The only freedom that matters to today’s Republicans is the right to lie

If you watched last week’s vice presidential debate between the GOP’s Sen. JD Vance and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and tuned out the candidates’ attempts at “Midwestern nice” and the side trips to Hong Kong and all the other distractions, you could actually hear and begin to understand what today’s conservative movement is all about.

Again and again — sometimes in subtle dog whistles to his right-wing base, sometimes openly and testily — and in different ways, Vance kept returning to his essential, core belief. It’s that the self-proclaimed experts are not only leading America down the wrong path but engaged in a campaign of censorship, including fact-checking by a biased liberal media, against the everyday people who are trying to share what they consider to be “the truth.”

And yet, over the course of 90-plus minutes, the Ohio senator also revealed that so much of the information Republicans demand the right to freely share — that legal Haitian Americans in Springfield, Ohio, are “illegal,” that Donald Trump was the savior of Obamacare, that burning more fossil fuels will fight climate change, and finally that there’s no answer to whether Trump lost the 2020 election — is complete and utter baloney.

This is the essence of the 2024 Republican Party. After spending the last few years waging fierce culture wars against so many fundamental freedoms that matter to Americans — from the rights of women to control their bodies to book banning to crackdowns on free speech and voting rights — the far-right is advocating for the only freedom that seems to matter to them.

The right to lie.

When our nation’s founders crafted the First Amendment in 1789 as a bold, revolutionary promise of free speech, they also created a loophole that someday an American Taliban could drive its Trump flag-waving Ford 150s through: the right to spread unfettered disinformation without government interference. Some 235 years later, two Republican demagogues with a 920-page blueprint for dictatorship are hoping to eke out an election victory with hateful blood libels against immigrants that are complete fiction, spun from whole cloth.

Just as candidates who are not yet in the White House, Trump and Vance and their xenophobic, Nazi-flavored fairy tales are already ripping America apart. In the Appalachian regions of the Carolinas and Tennessee ravaged by the climate-fueled floodwaters of Hurricane Helene, local GOP officials are pleading — unsuccessfully, of course — for Trump and his MAGA surrogates to stop lying that the federal government isn’t responding or is blocking private rescue efforts, or that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has no money because it was all spent on migrants (a complete fabrication). This came after schools and colleges in Springfield shut down and hospitals struggled under bomb threats because of Trump and Vance’s lies about Haitians eating people’s pets.

But it’s important to understand that underpinning this Republican war on the truth is a crusade to stop anyone — from government officials to academic experts on disinformation to pesky journalists — who might interfere. The far-right is happy to throw away most of the Constitution, but they will defend their right to lie until you pry it from their cold, dead brains. In a weird way, we should thank Vance for making this so clear in the debate.

Indeed, the right to lie was fundamental to both key moments of the vice presidential debate. Asked about immigration, Vance avoided the most noxious lies he’s told in recent weeks but continued to insist that thousands of Haitians who have come to work in Springfield are “illegal,” even though most, if not all, have been granted legal, protected status because of the violence in their homeland.

CBS News moderator Margaret Brennan then said, “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.” Vance took great offense that his right to create his own reality was being challenged. “Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he said. When Vance refused to move on to the next topic, the moderators cut off his microphone.

I thought this was the moment Vance lost the debate. Silly me, I guess, for clinging to the ancient idea that facts matter and that a candidate who’s afraid of the truth is disqualifying. Republicans thought taking on the clearly liberal and biased media, with its “facts” and whatnot, was the best moment of the night for Trump’s running mate.

“The reason there was an agreement there wouldn’t be live fact-checking is because where Republicans get frustrated is that there is disproportionate, or rather unilateral, fact-checking of the Republican candidate,” a Philadelphia-based Republican consultant, Farah Jimenez, insisted Wednesday when I appeared with her on a postdebate panel on WHYY. She said Republican candidates and their allies are overwhelmed on panels by Democrats, and that some prominent Democrats have endorsed Trump because of “this idea that you can’t offer up countervailing points, that you’re going to be thrown off the internet if you suggest that ivermectin is an appropriate response for COVID.”

