This American Life - 855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

Unnecessary and outrageous lies that make you wonder — why lie about that in the first place? Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Kasey, a woman who prides herself on her truthfulness, tries to help host Ira Glass figure out how to stop lying about one specific thing. (10 minutes)Act One: Producer Dana Chivvis talks to Liz Flock about a strange experience she had in 2011. (21 minutes)Act Two: Host Ira Glass talks with M. Gessen about a lie they've been seeing out in the world a lot recently — the “bully lie.” (15 minutes)Act Three: We find someone brave enough to stand up and make a case FOR lying. That person is producer Ike Sriskandarajah. (8 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Casey is autistic. She says it's puzzling, neurotypical people and how much they lie. She's not alone. Yeah, in our support groups, that issue comes up a lot. For some people, it's very puzzling and they just don't understand the concept.

And especially because so often lies are just completely transparent. She gave me this example. When she worked in HR, they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his administrative assistant. A naked picture of her was on his work computer. And still, he denied it, kept lying. It's just baffling to me. It's just inexplicable. I don't understand the continuing in the

lie. And I don't understand why they haven't learned at an earlier point that it's not productive, that this is not an effective tool for you. Looking around on Reddit, we found a lot of autistic people writing about this exact thing. Here's somebody who posted saying, I recently realized that a lot of things I'd always categorized as lies are not seen that way by NT people, no, typical people. Like they say it, knowing it isn't literally true, but they don't think of it as a lie

because they don't expect others to believe it. For example, here's some things that I always thought were weird, inexplicable lies, and then there's a list. It was great to see you, let's do this again soon. I hope you have a great holiday. You are so funny. I love your hairdo. Where did you buy that dress? I need to get one too. Oh wow you have a great holiday. You are so funny. I love your hairdo. Where did you buy that dress? I need to get one too. Oh, wow, that's very interesting. See

you later." They continue. I've decided to start translating a lot of NT chatter from its literal meaning into a simple form of, hello, I want you to see me as friendly. So I am making friendly noises. Do you? Yes. Do you? Yes. Do you relate? I do. You know, the white lies and the polite fictions and the pleasantries that go along with small talk, a lot of autistic people really do perceive that as lying. For me, I recognize that it's a cultural structure rather than an intent to deceive.

And does that make it any better? Absolutely. She remembers when she realized just how widespread lying is for neurotypical people. She was a teenager and she says she was heavyset from a heavyset family. That's pretty normal to me, you know. I'm not offended by or afraid of the word fat. But a lot of the people that were my friends were very afraid of that word. And so they would say to me, oh, you're not fat. And for me, that was just baffling. Like, I understood that they were trying to be kind, but I couldn't fathom how they thought that would actually be believed or helpful. I mean, it's a demonstrable fact.

Like, I have a mirror. I know what I look like. It started to make me clue into this idea of white lies and polite fiction. And then, you know, with the teenage politics, you start to see people who, oh, I'm so happy to see you. Awesome. Let's hang out. And then behind the person's back, oh my God, I can't stand her. She is just the worst. So I started to catch on that this was not just widespread, but that this was considered appropriate behavior. Now of course she's used to it. When I talked to her she was just about to go to a conference

where she knew people who barely remember her who'd be saying, so great to see you, and I mean a word of it. And she's okay with that. She ignores it, moves on. But she tries to keep things more strictly truthful. So you never lie? I won't say never. I think of myself as sort of practicing radical honesty with tact. So I do my best to tell the truth in all circumstances. I have to say, if that's your philosophy, I find it so interesting to think about what are the very few examples where you do let yourself lie, where you feel like that's the right thing to do.

What are those? So, from a moral and scriptural basis, one is justified to lie to protect others from individuals who mean to do them harm. So for example, there was someone in my life who was in a domestic violence situation, and I helped her to get to a safe place and when her husband called, I said, I have no idea where she is. It's quite simply a lie, but it is a lie that is fully justified because it is information to which he is not entitled for the protection of life and limb of myself or another person. That is obviously a very hard example to argue against.

She told me another one where her dog pooped all over her car and she was late to a meeting. And when she got there, she did not tell the truth about why. She didn't want to gross anybody out. Also, none of their business. Otherwise, she almost always picks honesty. When kids picked on their nieces about their weight, they came to her crying and asked, am I fat? And she says it was really hard not to say the kinds of lies

that people said to her when she was their age. But she didn't. She said, let's talk about your body and being fat. Is there something wrong with being fat? Honesty, she says, is the only way to vulnerability and intimacy, which, you know, of course. I was very curious how she does not lie at work. I definitely do most of my lying on the job.

Not here on the air, of course, where everything I say is deeply, thoroughly fact-checked. But just around the office, just white lies. I don't understand how you get by without a little pretending now and then in a workplace. I don't actually understand how you would get things done. Casey has none of that. Okay, let me ask you about a lie that I tell all the time at work. Okay?

At the end of pretty much any interview I ever do, I thank the person and I tell them how great they were, even if they were not great. Even if they were not good talkers, even if they were not able to describe the thing that we'd hoped that they would describe, that is what I say, because it seems to me to be such a vulnerable thing to ask people to like come and talk in an interview and they don't know how it's going to go and it's just kind of a nerve-wracking thing that it seems just kind to say you did a good job. I think that most of the time if the person you're speaking to didn't do well, that they're going to know it.

