On Discourse:

The Bullshit Paradox

In the weeks following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there’s been a lot of discussion on the state of political discourse, heightened rhetoric, and the inability of the left and the right to have respective and productive conversations over genuine disagreements. Most of this discussion has been focused on what the left and liberals have done wrong in ascribing the loaded descriptors of “fascist” and “nazi” to modern movement conservatism under Donald Trump and his allies.

This conversation has mostly taken place between centrists/moderate liberals and conservatives. Perhaps it’s best typified by Ezra Klein’s one-two punch of an article on how Charlie Kirk “practiced politics the right way” and his interview with Ben Shapiro on toning down provocative rhetoric. This would be the same Ben Shapiro who once quipped that the “only reason to have a conversation or be friends with anyone on the left…is to humiliate them as badly as possible.”

There seems to be a general consensus among the center and the right that the primary cause of the massive and violent political divide we find ourselves in is an intransigent left that keeps coming up with kooky ideas and then demonizing anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Whatever authoritarian impulses are being displayed by the right in our current moment is simply an understandable if not regrettable reaction to the childish antics of liberals and socialists.

But hear me out, what if this story of events is bullshit?

To help us tell an alternative theory of where political discourse has broken down, let’s turn to an old friend. Bill Maher:

Libs Say the Darndest Things

I’ve seen this clip posted by conservatives quite a few times and it’s a perfect representation of why it’s impossible to have the kind of discourse that the Ezra Kleins of the world seek, why Charlie Kirk was not practicing politics the right way, and why claims that the left is refusing to dialogue in good faith are based in dishonest and disingenuous framing.

The gist of Maher’s point here is that for us to get back to a normal kind of politics instead of whatever this is now, Democrats have to stop saying crazy shit and insisting that normal people are bad for not going along.

So let’s look at his examples of “crazy shit” that Democrats say:

“2 + 2 = 5”

This is not something that anyone has ever said or believed to be true. This whole thing comes from a tweet thread by a PHD mathematician who was trying to make a point about numerical abstraction and the idea that young data scientists should always be aware of what the numbers represent when they are crunching them. This was not a concerted political project of the left, nor did it represent some degradation of education standards. This was one mathematician illustrating an example of using a student’s mistake to teach them something deeper about the way numbers work.

“Math is racist.”

This is actually an example of a common mistake that many conservatives and centrists make when trying to critique certain pedagogical ideas associated with the left. As with a lot of examples of “the left going crazy!” this goes back to a few university courses that look at the history of mathematics being used to enforce white supremacist and colonialist ideas, and seek to incorporate non-Western modes of mathematical learning. The course isn’t saying that Math is racist; it’s saying that math has been used for racist ends, and it’s important to understand historical instances of people hiding behind the supposed impartiality of numbers to make racist claims and support eugenicist policies. Supporters of this framework believe that math education outcomes can be improved for marginalized and underserved communities by identifying culturally and geographically significant areas where math plays an important role. This really isn’t a controversial idea, and it’s not a crazy notion. In fact, when you read critiques of this pedagogical effort, much of what is written actually agrees with the course. The disconnect is when an academic says “math can be used for racist ends,” reactionaries hear “MATH IS RACIST, WE NEED NEW MATH MADE BY NON WHITE PEOPLE”.

“Queers for Palestine”

This one is actually kind of insane when you think about it. On a couple of different levels, in fact. Given the context in which Maher cites this slogan, you’d think it was a normative statement. “Queers should support Palestine or else they are deplorable.” And I’m sure there are a lot of people who think that anyone who doesn’t support Palestine or oppose the genocide in Gaza is deplorable, but that’s not what the slogan is saying. It’s a descriptive statement noting that a particular group of queer people supports Palestine. Now, why is this a crazy statement? It’s because Palestine is run by Hamas, which is a religious fundamentalist organization that brutally oppresses queer people. Why should queer people support a population that at one point voted to be led by an organization that wants to throw them off of tall buildings?

Because no one deserves to be genocided, Bill.

And even if you don’t think what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, the Queers for Palestine people do. So it makes sense that they would want to oppose that genocide and support the victims of it, regardless of whatever bigoted culture those people may have.

“Looting is Cool”

Here is another thing that no one ever said. Especially not any elected Democrats who have been pretty clear in their condemnation of violent protests. No, what people have actually said is that looting and rioting are a natural consequence of oppressive social conditions. They’ve said that if looting and property damage is your main concern (which they probably shouldn’t be), then the best way to address that is to fix the underlying conditions that make these neighborhoods where it happens into powder kegs.

