That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About | This American Life | Episode 855

Key Takeaway

Replace reflexive praise with truthful appreciation. When someone takes a risk—an interview, a presentation, or a hard conversation—do not say they “did great” if that is not accurate. Instead, name what is undeniably true: “Thank you for being open,” “I appreciate the effort,” or “That took courage.” This preserves kindness without asking either person to pretend, and it creates a clearer foundation for trust.

Episode Overview

This episode examines lies that seem unnecessary, from everyday social fictions to elaborate online hoaxes and political falsehoods. Casey, an autistic advocate of “radical honesty with tact,” offers practical alternatives to white lies; reporter Liz Flock recounts exposing two intertwined online identities; Masha Gessen describes the “power lie” as an authoritarian tactic; and producer Ike Sriskandarajah considers when playful family deception becomes exhausting.

Full Transcript

Transcript of That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About | This American Life | Episode 855 from This American Life. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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's autistic and she says it's puzzling neurotypical people and how much they lie she's not alone Yeah in our in our support groups um that issue comes up a lot for some people it's very puzzling and they just don't understand the concept um um and especially because so often lies are just completely transparent she gave me this example when you worked in HR they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his Administrative Assistant a naked picture of it was on his work computer still he denied it kept lying it's it's just baffling to me it's just I I it's inexplicable I don't understand the continuing in the lie I 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 um 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 n people nor typical people like they say it knowing it isn't literally true but they don't don't think of it as a lie cuz I don't expect others to believe it for example here are 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 that's very interesting see you later they continue I've decided to start translating a lot of ENT chatter from its literal meaning into a simple form of hello I want you to see me as friend so I am making friendly noises do you yes do you relate I I do you know the the um 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 yeah um for 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 heavy set from a heavy set family that's pretty normal to me you know I'm not um offended by or afraid of the word fat um 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 I understood that they were um trying to be kind MH but I couldn't fathom how they thought that would actually be believed or or helpful I mean it's a demonstrable fact I have a mirror I know what I look like um 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 would be saying so great to see you and I mean a word of it she's okay with that she ignores it moves on but she tries to keep things more strictly truthful so you never lie I want Say Never um 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 um one is Justified to lie to protect others from individuals who mean to do them harm so for example um there was someone in my life who was in a domestic violence situation and um I helped her to get to a safe place and when her husband called I said I have no idea where she is M 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 so none of their business otherwise she almost always picks honesty when kids picked on her 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 H 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 um 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 H I have to say that is that is really that's really that's really good thank you it's honest and it acknowledges them I wasn't I wasn't expecting you to really like say something so useful I'll do you the favor 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 100% I I really don't think except in extreme circumstances that Anne Frank is hidden in my attic situation um I don't think that lying is necessary I think if we have honest tactful interaction we're always going to be the better for it yeah all right um 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 uh and I really appreciate you doing that no I I can genuinely say that um that 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 I hope it will be useful what day our program lies that really just leave you scratching your head sometimes seriously we have some fun stories for you from WB E Chicago this is American life I'm IR glass stay with us it's his American Life Act One The Real L Word Okay so uh to kick things off today we are going to revisit some recent historical events I think that's all I'm going to say for now Dana chibas tell us what happened Liz flock was just starting out as a reporter in 2011 living in DC 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 blog post 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 um every day for months on end the job was a combination of actual reporting and aggregation basically reading other repor 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 um I was really scared Every Day writing about them scared of what um just at the respon 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're actually the number one traffic driver for the Washington Post for really for a while so we get about 3 million page views a month and we were encouraged to keep that up so oh my God 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 ARA who had recently moved back to 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 heads 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 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 surprised 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 kuds 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 6 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 6:00 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 doia Logan with a window sticker of Bashar al-assad um 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 #f free Amina and multiple Facebook groups which get over 10,000 followers overnight it's a big deal and then so all the sudden doubts start popping up about Amina um 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 lizard sent her questions by email do you remember the O [ __ ] 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 uh 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 90 s 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 that 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 y Elena leuch 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 were studying in Scotland they narrow in on the wife a woman named brda BR 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 Picassa showing a billboard of a smiling Syrian president Bashar al- Assad with the slogan 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 brida but they can't find Bri's phone number but they do find br's Mom's phone number they call her up we explained 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 BR I think it's Tom Tom br'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 BR 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 mear J Kadafi which is basically the Libyan leader muar Gaddafi's name um it's just getting like 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 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 6 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 Paul Brooks who has a very popular website about being lesbian called Les get real nice lesre docomo 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 lesg real.