And so the polite fiction is not going to reassure them. So what is the honest thing you could say in that situation? The honest thing is, you know, coming to do this, to have these conversations and be open and vulnerable is a big thing. And I really appreciate that you did it and that you made the effort. Thank you for that. That's honest. Hmm. I have to say that is really good. Thank you. It's honest and it acknowledges them. I wasn't expecting you to really say something

so actually useful. I'll do you the paper of being honest about that. I appreciate it. One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you today is that we're doing a whole episode of our show about inexplicable lies, lies that just you just think like why lie about that? In your experience, what percentage of lies are unnecessary lies? Can I say a hundred percent?

I really don't think, except in extreme circumstances, that Anne Frank is hidden in my attic situation, I don't think that lying is necessary. I think if we have honest tactful interaction, we're always gonna be the better for it. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. It's my pleasure.

I know that it's a vulnerable thing coming in and speaking honestly. And I really appreciate you doing that. No, I can genuinely say that you were great. You were very straightforward, and you spoke in a real way about what you really think, which is what we want. Thank you. I hope it will be useful.

Well, today on our program, lies that really just leave you scratching your head sometimes. Seriously, we have some fun stories for you. From WBEZ Chicago, this is American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us. This message comes from Wwise, the app for doing things in other currencies, sending or spending money abroad.

Hidden fees may be taking a cut. With Wyse, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit Wyse.com. TNCs apply. It's This American Life, Act One, the real L Word. Okay, so to kick things off today, we're going to revisit some recent historical events. I think that's all I'm going to say for now. Dana Chivas tells what happened.

Liz Flock was just starting out as a reporter in 2011, living in D.C., working at the Washington Post. This was the golden age of blogging and social media. Instagram was just a year old, basically a toddler. Twitter was five. And news outlets realized they could use these blossoming tools of the internet to do a hybrid version of reporting.

They called it the Breaking News Blog. Liz was a reporter at the Washington Post's Breaking News Blog. Called Blogpost. —Very original. —Very original. And what was happening at that time was the Arab Spring. So I was writing about protests in countries all over the Middle East every day for months

on end. The job was a combination of actual reporting and aggregation, basically reading other reporters' stories and various social media accounts and repackaging it all. I was doing a similar job around this time at AOL News. Our blog was called Surge Desk because we were supposed to create a surge of traffic for the website. Only I worked at AOL News, not the Washington Post. So I was reporting on Groundhog Day in Staten Island and writing posts about how solar flares are kind of like the sun is farting. Liz was writing about the Arab Spring.

And I was writing about all these really complicated topics and I was really scared every day writing about them. Scared of what? Um, just that the responsibility that I had, the tremendous responsibility to write accurately and quickly about all of these really important subjects. Yeah. And it's just you and one editor, is that right? Yeah, it was me and my editor, Melissa, and we were kind of, we were actually the number one traffic driver for the Washington Post for a while, so we would get about three million page views a month,

and we were encouraged to keep that up, so we posted as much as we could. To keep up with all this from her desk in DC, she followed a bunch of social media accounts and blogs. The Arab Spring, you might remember, was one of the first big social movements to use these online tools to organize. Rightly or wrongly, it was called the Facebook Revolution. One of the blogs Liz followed was written by a 35-year-old Syrian-American woman named Amina Aref, who had recently moved back to Damascus from the U.S. Her blog was called A Gay Girl in Damascus from the US. Her blog was called A Gay Girl in Damascus. She writes about her complex identity of being an out lesbian in conservative Syria, having

grown up in the US. And on the blog, she writes poetry, she writes history, she writes what are basically like foreign policy op-eds. She's openly critical of the Bashar al-Assad regime at a time when the regime was arresting, torturing, and murdering critics and activists. In one post, titled, Irony, there's a photo she's taken of a billboard. On it, Assad's smiling face and the head-scratcher of a tagline, Syria believes in you. Below the photo, Amina writes, sure, in all caps and multiple exclamation points. She's provocative. She sometimes writes more sexy poetry, I would say.

I forgot about this, but I went back to it. And there was one piece called Testimony of Jasmine. And she writes, my sex to your sex, grinding in time with sounds of the city stretched out below. And it goes on and on. Legally, I can't let her read you the rest of this poem. FCC rules. So, a young, pretty Syrian-American lesbian taunting the brutal Assad regime.

It's not much surprise when the secret police show up at her house one day. On April 26th, Amina publishes a post titled, My Father the Hero. She describes a harrowing scene. It was the middle of the night, and these two young, muscly guys in leather jackets rang the doorbell of her family's home. They've come for Amina. They know about her blog, know that she's a lesbian.

They threaten to rape her. But Amina's father argues with them, chides them. He knows them, knows their families. He says to them, quote, Do you know what is our family name? You do? Then you know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina. You know who it was who liberated Al-Quds. You know too maybe that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners. He tells them to leave, and they do. Amina's post goes viral.