“Healthy at any Weight?”

If you’ve followed Maher’s takes over the years, you’ll recognize this as one of his personal grievances. Basically, Bill believes that shame and ostracization are the only effective ways to approach the health and lives of fat people. Recent social trends of fat acceptance and rejecting shame of one’s weight and appearance are ridiculous to Maher, who believes that being overweight is a defect brought on by personal failure. And there is a healthy (pun intended) debate over whether body positivity has gone too far and become a celebration of unhealthy lifestyles.

The problem here is that there is actual research on how shame-based weight loss schemes are good for dramatic short-term changes, but aren’t actually sustainable. Many people who lose weight this way end up gaining it right back. And there are body positivity movements that aren’t just an uncritical permission slip to eat as many Gordita Crunch Wrap Supremes as you want, but rather are rooted in the empirically supported idea that healthier lifestyles are more sustainable when a person trying to be healthier feels secure and comfortable in the aesthetics of their body as it is. After all, if you are only trying to be healthier in order to lose weight and achieve a certain body aesthetic, when it doesn’t happen right away, you’re likely to sink back into bad habits out of disappointment.

Of course, Democrats have been much better at getting people to eat healthier food than Republicans. Compare the democrats’ political project of instituting free school lunches where food is sustainably sourced from local farms (a plan conservatives hate) with the current MAHA priority of replacing food fried with seed oils with foods fried in lard.

“If the men’s football team played the women’s football team it would be a tie”

Oh great! We close out with another example of something that no one has ever said. And I could talk about all the ways that trans women aren’t dominating women’s sports and how the professional leagues that allow trans competition have pretty strict rules on the level of transition one must have already undertaken in order for competition to be fair. We could talk about how it’s routine practice for women’s volleyball to have men on the team for training purposes. But if Bill Maher thinks that it’s a serious and widespread belief that a women’s football team should compete with a men’s team, then what is the point?

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Field of Distortion

It’s worth noting that the conservatives posting this clip of Maher’s show have clipped out the end of this speech, where Maher goes on to criticize Republicans for the creeping authoritarianism in response to these “crazy” Democrat ideas. Maher still fashions himself as an old-school liberal, opposed to Trump and far-right politics. But this is actually more than fine with the conservatives sharing this clip because they can now say, “even a liberal like Bill Maher thinks the left has gone crazy”.

We can see the problem, though, right? Maher says these are crazy ideas of the Democrats. But none of these things appear on any official Democratic Party platform. You could make the case that these are ideas that the left holds, but any honest observer of American politics would tell you that the Democrats as a political party have been running against and marginalizing their left flank since Clinton.

And even if the left is secretly running the Democratic party from behind the scenes, these still aren’t honest or accurate descriptions of what the left believes. It’s a tweet thread by one guy, a collection of college courses and curriculum recommendations, an echo of MLK’s words on looting (“the language of the unheard”), health advocates trying to find better ways to motivate healthier lifestyles, and a gross mischaracterization of people advocating for trans athletes. The only thing close to accurate Maher mentions here is that a significant number of queer people oppose what they see as a genocide, which shouldn’t really be considered a crazy occurrence.

If you went digging on social media, you could probably find someone with blue hair who does think that the idea of 2+2=4 is actually racist and that women should be allowed in the NFL, that eating whatever you want to the point of being physically disabled is the new healthy, Hamas should be in charge of Target’s new LGBTQ+ clothing line, and that we should have the purge but only for Black people.

And if that person represents everyone to the left of Thomas Massie, then Nick Fuentes represents everyone to the right of him.

But the bigger problem for the discourse is that Maher, along with a whole coterie of centrist liberals, centrist conservatives, and (ahem) classical liberals, believes that these wacky leftist ideas are the direct cause of the Republicans’ embrace of Trumpism and all of its attendant authoritarian impulses. Which is wild because none of these are ideas that exist in the reality of the broader leftist political movement. This is the political equivalent of getting mad at a person in real life because you dreamed that you got into an argument with them.

It’s almost like a reverse Motte and Bailey argument, where the left only ever wants to stay in their defensible Bailey position and debate there, but the right keeps building nigh indefensible Mottes on the left’s behalf.

On Bullshit

In 1986, the analytical philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published an essay titled On Bullshit, followed by a 2005 book by the same name. In these texts, Frankfurt attempts to create an analytical framework for understanding bullshit, explain how it’s distinct from lying, and understand its purpose for those who engage in it.

