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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.
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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 2 to 3 million entirely preventable excess deaths every year.