Back in DC, Liz decides to write about it. So the second I read her post, my father, my hero, I immediately reach out to her for an interview. I mean we were interviewing lots of activists but she's like the dream interview because she's so interesting. Amina emails her back and the next day Liz publishes a post. Syria blogger says she faced arrest but remains defiant. In the article, Amina tells Liz, quote, if we want to live in a free country, we need to start acting as though we live in a free country.

Six weeks later, Liz goes into the office. I am checking the blogs and social media and I see that on Gay Girl in Damascus there's a post not by Amina and it says, Dear friends of Amina, I'm Amina's cousin and I have the following information to share. Earlier today at approximately 6 p.m. Damascus time, Amina was walking the area of this bus station. The Post says Amina was abducted by three government agents. Then they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Bashar al-Assad.

The men are presumed to be members of the security services. Amina's present location is unknown. Liz was shocked and upset by this news. This was happening a lot at this point that activists were getting kind of hauled off the streets. But this was a person that I felt intimately connected to. Like, I knew her whole story at this point. Like, I'd read her whole blog. Yeah. And so it was really scary.

And obviously, as a gay woman and a woman speaking out against the regime, like you're thinking that this person's dead. Homosexuality was and still is illegal in Syria. Liz writes a post about Amina's disappearance. So does the Washington Post, Syria correspondent, and the New York Times and the Guardian and others. Liz calls the State Department. They tell her they're looking into it. A Twitter campaign gets going,

hashtag free Amina and multiple Facebook groups, which get over 10,000 followers overnight. It's a big deal. And then... Oh, so all of a sudden doubts start popping up about Amina. It really all started very quickly, like on the same day that she wrote that she was kidnapped or detained by security forces or that the cousin writes that. Andy Carvin, who's NPR's Twitter senior strategist and had this huge following, basically asks, has anyone met Amina? Has anyone actually met Amina in person,

not just on the internet? It's a good question. In fact, when Liz emailed Amina asking for an interview, Amina had responded that for her own safety, she couldn't talk on the phone. So Liz had sent her questions by email. Do you remember the oh fuck moment that you had when you realized people were doubting her identity?

Yes, I remember Andy asking that question on Twitter and I remember thinking, wow, if this person isn't real, I have interviewed them saying that she is and given them a platform and caused this blog to probably increase in popularity. And yeah, that's a really scary moment as a super young journalist. I don't know if you remember this New Yorker cartoon from 1993 where it says on the internet,

no one knows you're a dog and it has this dog at the computer. So obviously people were thinking about this all the way back to the 90s, but I know I wasn't. Like I, it's not that I was trusting everything I read online, but I think I just didn't expect this gay Syrian woman activist who was blogging like a lot of other Syrian activists. They were all totally legitimate to be someone so different. And yeah, I mean, as the story progressed, it got creepier and creepier. The Wall Street Journal reported that the photo of Amina on a gay girl in Damascus was

actually a photo of a woman named Jelena Lecic, who is of Croatian descent and was living in London at the time. So Liz and her editor, Melissa Bell, start trying to figure out who Amina actually is. They look up the IP address of the gay girl blog. It leads back to Scotland, to the University of Edinburgh, and they get a mailing address for Amina from one of her online friends. It's a house in Georgia, the state not the country, owned by an American couple who are studying in Scotland. They narrow in on the wife, a woman named Britta. Britta was studying Syrian economic development.

She had written about Syria for a Quaker group that she was the head of. And she had even posted photos of her visiting Syria with her husband. And she had posted this photo on the photo website, PICASA, showing a billboard of a smiling Syrian president Bashar al-Assad with the slogan, Syria believes in you. Syria believes in you. It's the same photo from Amina's blog post titled, irony. I mean, it's not a photo that exists like thousands of times on the internet.

It is only in these two places. And we're like, oh my god, this is the exact same photo. That's a smoking gun. Like, you never get that clear of an answer. Totally. Totally. So they got to call Britta. But they you never get that clear of an answer. Totally. Totally. So they gotta call Britta. But they can't find Britta's phone number. But they do find Britta's mom's phone number.

They call her up. We explain the whole situation to her. I remember thinking, this is so bizarre. Like, I'm sorry, but I think that your daughter is this person posting on this blog, pretending to be a lesbian woman in Syria. And to her credit, she was not like, -"Please leave me alone." She basically said, -"Wow, this is so interesting."

And I don't think it's Britta, I think it's Tom. TAMARA NOORAN-WILKINSON Tom. Britta's husband. Tom McMaster. And she was like, he's so involved emotionally with Syria. He, you know, his interest has evolved from there. And she even said, Britta complains about him spending his whole day on the computer. Aha! One of those husbands.

What they learned about Tom. He's 40 years old, a Middle East fanatic, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He's getting his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh. There's more. We find that Tom's cat is named Meowmar J. Kaddafi, which is basically the Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi's name. It's just getting ridiculous at this point, to be honest. And then we find one more thing, and that is we find that Amina gave a five-star review to Tom's ESL school that he has in Atlanta. I know, I know. And this is when it starts to just feel like,

oh my god, this guy is absurd. So as Amina A, Amina writes, great school, great teachers, this is probably the best value for anyone who wants to learn English in Atlanta. Oh, God. Okay, one last important detail about Tom's extracurricular activities. So Amina is super active online, and part of that is flirting with women.

