of National Security
If you haven’t followed the story, it centers around a Signal group chat of US military and intelligence officials, into which Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, was unwittingly invited. Signal is considered a more secure messaging function than SMS, but it is not, by any means, the same as conducting communications in a SCIF. We do not know who invited Mr. Goldberg, who publicly announced that this was happening in an article published on Monday (what feels like about a month ago at this point).
The discussion in said group chat revolved around military hardware and planning associated with a strike on Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, which the military later called successful and evidently killed 53 people (including, according to a few sources, a number of civilians). When asked about it, Secretary of Defense and drunk and rapist Pete Hegseth immediately denied the allegations (which had, at that point, already been confirmed by the Trump Administration), and then turned his rage toward Mr. Goldberg. Mike Waltz took a similar tack, appearing on the Ingraham Angle. Let’s recall that Laura Ingraham is slightly to the right of the kaiser. On her show, Waltz jumped into a full-blown character assassination of Goldberg, a respected journalist, calling him “scum” and accusing him of being deceitful and dishonest.
Goldberg, like many a good journalist, has pissed off folks on both the left and the right. Left-of-center critics focus on his baffling, early support for the Iraq War (something I personally hold against the man), while right-of-center critics seem to think that Mr. Goldberg– himself a self-described liberal Zionist- is not pro-Israel enough. (side note: it’s always wild to me that the Christian right gets to determine who is sufficiently pro-Israel). But in this case, it looks like he came out and explained what happened in frank, factual terms. I listened to the NPR interview segment with him on Monday evening, and he was extremely careful about what he said– there were a couple of times when he explicitly said that there was something or other that he wasn’t going to comment on.
A shitstorm ensued, of course.
Now the response is essentially to try and assassinate his character and undermine his credibility, following testimonies to Congress in which multiple members of the cabinet including the DNI, Department of Defense, FBI, and NSA, all basically said, “nah, nothing classified in that chat!” Even though, well, sounds like that wasn’t… actually… true. The testimonies are also colliding with each other to the point of derailing administration policy positions and talking points.
So, the moral of the story is that nothing matters anymore. This country has seen more damage done to its global reputation in two months than in my entire life on this planet, even considering the Second Iraq War and the debacle of Afghanistan.
It will take decades to recover, if it ever does, and in the meantime, it seems like it’s about to get much, much, much worse. Stay tuned for more on Signalgate.
Sorry I’m not writing more these days. I have something like 140 students. It’s a whole lot.
