Latest news with #Seinfeldian
Mint
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
George Santos is the congressman America deserves
Editor's note: On May 10th federal prosecutors in New York unveiled 13 criminal charges against Mr Santos. The charges include wire fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds and lying to the House of Representatives. Mr Santos pled not guilty. This story was originally published on 17 January 2023. Why do the many lies of George Santos matter? Maybe some of Mr Santos's constituents, in a district stretching along the North Shore of Long Island, voted for him in November because they were impressed he was a volleyball star at Baruch College and worked at Goldman Sachs, though none of that is so. Maybe they voted for him because he claimed to be Jewish, though he says now, with Seinfeldian sangfroid, that he meant only that he was 'Jew-ish'. If such qualities did in fact seem like reasons enough to cast a ballot for someone, well, the voters deserve what they got. But those qualities were probably not why most voters supported him. During the campaign his opponent raised doubts about his biography, as did a local newspaper, the North Shore Leader, which noted an 'inexplicable' leap in his reported assets from zero to about $11m in two years. The national press exposed some of his shady business dealings, and Democrats branded him a 'flat-out liar'. The Leader went on to endorse the Democratic candidate, saying it wanted to support a Republican but that Mr Santos 'is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot'. What seems certain is that, unlike the Leader, the majority of voters in New York's third district, which includes part of Donald Trump's home borough of Queens, did prefer a Republican regardless of how sketchy he might be. They were swept up in a wave of discontent that washed through the Democrat-dominated, troubled state of New York. The Republican agenda appealed to them, and Mr Santos, in his first votes, has supported it. But there is an even more troubling frame in which to view what Mr Santos calls his 'résumé embellishment'. The voters also preferred Mr Santos, by a margin of more than seven points, at least in spite of—though probably because of—a much more destructive and transparent whopper that he told, that Mr Trump won the 2020 presidential election. After running for the same seat in 2020 and losing, Mr Santos appeared at a rally in Washington on January 5th 2021, the day before the attack on the Capitol, to declare that his own election, along with Mr Trump's, had been stolen. Calling Mr Trump 'the best president in modern history since Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan', Mr Santos asked, 'Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald J. Trump?' As a teller of tall tales, the man was not exactly hiding his light under a bushel. 'You can't make this stuff up!' Mr Santos declared at that rally— surely a contender for his most shameless lie. This is why the outrage of the press and the Democrats over Mr Santos is so poignant. Since he ran again, and won, they have not just torn away his veil of autobiographical humbug but turned his deceit into a national scandal. Yet given Mr Trump's enduring success at warping reality, this blow for justice seems even less satisfying than catching Al Capone for tax evasion. It is more like hounding one of Capone's accountants for jaywalking. None of this excuses Mr Santos. His lies do matter, but not really for what they reveal about him. That such a person should represent Americans in Congress is a national disgrace. But it is also fitting, because he represents something true and awful, particularly about the Republican Party, yet also about America, a nation lousy with misinformation, also known as deceit. 'In law and in journalism, in government and in the social sciences, deception is taken for granted when it is felt to be excusable by those who tell the lies and who tend also to make the rules,' Sissela Bok, a philosopher, wrote in her landmark book 'Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life'. Writing in the late 1970s after the deceptions of Watergate and the Vietnam war, Ms Bok was trying to make sense of the collapse of trust in American institutions. Ms Bok added a new introduction a decade later, after the Iran-Contra affair, and another a decade after that, once President Bill Clinton admitted he had lied about sex with an intern. Now—in the wake of the Iraq war and Mr Trump, Bernie Madoff, Q-Anon and Sam Bankman-Fried, after social media has turned so many Americans into deceptive brand ambassadors for themselves—it may be time for a fourth introduction. Without trust in veracity—'a foundation of relations among human beings'—institutions collapse, Ms Bok wrote. She placed particular responsibility for the fraying of trust on politicians, partly because political lies, even when thought trivial by those who tell them, spread so far and are so widely imitated. 'When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily,' she wrote. That is what Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, is doing by defending Mr Santos as innocent until proven guilty of a crime. In prioritising his fragile majority, Mr McCarthy is conceding that power matters more to him than veracity. The speaker has blown a chance to restore some trust, in himself and Congress. Joe Biden has a chance of his own. He is not the résumé-embellisher he was when he first ran for president, in 1987, and claimed degrees and honours he had not earned. But he still tells the occasional fable about himself, and he has also lied at points about the economy and the pandemic. Now it appears the White House misled Americans by withholding news for two months that classified documents were found in Mr Biden's private office and home, the first of them almost a week before the midterms. There is no sign Mr Biden deliberately held back documents, as Mr Trump did. But unless the White House comes up with a better explanation for its long silence than it has so far, Mr Biden should own the deception, and apologise. Mr Biden is no George Santos or Donald Trump, but deceiving the public to advance a political agenda should not be graded on the curve. It is always wrong, and America could do with a demonstration of virtue in leadership.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind
In a 1995 episode of Seinfeld, an extremely Seinfeldian series of events leads Jerry to a problem: He has to take a lie-detector test. Specifically, he has to beat a lie-detector test. He seeks advice from his friend George Costanza, whose personal flaws render him uniquely suited to the task of polygraph cheating. George initially rejects the idea that conscience-free lying can be taught ('It's like saying to Pavarotti, 'Teach me to sing like you!''). But he relents. 'It's not a lie,' George says, with a melodramatic flourish, 'if you believe it.' The joke, in the episode, is at George's expense: Only in his upside-down world would sociopathy amount to a moral. These days, though, his advice might as well be political theory. To participate in American politics is to navigate, every day, an avalanche of falsehoods—lies issued, with Costanza-like ease, from the highest levels of power. Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump's first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president's words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda typically found only in authoritarian regimes. They gave the fiction an epithet befitting its magnitude: 'the Big Lie.' But that term, with its sense of emergency, has gone the way so many other fact-checks have in this age of heedless lying: It lives, now, in that democratically awkward space between accuracy and irrelevance. In 2024, Trump was reelected despite the Big Lie—and perhaps because of it. His false assertions are not liabilities, it seems, but rather selling points for many of his voters. They are weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust. Though Trump's second presidency began on January 20, 2025, the start of the new Trump era effectively began on January 7, 2025. That was the day that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it would be ending its efforts to fact-check claims made on those platforms. (It also happened to be exactly four years and one day after the attack on the Capitol that emerged from the Big Lie.) Meta's pronouncement was the company's 'Latest Bow to Trump,' as an Associated Press headline summed it up. It was also a harbinger of a wider kind of concession. Fact-checking, while increasing as a need over the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, is waning as an enterprise. The lies are winning. The president is wielding them ever more brazenly. George Costanza, for all his idiocy, may also be a savant: It's not a lie if you believe it. For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies' falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy. A century ago, in his classic book Public Opinion, the journalist Walter Lippmann laid out a bleak argument: One of the threats to the American experiment was American democracy itself. The work of self-government, Lippmann thought—even back then—asked far too much of its citizens. It asked too much of our minds. Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters' political decisions will be based on reliable information. But it is also a matter of psychology, and of cognition. The atomic unit of democracy is the human brain. Everything will come down to its capabilities, its vulnerabilities, its biases—for better and, definitely, for worse. Public Opinion considers mass media and propaganda, and the role that emotion plays in political life. Lippmann observed the importance of media inputs well before media was part of the American vernacular. The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains' impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called 'the pictures in our heads.' The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be. Lippmann was writing in the 1920s, not only during the early age of radio but also during a smaller kind of communications revolution: penny presses; mass-produced illustrations and photographs; advertising. He was reckoning with the beginning stages of the information environment that humans navigate today. As people consumed these media, he discerned that they would become reliant on images of the world rather than on the evidence provided by the world itself. They would become confused, he feared, by the preponderance of competing images. And the confusion would weaken them—making them susceptible to the advertisements, to all the stories, to information overwhelm. (To describe the effect of the images, Lippmann borrowed a term from the factory floor: They functioned, he argued, as 'stereotypes'—a term he used not as an insult but as a simple description of images' heuristic powers.) In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans' unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile. The philosopher John Dewey, alternately impressed and horrified by Public Opinion, called it 'perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy' ever written. [From the November 1919 issue: Walter Lippmann on the basic problem of democracy] Lippmann's critiques of democracy have become only more relevant with age. The media environment of the 1920s already featured elements of information overload. The first months of the second Trump presidency, having brought a 'flood the zone' approach to government, have lent new acuity to Lippmann's warnings. The number of news stories alone has made it seem almost absurd to expect citizens to attempt the basic work of democracy: staying informed. With every lie Trump has told, from the petty to the consequential, he has eroded people's ability to trust the pictures in their heads. Every time he condemns the pollsters who document his waning public approval, he further erodes that trust. The tethers that anchor people to their president—and to the ground truths of their politics—fray just a bit more. The people closest to Trump weaken those tethers as well. See, for example, the White House's changing story about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the administration forcibly deported to El Salvador in March. Administration officials initially called his deportation—effected without due process—an 'administrative error.' Soon, though, and without providing credible evidence, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was accusing Abrego Garcia of being a gang member, a human trafficker, and a 'foreign terrorist.' Earlier this month, after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador, the White House adviser Stephen Miller insisted that the administration had 'won' the case, 'clearly.' It had not. The Court had rebuked the White House, unanimously. But political power can be narrative power as well. Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight. In February, responding to Trump's ask-neither-permission-nor-forgiveness approach to presidential power, the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein published an essay titled, simply, 'Don't Believe Him.' The president's strategy, Klein argued, is to perform a level of power he doesn't have in the hopes that the performance might become, eventually, reality. Trump 'has always wanted to be king,' Klein wrote. 