Differentiating bullshit from lying is perhaps the most useful and oft-cited part of Frankfurt’s work here. He identifies lying as an act that is primarily concerned with the truth. The liar lies because they possess knowledge of the truth but wish to conceal that truth from others.

The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t particularly care about the truth. In fact, the bullshit they say may contain elements of truth, but the truth is ultimately immaterial to the bullshitters goals. While the purpose of lying concerns the nature of truth, the purpose of bullshitting concerns the nature of the bullshitter themselves. The bullshitter wants their audience to believe something about their personal character or motives and thus engages in bullshit to those ends.

Recently, academics and philosophers have taken to applying Frankfurt’s conception of bullshit to the proliferation of A.I. and its propensity to “hallucinate”. These large language models are built to simulate human conversation, which is their first and foremost goal. To that end, they aren’t so much concerned (or practically capable of) discerning the truth, only that the end users have the experience of communicating with a thinking agent. This can result in some hilarious instances of bullshit, such as a medical A.I. creating an entirely new body part, but the most pernicious example is A.I.’s tendency to obsequiously flatter an end user in chats. It may seem benign, but this kind of A.I. bullshit has been linked to recent stories of A.I.-driven psychosis.

Our political discourse is awash in bullshit. J.D. Vance wanted voters to believe that he is a devoted patriot dedicated to protecting Americans from outside threats, so he bullshitted about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets. Sen. Mike Lee bullshitted about the assassin who killed a Democratic lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota being a radicalized Marxist. Charlie Kirk bullshitted about a conspiracy to replace white people with brown immigrants. RFK Jr. bullshitted about his pick to lead the government’s research into autism, not being an unlicensed quack who tortured kids for money. Trump made a living bullshitting about his fortune and business acumen. The entire conservative movement is currently engaged in a massive bullshit effort to paint liberals as the primary source of political violence.

We should say that bullshit is not limited to the right wing of American politics. Everyone’s favorite liberal hero of free speech, Jimmy Kimmel, definitely bullshitted when he implied that the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder was MAGA. Liberal moderates like Ezra Klein and the freshly funded participants in Adam Jentleson’s new Searchlight Institute are bullshitting about Democrats’ electoral woes being caused by unpopular leftist messaging. Zohran Mamdani is almost certainly bullshitting about his practical ability to turn New York City into an affordable socialist paradise. (You should still vote for him, though.)

While there are bullshitters occupying all possible spaces on the political continuum, this does not mean that bullshit is equally distributed. Modern movement conservatism is practically built on a foundation of bullshit. From Lee Atwater’s famous strategy of hiding racist messaging behind economic issues and federal overreach to LibsofTikTok sparking harassment campaigns against any online person or entity who dares to validate trans youth. The anti-woke movement functions as a graduate-level course in bullshit as disgraced college professors and researchers try to paint the consequences of their sexual impropriety and racism as attacks on free speech and academic inquiry.

The important thing to remember when trying to wade through all this bullshit and to understand how it impacts the discourse is that the bullshitter isn’t strictly lying. They just don’t care whether what they say is true or not. And if the truth doesn’t really matter, then we cannot have substantive conversations that bridge the gap between political positions.

Which brings us back to Bill Maher. He is bullshitting his audience in this clip. His goal isn’t to communicate the truth about liberal political expression or even to intentionally lie about it. His goal is to convince his audience that he is smart and those with whom he disagrees are dumb. To that end, he’s assembled a list of things his audience believes that liberals and leftists would say or believe without caring whether or not these headlines reflect the true story.

This reflects the larger reactionary view of left-wing politics. Where the goal is not to engage with ideas and debate them, but to prove to whoever is watching that they are unequivocally stupid. The intended audience is not those who disagree or even those looking to form an opinion, but rather those who already agree the left should be disqualified from serious political consideration and thus only seek affirmation of that belief.

This is why Charlie Kirk was not practicing politics “the right way”. His commitment to debate was not about educating his audience about what the other side believes, or finding some space for synthesis between opposing views. It was always about bullshitting people about the left and what it stands for, positioning his opposition to leftist politics as a sign of personal virtue.

There just isn’t any room for the productive vision of discourse called for by centrists and moderates in this context. There is no way to come to a reasoned and principled consensus between opposing positions when one side will only ever entertain the most unreasonable version of their opponent’s argument. This is not the fault of liberals or leftists because, no matter what they actually say, the right will filter it through their distortion field of constructed stupidity.

So the next time you hear someone say that Democrats have failed in trying to communicate with the other side, you now know how to respond.

Bullshit.

Solidarity Forever.