She's not just writing lesbian erotica. She's on dating sites. She's had an online girlfriend in Canada for the last six months The girlfriend started one of the Facebook campaigns to free Amina and Amina She's also flirting and writing on the blog of This person Paula Brooks who has a very popular Website about being lesbian called Les get real nice

Les get real calm for those of you who don't remember the sapphic offerings of the internet in the year 2011, was a website where a variety of writers blogged about lesbianism and the lesbian news of the day. Amina had written a bunch on LesGetReal.com, and the founder, Paula Brooks, had encouraged her to start a gay girl in Damascus that winter. And Paula told Liz they'd had a little online fling.

Paula and Amina spoke all the time online and even were engaging in like a relationship that it wasn't clear how flirty it was, sexual it was. I think it seems like it was definitely romantic slash sexual. And this is over email or they're like? This is all online, like email and blog posts and you know, corresponding about the blog posts. Liz explained to Paula what was going on with Amina. Paula was outraged that this person was pretending to be a lesbian. This man was pretending to be a lesbian.

Lesgetreal.com posted an apology to readers for publishing 19 articles Amina had supposedly written. Time to confront Tom. Liz reaches him on the phone. He's on vacation with his wife in Istanbul. And I remember they're laughing a lot. Liz reaches him on the phone. He's on vacation with his wife in Istanbul. And I remember they're laughing a lot. Like, they basically, they laugh off the idea that either of one of them could be Amina. And Tom is kind of like sarcastically laughing at me.

And he's saying, he says something like, look, if I'm the genius who pulled this off, like, I would just say, yes, it's me, and I would write a book. And I said, genius. Genius. Yeah. And then I went through all the connections we had, which at this point were like 15 different connections.

And I think we called him a second day in the row, and then he started to get aggressive with us. And he said, like, thanks a lot for tracking us down and hung up on me. Other reporters had figured it out too. Liz and Melissa decide to run with the story. That a gay girl in Damascus was actually Tom, a white dude living in Scotland. But before they can publish, Tom beats them to it. He confesses in a post

on a gay girl. And the title of the blog is changed from a gay girl in Damascus to, let me find it, a hoax that got way out of hand. I never meant to hurt anyone. Hmm. It's less picky than a gay girl in Damascus. Yeah. Well, actually, he retitles it a hoax. Oh, okay. And then there's that subtitle.

So Tom writes the quintessential non-apology apology. Says that while the narrative voice might have been fictional, he was describing a very real situation on the ground in Damascus, and he doesn't think he harmed anyone. Maybe you saw the whole thing coming, internet scams being what they are these days. Maybe you're thinking, hey, this whole story is a scam. I can't believe I paid no dollars for this. But calm down a second. There's more.

Liz and her editor, Melissa, published their story on Sunday, six days after Amina was supposedly abducted. Their headline is, A Gay Girl in Damascus Comes Clean. After they post their article, Liz and Melissa are talking with a more senior editor. Everyone's pretty happy with the story. But there's something still nagging at Liz, a detail she can't get out of her head. It has to do with that other lesbian she interviewed, Paula Brooks from let'sgetreal.com.

She says to her editors, So I interviewed Paula, but I actually didn't interview Paula because she's deaf, and I talked to her father because she's deaf, and he said she can't speak on the phone, and her father like weirdly knew a lot about the story, and basically now I'm doubting that everyone is real. Do you guys think that Paula Brooks is also not real? Liz had emailed with Paula Brooks.

Paula had sent Liz a photo of her driver's license as proof of identity. But Liz had only ever spoken with Paula's dad. It's the exact same thing as with Amina. Like I can't talk on the phone so I'll have to do it in this alternate way. And, but in this case, I'm deaf. And, you know, I didn't want to doubt Paula being deaf, but the dad was so weird. And now I'm basically like, is every single person

on the internet actually just a white dude pretending to be someone else? So instead of celebrating a great scoop, outing Tom as Amina, Liz dove straight into investigating Paula Brooks. Oh, so I call back the dad and I basically say, I know you're Paula Brooks. Oh, wow. You just went straight for it.

I think we just went straight for it. Maybe we said, are you Paula Brooks? And he basically just said, yes. Oh, what? My name is Bill Graber. Yep. He said, I'm Bill Graber. Then I said, like, who are you?

Bill Graber. And it turned out he was like a retired construction worker who lived in Ohio. Bill told Liz he'd had some lesbian friends who were mistreated and he wanted to help. He also wanted a platform where he could write in support of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The real Paula Brooks, Bill explained, was his partner, who didn't know he'd been using her identity online to pose as a lesbian. Basically, Bill said that by running Les Get Real, he was surfacing issues for the lesbian community and helping in that way.

And having a flirtation with Amina. Yes, I mean, I would have loved to get those chats between Amina and Paula, AKA Tom and Bill, two white men flirting with themselves, each thinking the other one is a lesbian. But I never got those chats, so we'll have to let our imaginations run wild on that one. But he... Yeah.