'His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.' [From the June 2025 issue: 'I run the country and the world'] This is absolutely correct. It is also an encapsulation of the problem that Lippmann foresaw. The president, a creature—and in some sense a creation—of television, is keenly aware of the power of images. He avails himself of the insight that Lippmann had years before the TV would become a fact of many people's lives. And Trump knows how much is at stake. The pictures we carry around with us, in our mind's ever-revolving camera rolls, are much more than representations of the world as we understand it. The pictures are biases, too. They are assumptions and expectations. They are like brands, in their way: ever expandable, ever expendable. They can be shaped by lies as well as truths. Human brains have a hard time telling the difference. Lippmann was a contemporary of Freud, whose nascent insights in psychology informed Lippmann's theories of politics. Our minds make us what we are; they also make us, collectively, vulnerable to deceit. They are biased toward emotion over information. They tend to prefer the easy stories over the complicated ones. The pictures they hold might be informed by our interactions with physical reality, or by fantasy. Humans can try to separate the two—reality here, irreality there, stored in separate files—and can do so successfully. But the separation itself is work. And it is work made ever more taxing in a media environment where the human-generated lies mingle with the AI-generated ones, and where even the fact-checked news comes at people in endless feeds and floods. In the flurry, people can lose control of the pictures in their heads. They can lose control of themselves. 'For it is clear enough,' Lippmann wrote, 'that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.' Public Opinion—written not long after a once-in-a-century pandemic, and after the urgencies and contingencies of war had changed the way that Americans thought about truth itself—also contains insights from Lippmann's experience with public relations. He had worked in the field, on behalf of the United States and its allies, during World War I. He had seen firsthand how easily information could be spun and edited and, all too often, simply manufactured out of thin air. Modern advertising works, generally speaking, by creating problems rather than solving them. It manufactures desires among the public; it also manufactures, in the process, discontent. Our politics are doing the same work as they sell our nation back to us. Trump is, too. He manufactures problems—the 'rigged' elections, the invasion of 'illegals,' the 'woke mob,' the horrors of 'American carnage'—to sell us the solution: Trump himself. [Read: The 21st century's greatest, ghastliest showman] The word propaganda, in Lippmann's era, had not adopted the negative connotations it carries today. It was a term of politics borrowed from Catholic practice: Propaganda shared a root with propagation and suggested the straightforward act of sharing and spreading the faith. In the 1920s, it meant something akin to what today we might call straightforward 'publicity.' But Lippmann's studies of psychology had chastened him. Our minds, for all their attunement to the nuances of the physical world—the subtle shifts in light, the micro-expressions that move on the faces of other people—are not terribly adept at perceiving those distinctions through the filters of airwaves and screens. On the contrary, all the inputs people encounter, by choice or by circumstance—the news reports, the novels, the films, the celebrities, the radio shows, the billboards, the histories, the satires, the amusements, the truths, the lies—tend to end up in the same place. The inputs influence, then continually edit, the pictures in our heads. Those pictures might be accurate appraisals. They might be delusions. They are nearly impossible to categorize. They are also totalizing. 'Whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat it as if it were the environment itself,' Lippmann observed. The insight might seem simple: Of course we believe what we see. But the opposite is true as well: We see what we believe. For Lippmann, that meant that the information people rely on to form their mental images would be the lifeblood, or the death, of American democracy. Lippmann was a celebrated columnist, and he wrote Public Opinion as American newspapers were in the process of reforming. This was the era when objectivity, as a standard, was born. It was the age when reporters instituted standards of sourcing and validation. They were responding to the proliferation of information and misinformation, the advent of advertising, the establishment of public relations as a field and a career choice. The papers were reacting to market pressures, essentially, by creating a new kind of commodity: information that had been collected, vetted, verified. This information would go out of its way to clarify what had been reported and what had been merely opined. The lines were not always entirely clear—but they were efforts to impose new modes of order. Now, though, the lies are imposing the order. TV-news organizations, hosting candidate debates during the presidential election last year, deliberated over whether moderators should correct inaccuracies uttered on their air. Confusion on the matter led J. D. Vance, facing Tim Walz in a vice-presidential debate, to make his infamous complaint: 'The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.' (He was reacting to CBS moderators' efforts to clarify that many of the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, whom Vance had previously referred to as 'illegal,' indeed had legal status in the United States.) [From the March 2023 issue: We've lost the plot] Challenges to the rules have expanded far beyond the format of the televised debate. In early April, President Trump issued an executive order condemning Chris Krebs—who in Trump's first term headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—on the grounds that Krebs had said that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair. The order is so blatant in its attempt to rewrite history that to call it Orwellian would be something of an insult to Big Brother. But it is Costanzan. It is authoritarian. What Donald Trump believes, the order suggests, becomes the truth. 