Lying and Linguistic Tact in a Post-Truth Society
Over the week before Christmas 2025, I endured the all too common and dreaded experience of discussing politics with my extended family. Being subjected to hearing my Grandmother soap-box about her political beliefs was grating, yes, but also illuminating. My Memère was a Trump-Biden-Trump voter, one who denounced her allegiance to Trump and the MAGA movement during the 2020 election cycle.
On this particular occasion I decided to engage, partially because rage-baiting your Grandma is a fun thing to do over the holidays and partially because I wanted to understand how she could have had such drastic changes in opinion in just eight years.
The reason she cited for voting against Harris? She laughs too much.
After scouring the internet, I can find only circumstantial evidence that Kamala Harris laughs more than any other presidential candidate—and I did parse through a 10 hour compilation of the former VP laughing. Laughing is also not an indicator of underqualification for a presidency. But here’s why that doesn’t matter. While my Memère could not point to any specific objection she had to Harris’ policies or concerns about her qualification for the presidency, she could most certainly remember hearing the moniker “laffin’ Kamala Harris” or “laughing Kamala” over and over again.
This is due to a phenomenon known as The Illusory Truth Effect, henceforth called the ITE. A term first coined by Temple University psychologist Dr. Lynn Hasher and her colleagues in 1977, it describes the tendency of remarks to feel more true when repeated, even when they are demonstrably false. The ITE is so strong that even when researchers warn participants about the effect, they still fall victim to it.
What we’re seeing with American politics today might be more aptly described as the lore-ification of the press (thanks Amanda Montell for that witty nickname). Just as humans have a tendency to believe a statement when repeated, our brains like to cling onto facts we can neatly organize in our heads.
In Montell’s words: “When people lack the knowledge, literacy, or motivation to critically evaluate a message, they rely on simple heuristics, like ‘familiar sayings tend to be credible.’” We tend to absorb what is easiest, a habit that is especially problematic in a time where news is polarized and dramaticized.
This urge to organize information also manifests in the fact that humans quite literally prefer rhyme over reason. A 2000 study by psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh found that participants were more likely to rate the statement “woes unite foes” as true than the phrase “woes unite enemies”.
When we pass on information, stripping it of nuance and letting it devolve to easily absorbable nicknames or rhymes, we engage in the lore-ification. We’re simultaneously living through the post-truth era and the information age. Our brains, constantly inundated with content of questionable veracity, necessarily latch on to those easy to remember phrases.
The way in which Trump lies—the Washington Post found that he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term—has been likened to the Russian “Firehose of Falsehood”. That particular term refers to Putin’s “shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions”, as RAND researchers put it. This strategy is distinct from other propagandized presses or politics because it is 1) not committed to objective reality and 2)not committed to consistency. To a reader just learning about the firehose, it seems unlikely that this method would work because the lies are so outlandish. But here’s the thing: the firehose method is unconcerned with whether or not you know the information is not true, it's about asserting power and taking the relevance out of reality.
When leaders firehose, they proclaim to the people that they are not restrained by reality or objective truth. When the power is taken out of truth, objective reality devolves into a simple matter of position. You can effectively have your own truth.
As Historian and Philosopher Hannah Arendt said in a 1974 interview:
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Trump ran on being a “a peacemaker and unifier” in his second term, yet he’s illegally launched airstrikes on Iran, forcibly captured the Venezuelan president, and deployed the national guard to major American cities. These aren’t even all of his most insidious lies. Don’t think I’m uncritical of the Democrats, though. Trump is simply an easier case study because he makes his lies so public, and because he has been a vocal opponent of “fake news” for the last ten years.
When arguably the most powerful man in the world denounces news he doesn’t agree with as fake and publicly lies so often, Americans start to distrust not just him, but the whole system of information.
You may be asking how the uniquely American form of propaganda we’re seeing emerge reckons the lack of commitment to consistency while using the ITE. These two theories seem to be at odds with one another, but they’re not. American news/propaganda is so effective due to its sheer volume. It distracts you with outlandish, one-offs by the country’s leaders. It turns information to entertainment. The never ending news cycle is reduced to sound bites. Content and misinformation have little staying power, so they vie for our attention in a new way.
Bite-sized pieces of political propaganda are easily shared on social media, the place where most teens engage with the news. Nicknames spread and inform our opinions of politicians. The picture or quote that is reposted at once reinforces the ITE, but the ephemeral nature of an instagram story forces us to move on, engage with the next info-nugget that may or may not be true.
We engage with the lore because we have to in order to make sense of the information overload, not noticing that we never grasp full truths. This is why my grandmother remembered when she hobbled into that voting cubicle that Kamala Harris laughs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-bidens-dnc-speech
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/sites/bc-magazine/summer-2020/features/welcome-to-post-truth-america.html
https://scitechdaily.com/the-rhyme-as-reason-effect-why-we-find-reason-in-rhyme-time-after-time/
https://tonko.house.gov/news/email/show.aspx?ID=67AVR2U2BECV33D465RRAE2ZDI
