The progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan recently participated in an episode of the popular online series Jubilee, which is a bit like speed-dating, but for public political debate.

One prominent person (often but not always a brash right winger) sits at a table surrounded by opponents, who one-by-one fill the empty chair and argue over whatever the proposition happens to be.

In this episode, the propositions were a) Donald Trump is pro crime and pro criminal; b) Donald Trump is defying the Constitution; c) Immigrants, overall, are good for America; d) Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza is ethnic cleansing—and Hasan, who is a trained debater, would defend them against 20 “far-right conservatives.”

Several exchanges from this debate have made rounds online—when Hasan gets a boy named Connor Estelle to admit he is a fascist, when another says Hasn should “get the hell out” of the country. But, to me, one of the most revealing moments lacked that kind of viral potential. It was when Hasan asked Estelle: if you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?

“It is the means to support an end,” Estelle responded. “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”

Thanks to Estelle for his honesty. His means-to-an-end-style of bad faith in discourse is endemic on the right—not just among ascendant fascists—and has been for a long time. It’s just that most of them will never break character, and take false umbrage if you question their sincerity. But here Estelle lays out the method plainly: Rightists appeal to whomever they can with whatever false commitments they intend to break, knowing that, once delivered to power, they will pull the rug.

In nonexistential instances, this can look like Trump promising to lower costs, knowing that his tariffs will increase them, and (thus) lying about the incidence of tariffs. But in the final showdown, the promise is freedom, and the ulterior motive is tyranny. When Hasan asked Estelle, What happens when your fantasy autocrat kills your family, Estelle didn’t renounce extrajudicial violence. He replied, “Well, I'm not going to be a part of the group that he kills.”

I mention this exchange for two reasons: First, because it’s important for people to know that this is how right-wing operators pursue their ends. That they view liberal freedoms as loopholes to exploit in their pursuit of power. Second, because it reveals a weakness in liberalism-as-practiced.

The liberal commitment to free speech is inviolable. But it does not follow that liberals must extend the presumption of good faith to everyone engaged in free speech. Right-wing operators in particular are groomed and trained to argue to embrace bad-faith argument as a tactic. And yet even in the Trump era, when the bad faith is so thinly veiled, liberals remain reluctant to treat it as disqualifying. Even when their counterparties have established long track records of bad faith.

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ATWATER UNDER THE BRIDGE

I’m not referring here to competitive debaters like Mehdi Hasan. Competitive debate can be a breeding ground for bad faith, but it can also be a useful format for exposing bad faith. And, if you watch, you’ll see Hasan plainly didn’t realize he’d be debating unapologetic fascists.

No, the suckers here are liberal journalists and intellectuals who maintain that facts and reason are the only rightful tools of discourse. That liberalism’s great strength is its capacity to depersonalize arguments. To ignore evidence of bad faith and deal with text. To steelman instrumental arguments and refute them. Win the battle of ideas.

But this is wrong. It’s wrong in the cliched sense that lies travel faster than truth—because concocting nonsense is much easier than reciting truths carefully, or using precise logic. And it’s wrong in that it widens the loophole for unscrupulous actors. If liberals are committed to the presumption of good faith, how can they object when news outlets recruit liars and propagandists to offer up the conservative “perspective” on the issues of the day? This is how a shabby propagandist like Byron York remained a fixture on NPR well into the Trump era, and why CNN offered contributor contracts to vile liars like Cory Lewandowski and Jeffrey Lord. Why it still reserves a seat at the table for an odious position-taker like Scott Jennings.

These operatives may not be outright fascists like Connor Estelle. But it’s actually hard to say for certain, because they lack Estelle’s candor. They would never confess to viewing deception as fair means to their political ends. That they’ve been trained to shed all compunction about saying things they know to be false, or that they don’t believe, or that they can’t support.

The intentionality of it all only becomes evident on those rare occasions when their fellow travelers let the mask slip: When, for instance, a Republican operative believed to be Karl Rove derided the “reality-based community” to the journalist Ron Suskind.

Perhaps the most famous confession came from the Republican consultant Lee Atwater, who once told an interviewer, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”

To this canon we can now add Estelle, who said, “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”

SLICING THE SALAM-I

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