'When the president does it … that means that it is not illegal,' Richard Nixon claimed, a few years after his association with illegal activity ended his presidency. That tautology, in the age of Trump, is now a matter of judicial precedent. It is also the defining logic of Trump's attempts to expand executive authority. 'I'm a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,' Trump said recently in an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Jeffrey Goldberg. He was responding to their questions about why Trump continues to insist, falsely, that he won the 2020 election. 'I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart,' Trump said. 'I believe it with fact.' This is the Costanza principle at work. 'Because I believe it' is neither a factual argument nor a legal one. But Trump is treating it as both. He is treating his preferred reality as the only one that can exist. He is behaving, in that respect, less like a president than like a king. He is acting as the kind of demagogue whom James Madison and other Founders feared when they warned about 'the passions' and their corrosive effect on politics. Passions, for those men of the Enlightenment, fought against reason. They weakened people's defenses against the seductions of emotional appeals. They could make people unable to tell the difference between the convenient story and the true one. 'Facts don't care about your feelings,' as the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it, is a good slogan, but it gets things wrong: The guiding principle of Trumpism is 'Feelings don't care about your facts.' And once facts are discarded, anything can come in their place. Trump's lack of accountability for his lies has expanded, in these early days of his second term, into a more comprehensive form of unchecked power. 'The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive,' he told Parker and Scherer. 'The second time, I run the country and the world.' If Can he say that? was a broad theme of Trump's first term, Can he do that? is the even graver theme of his second. The deportations. The tariffs. The dismantling of the civil service, of scientific research, of government records, of civil rights, of voting rights, of basic standards of due process: The president's efforts to destabilize his own government from within—to defund agencies, to 'purge' the civil service of people he views as insufficiently loyal—have not merely been escalations of the attempted power grabs he made in his first term. They have been direct assaults on the delicate balance of power: an executive laying siege to the legislative and judicial branches. Lippmann did not predict this turn of events, but he understood their consequences. Democracy, under the sway of lies, becomes a form of anarchy. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind
In a 1995 episode of Seinfeld, an extremely Seinfeldian series of events leads Jerry to a problem: He has to take a lie-detector test. Specifically, he has to beat a lie-detector test. He seeks advice from his friend George Costanza, whose personal flaws render him uniquely suited to the task of polygraph cheating. George initially rejects the idea that conscience-free lying can be taught ('It's like saying to Pavarotti, 'Teach me to sing like you!''). But he relents. 'It's not a lie,' George says, with a melodramatic flourish, 'if you believe it.' The joke, in the episode, is at George's expense: Only in his upside-down world would sociopathy amount to a moral. These days, though, his advice might as well be political theory. To participate in American politics is to navigate, every day, an avalanche of falsehoods—lies issued, with Costanza-like ease, from the highest levels of power. Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump's first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count —guided by the optimism that checking the president's words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda typically found only in authoritarian regimes. They gave the fiction an epithet befitting its magnitude: 'the Big Lie.' But that term, with its sense of emergency, has gone the way so many other fact-checks have in this age of heedless lying: It lives, now, in that democratically awkward space between accuracy and irrelevance. In 2024, Trump was reelected despite the Big Lie—and perhaps because of it. His false assertions are not liabilities, it seems, but rather selling points for many of his voters. They are weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust. Though Trump's second presidency began on January 20, 2025, the start of the new Trump era effectively began on January 7, 2025. That was the day that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it would be ending its efforts to fact-check claims made on those platforms. (It also happened to be exactly four years and one day after the attack on the Capitol that emerged from the Big Lie.) Meta's pronouncement was the company's ' Latest Bow to Trump,' as an Associated Press headline summed it up. It was also a harbinger of a wider kind of concession. Fact-checking, while increasing as a need over the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, is waning as an enterprise. The lies are winning. The president is wielding them ever more brazenly. George Costanza, for all his idiocy, may also be a savant: It's not a lie if you believe it. For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies' falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy. A century ago, in his classic book Public Opinion, the journalist Walter Lippmann laid out a bleak argument: One of the threats to the American experiment was American democracy itself. The work of self-government, Lippmann thought—even back then—asked far too much of its citizens. It asked too much of our minds. Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters' political decisions will be based on reliable information. But it is also a matter of psychology, and of cognition. The atomic unit of democracy is the human brain. Everything will come down to its capabilities, its vulnerabilities, its biases—for better and, definitely, for worse. Public Opinion considers mass media and propaganda, and the role that emotion plays in political life. Lippmann observed the importance of media inputs well before media was part of the American vernacular. The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains' impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called 'the pictures in our heads.' The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be. Lippmann was writing in the 1920s, not only during the early age of radio but also during a smaller kind of communications revolution: penny presses; mass-produced illustrations and photographs; advertising. He was reckoning with the beginning stages of the information environment that humans navigate today. As people consumed these media, he discerned that they would become reliant on images of the world rather than on the evidence provided by the world itself. They would become confused, he feared, by the preponderance of competing images. And the confusion would weaken them—making them susceptible to the advertisements, to all the stories, to information overwhelm. (To describe the effect of the images, Lippmann borrowed a term from the factory floor: They functioned, he argued, as 'stereotypes'—a term he used not as an insult but as a simple description of images' heuristic powers.) In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans' unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile. The philosopher John Dewey, alternately impressed and horrified by Public Opinion, called it 'perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy' ever written. From the November 1919 issue: Walter Lippmann on the basic problem of democracy Lippmann's critiques of democracy have become only more relevant with age. The media environment of the 1920s already featured elements of information overload. The first months of the second Trump presidency, having brought a 'flood the zone' approach to government, have lent new acuity to Lippmann's warnings. The number of news stories alone has made it seem almost absurd to expect citizens to attempt the basic work of democracy: staying informed. With every lie Trump has told, from the petty to the consequential, he has eroded people's ability to trust the pictures in their heads. Every time he condemns the pollsters who document his waning public approval, he further erodes that trust. The tethers that anchor people to their president—and to the ground truths of their politics—fray just a bit more. The people closest to Trump weaken those tethers as well. See, for example, the White House's changing story about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the administration forcibly deported to El Salvador in March. Administration officials initially called his deportation—effected without due process—an 'administrative error.' Soon, though, and without providing credible evidence, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was accusing Abrego Garcia of being a gang member, a human trafficker, and a ' foreign terrorist.' Earlier this month, after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador, the White House adviser Stephen Miller insisted that the administration had 'won' the case, 'clearly.' It had not. The Court had rebuked the White House, unanimously. But political power can be narrative power as well. Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight. In February, responding to Trump's ask-neither-permission-nor-forgiveness approach to presidential power, the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein published an essay titled, simply, 'Don't Believe Him.' The president's strategy, Klein argued, is to perform a level of power he doesn't have in the hopes that the performance might become, eventually, reality. Trump 'has always wanted to be king,' Klein wrote. 'His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.' From the June 2025 issue: 'I run the country and the world' This is absolutely correct. It is also an encapsulation of the problem that Lippmann foresaw. The president, a creature— and in some sense a creation —of television, is keenly aware of the power of images. He avails himself of the insight that Lippmann had years before the TV would become a fact of many people's lives. And Trump knows how much is at stake. The pictures we carry around with us, in our mind's ever-revolving camera rolls, are much more than representations of the world as we understand it. The pictures are biases, too. They are assumptions and expectations. They are like brands, in their way: ever expandable, ever expendable. They can be shaped by lies as well as truths. Human brains have a hard time telling the difference. Lippmann was a contemporary of Freud, whose nascent insights in psychology informed Lippmann's theories of politics. Our minds make us what we are; they also make us, collectively, vulnerable to deceit. They are biased toward emotion over information. They tend to prefer the easy stories over the complicated ones. The pictures they hold might be informed by our interactions with physical reality, or by fantasy. Humans can try to separate the two—reality here, irreality there, stored in separate files—and can do so successfully. But the separation itself is work. And it is work made ever more taxing in a media environment where the human-generated lies mingle with the AI-generated ones, and where even the fact-checked news comes at people in endless feeds and floods. In the flurry, people can lose control of the pictures in their heads. They can lose control of themselves. 'For it is clear enough,' Lippmann wrote, 'that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.' Public Opinion —written not long after a once-in-a-century pandemic, and after the urgencies and contingencies of war had changed the way that Americans thought about truth itself—also contains insights from Lippmann's experience with public relations. He had worked in the field, on behalf of the United States and its allies, during World War I. He had seen firsthand how easily information could be spun and edited and, all too often, simply manufactured out of thin air. Modern advertising works, generally speaking, by creating problems rather than solving them. It manufactures desires among the public; it also manufactures, in the process, discontent. Our politics are doing the same work as they sell our nation back to us. Trump is, too. He manufactures problems—the 'rigged' elections, the invasion of 'illegals,' the 'woke mob,' the horrors of 'American carnage'—to sell us the solution: Trump himself. The word propaganda, in Lippmann's era, had not adopted the negative connotations it carries today. It was a term of politics borrowed from Catholic practice: Propaganda shared a root with propagation and suggested the straightforward act of sharing and spreading the faith. In the 1920s, it meant something akin to what today we might call straightforward 'publicity.' But Lippmann's studies of psychology had chastened him. Our minds, for all their attunement to the nuances of the physical world—the subtle shifts in light, the micro-expressions that move on the faces of other people—are not terribly adept at perceiving those distinctions through the filters of airwaves and screens. On the contrary, all the inputs people encounter, by choice or by circumstance—the news reports, the novels, the films, the celebrities, the radio shows, the billboards, the histories, the satires, the amusements, the truths, the lies—tend to end up in the same place. The inputs influence, then continually edit, the pictures in our heads. Those pictures might be accurate appraisals. They might be delusions. They are nearly impossible to categorize. They are also totalizing. 'Whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat it as if it were the environment itself,' Lippmann observed. The insight might seem simple: Of course we believe what we see. But the opposite is true as well: We see what we believe. For Lippmann, that meant that the information people rely on to form their mental images would be the lifeblood, or the death, of American democracy. Lippmann was a celebrated columnist, and he wrote Public Opinion as American newspapers were in the process of reforming. This was the era when objectivity, as a standard, was born. It was the age when reporters instituted standards of sourcing and validation. They were responding to the proliferation of information and misinformation, the advent of advertising, the establishment of public relations as a field and a career choice. The papers were reacting to market pressures, essentially, by creating a new kind of commodity: information that had been collected, vetted, verified. This information would go out of its way to clarify what had been reported and what had been merely opined. The lines were not always entirely clear—but they were efforts to impose new modes of order. Now, though, the lies are imposing the order. TV-news organizations, hosting candidate debates during the presidential election last year, deliberated over whether moderators should correct inaccuracies uttered on their air. Confusion on the matter led J. D. Vance, facing Tim Walz in a vice-presidential debate, to make his infamous complaint: 'The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.' (He was reacting to CBS moderators' efforts to clarify that many of the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, whom Vance had previously referred to as 'illegal,' indeed had legal status in the United States.) From the March 2023 issue: We've lost the plot Challenges to the rules have expanded far beyond the format of the televised debate. In early April, President Trump issued an executive order condemning Chris Krebs—who in Trump's first term headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—on the grounds that Krebs had said that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair. The order is so blatant in its attempt to rewrite history that to call it Orwellian would be something of an insult to Big Brother. But it is Costanzan. It is authoritarian. What Donald Trump believes, the order suggests, becomes the truth. 'When the president does it … that means that it is not illegal,' Richard Nixon claimed, a few years after his association with illegal activity ended his presidency. That tautology, in the age of Trump, is now a matter of judicial precedent. It is also the defining logic of Trump's attempts to expand executive authority. 'I'm a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,' Trump said recently in an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Jeffrey Goldberg. He was responding to their questions about why Trump continues to insist, falsely, that he won the 2020 election. 'I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart,' Trump said. 'I believe it with fact.' This is the Costanza principle at work. 'Because I believe it' is neither a factual argument nor a legal one. But Trump is treating it as both. He is treating his preferred reality as the only one that can exist. He is behaving, in that respect, less like a president than like a king. He is acting as the kind of demagogue whom James Madison and other Founders feared when they warned about 'the passions' and their corrosive effect on politics. Passions, for those men of the Enlightenment, fought against reason. They weakened people's defenses against the seductions of emotional appeals. They could make people unable to tell the difference between the convenient story and the true one. 'Facts don't care about your feelings,' as the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it, is a good slogan, but it gets things wrong: The guiding principle of Trumpism is 'Feelings don't care about your facts.' And once facts are discarded, anything can come in their place. Trump's lack of accountability for his lies has expanded, in these early days of his second term, into a more comprehensive form of unchecked power. 'The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive,' he told Parker and Scherer. 'The second time, I run the country and the world.' If Can he say that? was a broad theme of Trump's first term, Can he do that? is the even graver theme of his second. The deportations. The tariffs. The dismantling of the civil service, of scientific research, of government records, of civil rights, of voting rights, of basic standards of due process: The president's efforts to destabilize his own government from within—to defund agencies, to 'purge' the civil service of people he views as insufficiently loyal—have not merely been escalations of the attempted power grabs he made in his first term. They have been direct assaults on the delicate balance of power: an executive laying siege to the legislative and judicial branches. Lippmann did not predict this turn of events, but he understood their consequences. Democracy, under the sway of lies, becomes a form of anarchy.
USA Today
16-03-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Brooklyn man's Seinfeld joke turns out to be multi-million dollar scam
