It's the lying. with an update

Our mafia government with its narcissistic sociopath-in-chief does not care about Social Security. It doesn't care about jobs or other nations' sovereignty or court orders telling it that it can't do some illegal thing it wants to do. It doesn't care about guilt or innocence or "due process." It cares only about power and expressions of power. It believes it has the right to decide who gets treated lawfully and who doesn't simply because it has the power to do it. It wants to demonstrate that. And it wants to lie about everything.

Trump can run for a third term.
Tariffs are paid by the other guy.
Trump really won in 2020.
Ivermectin! Bleach! Very Powerful Light!

The list goes on forever. 

A lot has been written, of course, about the use of lying and propaganda in politics and their function as a means of control. Hannah Arendt, George Orwell (Eric Blair) helped create the language that allows us to understand what's being done to us. 

Why all the lying?

1. To demonstrate power over subordinates

2. To compromise and implicate associates

    "In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them."

 3. To erase the distinction between what is true and what is false. But why?

        In The Yale Review of International Studies in 2021, Liam Will put it this way:

Modern propagandists, however, have given up on this old model and invented something newer and far more effective. Rather than seeking to create a grand meta-narrative that can explain everything, modern authoritarians seek to destroy the concept of truth itself, making it impossible to explain anything, and possible to deny everything.

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, in a 2016 Facebook post reminded us, "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so."

And, from "Truth and Politics," Hannah Arendt has this for us:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Why all the lying? To destroy "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world..." To destabilize reality and replace objective facts with the authority of the Leader, in this case Donald Trump, and by extension his minions. It's a familiar strategy dressed up in a ball cap and a big red tie.

Right now, as far as we know, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, having been kidnapped on March 12th from an IKEA parking lot "with his 5-year-old son in the car," is being tortured in a Salvadoran prison infamous for doing just that. The government admits his rendition was a mistake but claims it is powerless to effect his release and return. They are lying. There is a hearing tomorrow where, undoubtedly, the government will shrug and lie again, about what they did, about what they knew and when, most of all they will lie about Abrego Garcia. It's what they do.

(Update: This excellent "One First" piece from Steve Vladeck is a first-rate explainer for how and why the administration's claim that there's nothing they can do and you can't make me is a bunch of bunk.)

Vance lied about Abrego Garcia's being "a convicted MS-13 gang member" when, in fact, back in 2019 when Abrego Garcia actually did get his day in court, not only was ICE unable to make the gang charges stick, the judge instead granted Abrego Garcia protected status. 

More from Greg Sargent's piece:

Let us gently suggest that these facts don’t matter to Vance in the least. This is not meant glibly: For Vance, that is the case as a matter of principle. He is nakedly asserting the power to decree Abrego Garcia a criminal subject to expulsion, even if—or especially if—the facts show the contrary. The administration is doing this on many fronts, from this case to the efforts to remove foreign students to the deportations of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison.

Let me gently suggest that facts DO matter, to Vance, to Trump, to their evil gang of thugs, and to all the bowers and scrapers vying to be lickspittle of the month. Facts are the target and they establish what "contrary" means. Facts matter because they must be battered by lies while those who remember them are viciously attacked. Facts matter because by destroying them or overwhelming them, the Leader demonstrates dominance over them. His (in this case) story becomes the only legitimate story. They lie because they have to, and...

They continue to lie. Pay special attention to the reference to secret evidence.

They lie to break reality, to break the world we see around us, to break us. They lie for power. The truth has power, too. But it doesn't speak for itself.

"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." 

 nineteen eighty-four, George Orwell