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 SL sexual it was I think it seems like it was definitely romantic sexual and this is over email or they're like this is all online like email um 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 yeah this man was pretending to be a lesbian lesg They're laughing a lot like they basically they laugh off the idea that either of one of them could be Amina H 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 the genius genius yeah and then I went through all of 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 um let me find it a hoax that got way out of hand I never meant to hurt anyone H it's less picky than a gay girl in Damascus yeah well actually he retitled 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 6 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 lesg real.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 right the dad was so weird right 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 AA Liz do straight into investigating Paula Brooks 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 I maybe we said are you Paula Brooks and he basically just said yes my name was 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 form where he could write in support of repealing don't ask don't tell the real PA 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 lesg get reel 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 love 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 um 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 to 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 Mina Liz and Melissa published another one with the headline Paula Brooks editor of Les get real also a man I mean to the point that's really at this point you can tell by how plugged in everyone is because we don't even need to explain more than that cuz everyone knows what's going 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 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 the 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 rating it's so bad like when her father supposedly says to the secret police you know where we stood when Muhammad 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 brda for this story Tom and Bill definitely did not want to talk to me BR 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 like 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 basos Twitter is owned by Elon Musk Instagram is owned by Facebook Facebook has done away with factchecking 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 [ __ ] or piss or [ __ ] or tits not even tits because of course think of the chaos that would ensue if I did Danny chivis 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 he 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 from Chicago public radio when our program continues This American Life from Mya glass Today's show that's a weird thing to lie about there's 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's somebody who's been on our show a few times Masha gesson 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 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 ter you may remember uh 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 camera 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 itself God herself were on his side um 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 and says you know that that that's something entirely different than we saw where with our Lying Eyes let me ask you to read um you you write about this very enjoyably let me ask you to read this P 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 okay lies can serve 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 host 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 trump in lie is different it is the power lie or the 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 likee conjures a different reality the demands that you choose between your experience and the bully demands are you going to insist that you're 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 to myself oh 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 uh come up in the news over and over so for examp um Ukraine started the war with Russia right us Aid sent $50 million worth of condoms to Hamas China controls the Panama Canal yeah these are bully lies and I'm seeing you know 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 and the first Administration was Trump and his lies and a bunch of psychop fants mhm now they're kind of all you know particularly Trump and musk uh are just kind of running uh one is constantly getting ahead of the other um you know federal employees uh 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 over 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 MAA 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 pomac 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 over 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 um 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 b big one that we all just live through that 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 advisers concealing how he had aged in office I talked to Masha about this like 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 I wrote a piece about it at the time saying that that it was totally trumpan Behavior Uh 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 um 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 it had that feel of the bully lie the reason Masha is so aware of what that feels like they said 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 Li 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 M has actually written and reported a ton about this there were a book about Putin and another one about Russia's recent turn to totalitarianism an authoritarian uh 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 um talking about it for a little bit here I found it eye openening 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 what are the things that