Thomas John Sfraga, 56, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for defrauding investors of over $2 million for companies including the Vandelay Contracting Corporation. A Brooklyn crypto influencer who convinced friends to invest in a bogus company referencing the show Seinfeld was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for the multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, Department of Justice officials announced Friday. Thomas John Sfraga, a one-time popular podcaster who used the alias "TJ Stone," defrauded at least 17 people of over $2 million that he convinced them to invest in his business ventures, including the Vandelay Contracting Corporation, a reference to a running gag on the hit show. Investments in Sfraga's Vandelay company proved just as phony as Vandelay Industries — a supposed latex manufacturing company — on Seinfeld. On the TV show, George Costanza concocts the company to convince state bureaucrats he's looking for work so that he can receive unemployment checks. But Sfraga, 56, wasn't looking to fool government workers; he robbed friends, neighbors, old classmates and even his child's baseball coach, according to federal court papers. 'Sfraga callously stole from friends, next-door neighbors, and the parents of children who played on teams with his own children, as well as from individual cryptocurrency investors,' said John J. Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. 'There was nothing funny about his use of a Seinfeldian company, Vandelay Industries, to carry out this fraud, which caused severe financial and emotional harm to the hard-working men and women who trusted him.' Sfraga ran his scams from 2016 to 2022. He told victims — most from Brooklyn, Long Island and Staten Island — they were investing in real estate and cryptocurrency ventures. He used the money instead for personal expenses and to pay back victims to lull them into trusting him, court filings say. The spurious operation unraveled in a more ignominious way than Costanza's. Investors eventually caught on and Sfraga fled to Arizona under a false identity, federal prosecutors said. He then fled again to Nevada where he was finally arrested for not paying his tab at a casino in Las Vegas, court records said. U.S. District Judge Frederic Block sentenced the 56-year-old in Brooklyn on Thursday to 45 months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in May 2024. The judge also ordered Sfraga to forfeit $1.3 million. The amount Sfraga will have to pay back to his victims will be determined at a later date, federal authorities said. An attorney for Sfraga did not respond to requests for comment. 17 victims of 'Seinfeldian' Ponzi scheme Among the victims, federal prosecutors said, were people Sfraga had known since grade school and parents of children that played on the same team as his child. He found victims at cryptocurrency networking events and stole money gifted to a young couple for their wedding, prosecutors said. The ventures they paid into included a company called Build Strong Homes and a 'virtual wallet' cryptocurrency venture, according to court filings. 'During a challenging time in my life, as I faced a difficult and costly divorce, [Sfraga] and I met socially,' one victim told prosecutors. 'He acknowledged my financial struggles and offered a way to help . . . . He assured me, as a friend.' One person from Brooklyn thought they were joining Sfraga in a clever business scheme, according to an arrest affidavit. The victim worked at a bank and agreed to give Sfraga tips on foreclosures so that the two of them could invest in the properties and resell them. Sfraga made a few payments to the victims before eventually cutting off communication, court filings say. He fooled a victim from Long Island and that victim's father into investing hundreds of thousands of dollars for real estate projects, according to the affidavit. Sfraga later convinced that same victim to give him $50,000 received in wedding gifts, court documents say. When the victim demanded the money back, Sfraga said his dad, who purportedly lived in Alaska, was dying and he had to see him. Sfraga's Vandelay Corporation was supposedly tied to a cryptocurrency company — unnamed in the affadavit — with offices in Manhattan. He met another victim at the company's building in Manhattan where he introduced himself as TJ Stone, in apparent reference an alias used on the podcast 3 People Like This; and convinced him to give him $30,000 for Vandelay 'e wallets,' the affadavit says. Sfraga cashed the check that day. When they scheduled an appointment for Sfraga to create an 'E wallet' on the victim's phone, he didn't show up; and when the victim asked for the money back, Sfraga said he was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack, court filings say. Then Sfraga cut off contact. 'Instead of investing money, I used some of it to cover my own expenses and to pay back earlier investors and business associates,' Sfraga told a judge at a guilty plea hearing. 'I knew that some of the assurances and guaranties that I made to investors were false, and that this was wrong.' Flight and arrest at Las Vegas casino The demand from investors for their money back grew and Sfraga fled to Arizona where he spent his teenage years, according to prosecutors. Sfraga lived there under a false identity on his return, court filings say. Police picked up on an unrelated property crime. Local police discovered his real name, learned he had an open warrant and arrested him on Sep. 18, 2023, according to prosecutors. He posted the $3,600 cash bond and fled again. Police in Nevada arrested Sfraga on an unrelated issue — this time not paying his bill at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas — on December 23 of that year, prosecutors said. Court filings say Sfraga was then handed over into federal custody on a warrant out of the Eastern District of New York where he was transported and brought to court in Brooklyn on Jan. 22, 2024. Where did Sfraga come from? The mystery of Sfraga's scams is that he enjoyed a decent life, prosecutors said. He was married to a wife described as 'unbelievably supportive' in court filings. He had two healthy children who were part of local teams. And some of his business ventures were successful, earning as much as $100,000 annually, according to prosecutors. Court filings say he also made a 'living wage' from his podcast business which had over a million listeners and was sponsored by advertisers from 2017 to 2018. The podcast, a comedy show called 3 People Like This, has over 100 episodes on Apple Podcasts. He spent his teenage years in Arizona. Sfraga moved to the state with his mom after his parents divorced, court filings say. He went to good schools and lived in a decent area. Prosecutors said he mostly stayed out of trouble then, aside from one unnamed 'incident.' He almost played college baseball for Arizona State University, according to court filings. He married and had two children upon returning to Brooklyn as an adult, court documents say. '[Sfraga] had every opportunity to enjoy a productive, law-abiding life,' prosecutors said. "Instead, he chose to cheat and swindle his neighbors and friends out of their savings to support his lifestyle.' Share your feedback to help improve our site!