Of course, the Food and Drug Administration has indeed warned that ivermectin, an anti-parasite, is not an effective treatment for COVID-19 and that large doses can be dangerous. I agree with Jimenez that we shouldn’t censor people for their ideas, no matter how wrongheaded, but in the broader political context, there are rights — but also responsibilities. Just because conservatives have a constitutional right to spin false stories about COVID-19, climate change, refugees, or the 2020 election doesn’t mean we should reward them for taking no moral responsibility to find or speak the truth.

The other key moment of the vice presidential debate came near the very end when Walz challenged Vance directly to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Unable to defend the Big Lie, Vance tried to change the subject to the one point he wanted to continually hammer: “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?” Walz called the out “a damning nonanswer,” but Vance doubled down. “Kamala Harris wants to use the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds,” he insisted.

Let’s be clear, though. On the free speech battles that matter most — in our beleaguered public libraries or in our high school classrooms — Republicans like Vance are on the side of government repression. It’s only on the right to tell Americans that public health experts are lying about wearing masks or the efficacy of vaccines that they discover their inner James Madison — even after studies showed that unvaccinated people in heavily GOP counties had higher death rates.

Another exchange laid bare the fundamental difference between the two parties, triggered by a study from economists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania — Trump’s alma mater that he once called “the best college for colleges” — that found Trump’s proposals would burn a whopping $5.8 trillion hole in the federal deficit over 10 years.

Vance insisted the problem is not with his running mate’s half-baked ideas but with the experts. “A lot of those same economists attack Donald Trump’s plans, and they have PhDs, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom,” Vance said, insisting that instead of crunching numbers, Wharton’s world-class economists should be awed by Trump’s 45th presidency.

» READ MORE: Why JD Vance’s new lies about immigrants are worse than ‘eating dogs and cats’ | Will Bunch

Walz spoke for the majority of Democrats, and hopefully some other folks, when he said that maybe we should consider education and expertise. The Minnesota governor said Vance was arguing that economists “can’t be trusted. Science can’t be trusted. National security folks can’t be trusted. Look, if you’re going to be president, you don’t have all the answers. Donald Trump believes he does. My pro tip of the day is this: If you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., not Donald Trump.”

Here’s the conundrum: One of the few true things Vance argued in the debate is that Americans do, indeed, have a constitutional right to lie. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court built on earlier rulings to establish that telling lies, even if provably false, is protected speech — throwing out a law that punished candidates lying about their military records. If you believe strongly in largely unfettered free speech, as I do, this was the right decision. No one should want the government tossing someone in jail for posting on Facebook about their encounter with Bigfoot.

But like the Democrats’ famous Clinton-era line about abortion, constitutionally protected fibbing should be safe, legal, and rare. The theory is that the government shouldn’t punish or censor folks for fringe, extremist views, but this quaint idea has been swamped by the storm surge of one of our two political parties using disinformation as its national platform.

After Trump’s 2016 election, when it was clear that deliberate falsehoods on social media, some of them generated by our Russian adversaries, were becoming a major problem, there was a brief and highly unsuccessful effort to wage a war against disinformation. In 2022, Republicans screaming — without justification — about censorship crushed an effort to create a Disinformation Governance Board within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A disinformation specialist at Harvard says she was forced out of her job under pressure from Facebook. The pathways were cleared for a flood of raw sewage, some of it generated by artificial intelligence, in the 2024 campaign.

We’ve been assured over the years that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But the Republican embrace of their right to lie is tearing apart the American Experiment, often with lethal results. Think about the thousands who died needlessly from COVID-19 misinformation, the people who lost their lives as a result of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection inspired by Trump’s election lies, or the growing death toll from climate disasters as millions, led by Trump and Vance, deny the science. We are suffering a national heart attack from listening to Trump instead of the Mayo Clinic.

And things could get a lot worse. A major hurricane is bearing down on vulnerable Tampa Bay even as the toxic lies from the last killer storm — seeking to blame immigrants for the suffering instead of Big Oil’s corporate greed — still echo. The whoppers you’re hearing in 2024 about refugees are setting the stage for a cruel deportation archipelago of detention camps in 2025.

The law is not going to save us from this fate. Only we, as citizens, can save ourselves. In following the letter of the law, a conservative movement based around disinformation is committing the moral crime of the century. If America as we know it is going to survive, they must be punished in the only place they can be: at the ballot box.

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