And Bill, you know what's funny? I still remember this. I was like, Bill, how does it feel to know that you were flirting with another dude thinking it was a lesbian? And he was definitely, like, put off by that. And he said this thing to me. He was just like, it was a major sock puppet hoax, crash into another major sock puppet hoax. For the uninitiated, a sock puppet hoax

is when someone uses a false identity online. The day after they published their story about Tom being a meaner, Liz and Melissa published another one with the headline, Paula Brooks, editor of Les Get Real, also a man. I Real, Also a Man. I mean, to the point. At this point, you can tell by how plugged in everyone is

because we don't even need to explain more than that because everyone knows what's going on and is like glued to their computers. I mean, some people, and Syrian activists in particular, were like really upset by the whole situation, especially about Gay Girl in Damascus because it was taking like needed... Some people and Syrian activists in particular were like really upset by the whole situation, especially about gay girl in Damascus because it was taking like needed, it was like boy who cried wolf situation, which is like who's going to trust Syrian activists posting about this after this situation.

By the time Tom's little lie had rolled all the way downhill, it was a pretty sizable lie with real world consequences. downhill. It was a pretty sizable lie, with real world consequences. The Syrian government used it to suggest that everyone in the West was lying about the Assad regime's murderous tactics against activists and bloggers. They used it to suggest that gay people in Syria were really just agents of the West. In retrospect, Amina's writing, it's so bad. Like when her father supposedly says to the secret police, you know where we stood when Mohammed, peace be upon him, went to Medina. It's like the 1950s Hollywood version of how a Syrian man would talk. But what was good about Amina's writing, Tom's writing, is that it played

for emotion. It confirmed what we were all feeling here in the West, what excited us about the Arab Spring. Democracy was ascendant, the bad guys were going down, the lesbians were taking over, or whatever. Amina was the lie we all wanted. I reached out to Tom, Bill, and Britta for this story. Tom and Bill definitely did not want to talk to me. Britta didn't respond. But the day after he was outed, Tom did some press. He said he had wanted to wind Amina down for a while, and he was going on vacation.

So having her abducted was kind of his out-of-office message. Yeah, man, the internet, huh? The internet. I mean, it's, oh, god, I know. And it was so fun for just a short period of time where everyone was just like, is this thing on? Can I tell you about what I ate? A lot's changed since then.

The Washington Post, where Liz worked, is now owned by Jeff Bezos. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. Instagram is owned by Facebook. Facebook has done away with fact-checking. And the president has his own social media platform, called Truth Social, where he regularly posts falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Kind of makes you long for the good old days, when the internet wasn't dominated by the

most powerful, and people still cared what was true and what wasn't. The truth. So retro. It's a whole new world now. Except over here on the dusty old radio, where I still can't say shit or piss or fuck or cunt or cocksucker or motherfucker or tit. Not even tits, because of course, think of the chaos that would ensue if I did.

["The Furies"] Dana Chibis is a reporter on our program. Liz Flock is still a reporter, but now she spent years reporting her stories. Her latest book, The Furies, which she traveled to Syria multiple times for, is out in paperback. Coming up, an American dad makes an impassioned argument for more unnecessary lies. Also, Masha Gessen, that's in a minute on the Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This is American Live from Ira Glass.

Today's show, that's a weird thing to lie about. We have stories today of unnecessary lies, outrageous lies that make you wonder why lie about that in the first place. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Bully Pulpit. There's a particular kind of lie that somebody who's been on our show a few times,

Masha Gessen, wrote about a few years ago. And when I read what they wrote, I realized, like, oh, I had not thought about this as a specific way that a person can lie that is, like, different from all the other ways a person can lie. It's a kind of lie that President Trump does a lot. He kicked off his presidency with one of these lies. In the very first minutes, on the very first day of his very first term, you may remember that he insisted that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than they were.

Even their photos clearly showed that he was wrong. But he also lied about the weather because it was rainy and, you know, the cameras panned to all these former presidents. And Trump claimed that when he started to speak, the sun came out and the clouds parted, you know, as though God herself were on his side. And it was an easily checkable story. It was definitely not true. In fact, for anybody who had watched the inauguration,

which was a lot of us, like it was just right there. We had just seen it. And then he emerges from this and says, you know, that that's something entirely different than we saw with our lying eyes. Matthew 16 Let me ask you to read, you write about this very enjoyably. Let me ask you to read this passage. I'm going to hand you a copy. Let's start here and continue up here. We'll skip this a little bit and then we'll keep going. Matthew 16 Okay. Lies conserve a number of functions.

People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt, to escape confrontation or lighten the blow, to make themselves appear better, to get others to do or give something, and even to entertain. However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing.

Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime. People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating. Guests want the hosts to think that they like their fish overcooked. These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they're surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts.

The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it, while denying that he took it. There's no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want when I want to. The power lie conjures a different reality, the demands that you choose between your experience and the bully's demands.

Are you going to insist that you are wet from the rain, or give in and say that the sun is shining. I have to say, since reading that passage in your book a few weeks ago, I feel like it's like you gave a name to something that I had known was there but hadn't put a finger on what it was. Like I hadn't named myself. This is a particular phenomenon, a particular way of lying that Donald Trump does. And since I read that, I feel like I see this kind of power lie or bully lie from Trump

and from his team come up in the news over and over. So for example, Ukraine started the war with Russia. USAID sent $50 million worth of condoms to Hamas. China controls the Panama Canal. Yeah, these are bully lies. And I'm seeing more and more of the sort of impossibility of standing up to it. Because there are now a lot of these people, right? It's not just Trump. The first administration was Trump and his lies and a bunch of psycho fans. Now they're kind of all, particularly Trump and Musk, are just kind of running, one is constantly getting ahead of the other. Federal employees have fortunes in the tens of millions with a salary of $180,000.