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Brooklyn man's Seinfeld joke turns out to be multi-million dollar scam
A Brooklyn crypto influencer who convinced friends to invest in a bogus company referencing the show Seinfeld was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for the multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, Department of Justice officials announced Friday. Thomas John Sfraga, a one-time popular podcaster who used the alias "TJ Stone," defrauded at least 17 people of over $2 million that he convinced them to invest in his business ventures, including the Vandelay Contracting Corporation, a reference to a running gag on the hit show. Investments in Sfraga's Vandelay company proved just as phony as Vandelay Industries — a supposed latex manufacturing company — on Seinfeld. On the TV show, George Costanza concocts the company to convince state bureaucrats he's looking for work so that he can receive unemployment checks. But Sfraga, 56, wasn't looking to fool government workers; he robbed friends, neighbors, old classmates and even his child's baseball coach, according to federal court papers. 'Sfraga callously stole from friends, next-door neighbors, and the parents of children who played on teams with his own children, as well as from individual cryptocurrency investors,' said John J. Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. 'There was nothing funny about his use of a Seinfeldian company, Vandelay Industries, to carry out this fraud, which caused severe financial and emotional harm to the hard-working men and women who trusted him.' Sfraga ran his scams from 2016 to 2022. He told victims — most from Brooklyn, Long Island and Staten Island — they were investing in real estate and cryptocurrency ventures. He used the money instead for personal expenses and to pay back victims to lull them into trusting him, court filings say. The spurious operation unraveled in a more ignominious way than Costanza's. Investors eventually caught on and Sfraga fled to Arizona under a false identity, federal prosecutors said. He then fled again to Nevada where he was finally arrested for not paying his tab at a casino in Las Vegas, court records said. U.S. District Judge Frederic Block sentenced the 56-year-old in Brooklyn on Thursday to 45 months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in May 2024. The judge also ordered Sfraga to forfeit $1.3 million. The amount Sfraga will have to pay back to his victims will be determined at a later date, federal authorities said. An attorney for Sfraga did not respond to requests for comment. Ponzi schemes, pig-butchering and more: How to protect yourself from crypto scams Among the victims, federal prosecutors said, were people Sfraga had known since grade school and parents of children that played on the same team as his child. He found victims at cryptocurrency networking events and stole money gifted to a young couple for their wedding, prosecutors said. The ventures they paid into included a company called Build Strong Homes and a 'virtual wallet' cryptocurrency venture, according to court filings. 'During a challenging time in my life, as I faced a difficult and costly divorce, [Sfraga] and I met socially,' one victim told prosecutors. 'He acknowledged my financial struggles and offered a way to help . . . . He assured me, as a friend.' One person from Brooklyn thought they were joining Sfraga in a clever business scheme, according to an arrest affidavit. The victim worked at a bank and agreed to give Sfraga tips on foreclosures so that the two of them could invest in the properties and resell them. Sfraga made a few payments to the victims before eventually cutting off communication, court filings say. He fooled a victim from Long Island and that victim's father into investing hundreds of thousands of dollars for real estate projects, according to the affidavit. Sfraga later convinced that same victim to give him $50,000 received in wedding gifts, court documents say. When the victim demanded the money back, Sfraga said his dad, who purportedly lived in Alaska, was dying and he had to see him. Sfraga's Vandelay Corporation was supposedly tied to a cryptocurrency company — unnamed in the affadavit — with offices in Manhattan. He met another victim at the company's building in Manhattan where he introduced himself as TJ Stone, in apparent reference an alias used on the podcast 3 People Like This; and convinced him to give him $30,000 for Vandelay 'e wallets,' the affadavit says. Sfraga cashed the check that day. When they scheduled an appointment for Sfraga to create an 'E wallet' on the victim's phone, he didn't show up; and when the victim asked for the money back, Sfraga said he was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack, court filings say. Then Sfraga cut off contact. 'Instead of investing money, I used some of it to cover my own expenses and to pay back earlier investors and business associates,' Sfraga told a judge at a guilty plea hearing. 'I knew that some of the assurances and guaranties that I made to investors were false, and that this was wrong.' The demand from investors for their money back grew and Sfraga fled to Arizona where he spent his teenage years, according to prosecutors. Sfraga lived there under a false identity on his return, court filings say. Police picked up on an unrelated property crime. Local police discovered his real name, learned he had an open warrant and arrested him on Sep. 18, 2023, according to prosecutors. He posted the $3,600 cash bond and fled again. Police in Nevada arrested Sfraga on an unrelated issue — this time not paying his bill at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas — on December 23 of that year, prosecutors said. Court filings say Sfraga was then handed over into federal custody on a warrant out of the Eastern District of New York where he was transported and brought to court in Brooklyn on Jan. 22, 2024. Promises of gold mines: Ex-NFL player gets prison for running Ponzi scheme The mystery of Sfraga's scams is that he enjoyed a decent life, prosecutors said. He was married to a wife described as 'unbelievably supportive' in court filings. He had two healthy children who were part of local teams. And some of his business ventures were successful, earning as much as $100,000 annually, according to prosecutors. Court filings say he also made a 'living wage' from his podcast business which had over a million listeners and was sponsored by advertisers from 2017 to 2018. The podcast, a comedy show called 3 People Like This, has over 100 episodes on Apple Podcasts. He spent his teenage years in Arizona. Sfraga moved to the state with his mom after his parents divorced, court filings say. He went to good schools and lived in a decent area. Prosecutors said he mostly stayed out of trouble then, aside from one unnamed 'incident.' He almost played college baseball for Arizona State University, according to court filings. He married and had two children upon returning to Brooklyn as an adult, court documents say. '[Sfraga] had every opportunity to enjoy a productive, law-abiding life,' prosecutors said. "Instead, he chose to cheat and swindle his neighbors and friends out of their savings to support his lifestyle.' Michael Loria is a national reporter on the USA TODAY breaking news desk. Contact him at mloria@ @mchael_mchael or on Signal at (202) 290-4585. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: That's a shame: Brooklyn man sentenced for 'Seinfeldian' scheme