he's doing that are more typical for autocrats well at this point there is 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 uh making decisions right you're making me think of him deciding to weigh in on and ban um congestion pricing in New York City from the White House exactly and saying I'm the king going with the King right yeah uh or um calling out the governor of Maine for uh I guess in his opinion not following his executive order on uh 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 AIDS 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 leader and then there's Donald Trump's basic campaign message make America great again a better F should have basically the past is is a common trait to all modern autocrats I mean in the 20th century we also had some futuristic autocrats uh the Soviet totalitarianism was probably the the most Vivid example but all all the a 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 uh 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 um I think the first time he mentioned Greenland was 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 what he does all the time yeah um one thing about Trump though uh is that he's very sensitive to being heard Greenland Was Heard and because Greenland was heard it became a kind of a defix 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 yeah um and I think that the way that he is also throwing around the Panama Canal and and the Gulf of America um of course he's doing this because totalitarian leaders have to promise expansion that's like why um it's it's like it's an axom uh what are you saying no what do you like they have a rule book that they have to follow absolutely um I'm actually I'm actually half serious like that uh there just so you are serious like 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 were ruin 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 going to expand yeah yeah we're going to take over other lands um and what it is I think is it's it's a promise of greatness um it's a trade-off generally speaking autocratic regimes don't in the long run prove economically beneficial uh and to the populations to the population uh 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 the something greater is a country that's expanding its borders yeah yeah the greatest country in in the world that is expanding its 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 an autocracy uh the problem is that it's actually always a gradual process uh and it's happening much faster here than it's happened in any country that I'm familiar with really uh yes I mean it took Putin quite a long time uh to establish actual authoritarian Rule and then another number of years to turn that regime into a totalitarian one um the way that Trump is taking a sledgehammer to government is certainly unprecedented In My Memory right um but I think that things that we have to look for you know some of them you can you can sort of measure like when they start consistently ignoring Court decisions that are not favorable to them yeah uh 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 um these Court decisions that go against the government are illegitimate so that will be a huge marker but then there there are softer things like shifting consensus and it's I think it's already happening like that's one way of understanding uh what people have also been calling oby 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 the only one right but Mark Zuckerberg's little address when he decl he announced that they were not going to have factchecking 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 living in um and all of these things are sort of ways of saying look I'm fully accepting the 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 yeah and anybody who refuses to do that they're going to be left out in the cold Masha gesson the book about Donald Trump and his AO rtic 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 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 the judges should not be allowed to control what the president does fact three 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 co-workers here at the radio show ik Kaja sometimes in my own life just for fun I'll make up something and tell people here's one from years ago you remember Carl 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 have changed religion from Hinduism to some other unknown cult it would have been easy to correct this misunder standing 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 little disappointed but things happen 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 I 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 laugh laughing then I knew it was just a joke then I had to tell Dad I was relieved I didn't know to think about 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 every 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 Buscus was taking it and I decided to go with him and 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 Buscus who knows the real story and who started laughing my dad and my friend Buscus 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 raise 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 time share in Warz 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 wait but just what do you act 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 in 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're like huh 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 why is to you and he was like what what it'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 TR them to determine fact from fiction it seems useful in our world ik Kaja is one of the producers of our show by the way his friend Charles who Ike lied to about Carl Rove Charles WR 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 I could the page in time iar just close close close my eyes but I couldn't find a way so I'll settle for one day to believe in you tell me tell me tell me lies tell me swe little Li well program was produced today by Diane woo the people who put together today's show include Jenai bonds Michael kame Angela jasi kathern Rondo Stone Nelson Nadia Raymond Ryan Ry Lily Sullivan Francis Swanson Christopher Swala and Julie Whitaker our managing editors SAR abduraman our senior editor is David Kasten Bal our executive editor is Emanuel Barry special thanks today to Andy Carvin Anna stesy Anna kaha Natasha Nelson Ira Kramer Eric Garcia and Matt Miller our website this American life.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 thank as always to our program's co-founder Mr T Mala have you heard he is doing a one-man show based on the children's book The Very Hungry cater pillar it opens this way is this thing on can I tell you about what I ate I'm Maric glass back next week with more stories of This American Life lies tell meet little lies me oh no you can't disguise you can't disgu you can't disguise tell me lies tell me