That's something that Elon Musk claimed without presenting any evidence at all in an Oval Office press event, where he also suggested that Social Security may be sending out checks to people 150 years old. Also without evidence. Seems to be flatly untrue. Masha says these kind of lies, these bully lies, are different from the kind of lies that we've been used to in American politics for most of our history. Where the two sides, you know, argue back and forth, present evidence, try to convince

each other, or try to convince voters at least. The bully lies different. It doesn't try to convince you. It doesn't present evidence. It just tells you to pick a side. So when the president said that diversity programs caused the plane crash over the Potomac, when he called the president of Ukraine a dictator without elections, he didn't lay out a set of facts to make his case.

He wasn't interested in rebuttal. When he does this kind of thing, Masha writes, he's asserting control of a reality itself and splitting the country into those who agree to live in his reality and those who resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts. I don't know if it's worth complicating this analysis with this example, but I was actually able to think of one instance of the Democrats doing the kind of bully lie that Masha writes about. And it's a big one that we all just lived through. It seemed like it was done more out of desperation than anything else and not

part of a daily pattern of making false claims with no facts behind them. The thing I'm talking about is Joe Biden and his advisors concealing how he had aged in office. I talked to Masha about this. That basically was making everybody in the country choose, either you accept what we're telling you about Biden or you're against us. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I wrote a piece about it at the time saying that it was totally

Trumpian behavior. I did not win any friends with that piece, but that's what it felt like because we could see it. We could see the debate. And then there were all these people around Biden who were saying, don't believe your lying eyes. He is in control. He's running the country. It had that feel of the bully lie. The reason Masha is so aware of what that feels like is that they grew up in Russia, left, came back, then fled when it became impossible for them to keep living there under Vladimir Putin. Masha says the bully lie is significant because it's not a traditional part of American politics, but it is a very standard tactic of authoritarian leaders around the world and in history.

Masha has actually written and reported a ton about this. They wrote a book about Putin and another one about Russia's recent turn to totalitarianism. An authoritarian government, just to remind you, is basically a government run by one person, a strongman leader who holds all the power, which of course is different from our system of checks and balances. Masha wrote about the bully lie in their book about Donald Trump's first term. The book is called Surviving Autocracy.

That's what I asked him to read from a little earlier. In that book, Masha argues that Donald Trump does lots of things that we normally see from authoritarian leaders, not just the bully lies. And I think it's worth talking about it for a little bit here. I found it eye-opening to see it laid out point by point. And I just want to say, if you like the president and you think talking about him this way is just way, way out of line, just stay with me. We talked about that.

I feel very aware that people who like the president may hear you say the word autocrat and just think it's nuts and you're just looking for any alarmist thing you can say to make him look bad. Can I ask you to make your case for a skeptical listener? What are the things that Donald Trump does that usually we see from autocrats and not from kind of just like regular American politicians who might lie and do whatever it is that they do? Like what are the things that he's doing that are more typical for autocrats?

Well, at this point, there's every indication and by every indication, I mean, all the things that he constantly says that he actually thinks that that's how government should work. It should be one person making decisions. Right. You're making me think of him deciding to weigh in and ban congestion pricing in New York City from the White House. Exactly. And saying, I'm the king, going with the king. Right.

Or calling out the governor of Maine for, I guess in his opinion, not following his executive order on disallowing transgender athletes in sports, with the governor responding that the state of Maine has its own laws, and him basically saying, I can't remember the exact quote, but basically saying I'm in charge here and we'll see who wins. That is actually almost the definition of an autocrat acting like you have ultimate and unchecked power. And there are other specific things, Masha says, that Donald Trump has done in the

last few weeks that are standard moves for an autocrat. Number one, punishing press outlets who don't do what he says. Trump kicked the Associated Press from covering him in the Oval Office on Air Force One and at major events after they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, like he wants. Autocrats go after their enemies. Donald Trump has been going after so many enemies, publicly. Former aides, he fired Justice Department officials

who prosecuted cases against him, and this week even went after the law firm that is giving advice to one of those officials, taking away their security clearances, which make defending that official harder. That is very autocratic, later. And then there's Donald Trump's basic campaign message, make America great again.

A better future that's basically the past is a common trait to all modern autocrats. And then in the 20th century, we also had some futuristic autocrats. The Soviet totalitarianism was probably the most vivid example, but all the autocrats have come to power in the world, like in the last 15 or so years on this wave of resurgent autocrats have come to power in the world, like in the last 15 or so years on this wave

of resurgent autocracies, they're all past-oriented. They're saying like, we had a glorious past and we've got to go back to it. Yeah, it's make whatever country great again. And it's always an imaginary past. When you felt comfortable, when you didn't have these anxieties, when your children were just like you, when men were men and women were women, and everyone spoke the same language as you do. Yeah, yeah.

