I’ve read about a “press conference” by Rudy Guilliani and Eric “Freddo” Trump that was in fact a propaganda event at which they repeated and embellished the misinformation being spread abroad by Trump and his collaborators. There seems to be swirls upon swirls of misinformation around us, and these are not cases of someone misunderstanding or being innocently mistaken, but they are calculated programs of lies, empires of fraud.

I do not believe that this should go unchecked, indeed, go unpunished. We demand truth in advertising, and so those who practice deceit in their adverts must answer to the Federal Trade Commission and often suffer the loss of large sums as a result of attendant lawsuits. If we can be so fastidious about false claims in commerce, can we not create some similar mechanism to control political discourse? This may well be impossible because in politics there are so many instances of lying that capacity of the courts would be far exceeded. But we must somehow get beyond our responses of “Sure, he’s lying, but that’s the kind of guy he is.” or “Don’t expect the truth, it’s politics!”