What do you make of all the things that Trump has been saying lately about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal and Gaza? I think a few things are happening there, and I think they're pretty scary. I think the first time he mentioned Greenland, which was during his first term, it was probably at a moment's inspiration. He probably meant nothing by it. Just like out loud trolling, I'll say a noisy thing, it'll get a headline and who cares? Exactly, which is very much his-

What he does all the time. Yeah, one thing about Trump though, is that he's very sensitive to being heard. Greenland was heard and because Greenland was heard, it became a kind of a day fix. And so now in his second term, he's bringing up Greenland again. I think it's a whole other story. It's no longer an absurd trolling kind of meme

thing is beginning to approach policy. And I think that the way that he is also throwing around the Panama Canal and the Gulf of America, of course he is doing this because totalitarian leaders have to promise expansion. That's like- Why? It's like, it's an axiom. What are you saying? No, like they have a rule book that they have to follow?

Absolutely. I'm actually half serious. Like that- You are serious. Like there are certain things that they do. Like for example, they pick some group in society to be the, like these are the people who we hate, who are ruining things for the rest of us.

That's one thing they do. Exactly. And then another thing is that they call to some sort of golden age. Yeah, that they're going to recreate in the future. And then you're saying another one is just, we're gonna expand. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna take over other lands.

And what it is, I think, is it's a promise of greatness. It's a trade-off. Generally speaking, autocratic regimes don't, in the long run, prove economically beneficial to the population. And, right, they're usually economically beneficial to the actual autocrat and his cohort and You will not necessarily be personally better off so What is he going to actually give them what he's going to give them is a sense of belonging to something greater And this something greater is a country that's expanding its borders. Yeah. Yeah the greatest country in the world that is expanding his borders

Okay, so obviously nobody knows what's coming next, but if you see Trump as a kind of autocratic ruler and you worry about him taking more power in that way, what are the things you'd be looking for next? Like what are the markers of it going further? Well, the problem is that, you know, we're always looking for that one thing or those three things. And now once we check them off, we're living in autocracy.

The problem is it's actually always a gradual process. And it's happening much faster here than it's happened in any country that I'm familiar with. Really? Yes. I mean, it took Putin quite a long time to establish actual authoritarian rule and then another number of years to turn that regime into a totalitarian one. The way that Trump is taking a sledgehammer to government is certainly unprecedented in my memory. But I think that things that we have to look for, you know, some of them you can sort of measure like

when they start consistently ignoring court decisions that are not favorable to them. Yeah. So far, they've ignored some, it seems like, but it doesn't look like it's consistent. But at some point, I would expect them or let's say I will fear that they will say these court decisions that go against the government are illegitimate. So that will be a huge marker. But then there are softer things like shifting consensus.

And I think it's already happening. That's one way of understanding what people have also been calling the obeying in advance that we have seen sort of all over the place. The most vivid example of it is by far not the only one, right, but it's Mark Zuckerberg's little address when he announced that they were not going to have fact checking on Facebook anymore. He kept saying, you know, things have changed.

This is a new moment. We're going to move our operations to Texas because that's the new moment. We're going to move our operations to Texas because that's the new moment we're living in. And all of these things are sort of ways of saying, look, I'm fully accepting that Trump has created a new reality. And I'm going to take all my things and move into that reality with him and live there with him. And anybody who refuses to do that, they're going to be left out in the cold.

Masha Gessen. The book about Donald Trump and his autocratic tendencies is called Surviving Autocracy. These days, they're an opinion columnist at the New York Times. They recently wrote in the Times, life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you, most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening.

It is stultifying. It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe underwater, because you're submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism, and eventually badly, being reflected in bad journalism, and eventually in bad literature and bad movies. Just this week, lawyers nominated for top positions in the Justice Department, including Solicitor General, were asked if the president could ignore or disobey a court order. And they hedged. They did not say that he should obey. Vice President Vance said earlier this month that judges should not be allowed to control what the president does.

["The Last Post," by John Williams playing on piano and piano music.] Act 3, in defense of unnecessary lies. Well, it's been nearly a whole hour talking about far-fetched lies that do not seem to make the world a better place at all. Our tone, I'll admit, has been skeptical, sometimes incredulous. In this act, we turn that around. I present one of our coworkers here at the radio show, Ike Shreesh Kandarasha. Sometimes, in my own life, just for fun, I'll make up something and tell people.

Here's one from years ago. Remember Karl Rove, the guy who helped get George W. Bush elected to be governor and then president? I told my friend Charles that this man, well into his 60s, was really only 36. He just looked old. I guess I like the world where things aren't quite as they appear, and the people running the show are more like children in grown-up suits. And Charles, he went with it.

So hard that years later he came back and told me he told dozens of people before catching the lie. Which, to be honest, made me feel great and enjoy the lie even more. That strangers I never met got to step into this funny little warped reality. But sometimes, these lies of amusement don't work out so well. Like for instance, when my dad came to visit me years ago and was staying over in my small apartment, he noticed a diploma on my desk, ordaining me as a minister. I still remember that very well.

It was a certificate, some kind of certification. My dad. My first impression was you had changed religion from Hinduism to some other unknown cult. It would have been easy to correct this misunderstanding and tell my dad the real story, that my friends had asked me to officiate their wedding and to legally marry them,

I had to get ordained in an online church. It just seemed funnier to go along with the story that I was now a minister in a Christian cult. It came as a surprise to me, for so many generations we have been following this religion. So I was a little disappointed, but things happened. As soon as he came home, he told me, My mom. I thought it was odd because you would have told me about it if you were doing something like this. So it came as a huge surprise to me too. While my dad met my fake conversion story with resigned disappointment and no follow-up questions, my mom just called me.

So when we spoke the next time, I brought it up and I asked you about it, then you started laughing. Then I knew it was just a joke. Then I had to tell dad. I was relieved. I didn't have to think about it anymore. Did you think it was a good joke? Yes. It's an excellent joke. Is that a lie? It's a white lie.

Honestly, this all surprised me that my dad couldn't tell I was joking, mostly because I learned this type of joke from him. What did you say? I've just been doing your joke. The joke you make all the time where you lie about something. I didn't know that. He does that a lot, yes. My dad tells people he came to America by going through a tunnel under the wall.

Other times, it's a boat. When I was a kid, he told me the stretch marks on his shoulders were from a fight he had with a tiger. I told everybody. But my favorite lie he told happened during a math class my dad used to teach at Madison Area Technical College. My good friend Buskus was taking it and I decided to go with him. Before the lesson started, my dad introduced me to the class.

I do remember that I introduced you as a foreign exchange student from Nicaragua. Although you didn't look like a Nicaraguan. Why did you say that? Because we had students from Central American countries. I wanted to make use of that and came up with this idea. Well, I understand why it's plausible, but why did you even tell a lie about where your son was from instead of saying, my son is here? I just wanted to play a practical joke with my students. It is also for Buskus who knows the real story and who started laughing. My dad and my friend Buskus started laughing so hard they were wiping tears from their eyes.

The rest of the class seemed confused why their teacher was misidentifying a new South Asian student as being from Central America. It was very funny, especially for those of us who have to field a lot of those, where are you from originally, types of questions. Anyone carefully observing my dad might notice he has a tell, quick eyebrow rays, and a big grin. I have the same tell, and people close to me know it, but apparently that doesn't make it any less frustrating to live with. Early in our relationship, my now-wife, Emma, told me it was driving her crazy.

She didn't want to look over her shoulder to check for my tell or second-guess everything I was telling her. Like, do you really want to go to an info session on a timeshare in Juarez? Or what do you mean the president says he will raise the black flag of ISIS over the White House? She told me to stop. Neither of us remember the exact lie that drove her over the top, but she remembers the feeling very clearly. I wanted an actual answer about whether it was how you felt, or what you wanted to do, or where we should put the thing, or should we whatever, you know, something kind of day to day.

And the accumulation of getting not real answers that I then had to parse and say, but just what do you ask? I just need you to tell me straight so we can move on from this. I think that was the thing that took me to wanting you to stop. Emma compared it to this thing I did when I was 26 and it just moved into my own apartment

when I used to use my kitchen drawers for non-kitchen items, which is not exactly a lie, but felt like waking up on the set of a surrealist play. It's just confusing. And this was, you know, when we first started dating, or maybe even before, and I was looking for something in your kitchen.

You had maybe like two forks and two spoons, and I was probably looking for one of these forks or something and I opened a drawer, like a logical place to have silverware, and instead found either boxers or DVDs, like Seinfeld box set. And it was funny, but it was also maddening. Emma didn't want to live in wonderland.

It's too crazy, too hard to find the forks. If we were going to make plans together for the rest of our lives, she wanted straight answers. So I stopped lying to her. For years, I packed this part of me away, and the dresser I ended up buying for my underwear. But now we have two kids, and I've brought lying back into our house, especially with our oldest. Just recently, like a day ago, what did you say? You looked at his foot and you were like, you know, I can't, where did you get all these toes?

Why do you have 10 toes? Most people only have six. And now he's four and like wise to you. And he was like, what, what? He's like, you're joking. Leroy gets it. So far, he hasn't asked me to stop yet. Maybe you would like to try this in your own house.

In fact, maybe it's a valuable lesson for your kids. Trains them to determine fact from fiction. Seems useful in our world. Archsriis Kandarajah is one of the producers of our show. By the way, his friend Charles, who Ike lied to about Karl Rove, Charles wrote amazingly that he never thought that that was true. He lied to Ike about believing it, and also about telling others just to amuse himself. themselves. What program was produced today by Diane Wu? The people who put together today's show include Jindayi Bonds, Michael Kamatay, Angela Gervasi, Catherine Ray Mondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rumory, Lily Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Sotala, and Julie Whitaker.

Our managing editors Sara Abdurrahman, our senior editors David Kastenbaum, our executive editor is Emanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Andy Carvin, Anna Starceski, Anna Cajada, Natasha Nelson, Ira Kramer, Eric Garcia, and Matt Miller. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. I know you. You're living your life, doing stuff, you need something to listen to. What are you going to listen to? Go to our website. You can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. That is still happening. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public radio exchange.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tory Malatya. Have you heard he is doing a one-man show based on the children's book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar? It opens this way. Is this thing on? Can I tell you about what I ate? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.