Joe McCarthy Would Appreciate JD Vance's Big Lie—So Would Joseph Goebbels

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” —from Profile of Hitler created by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US intelligence service during WWII.

Imagine if this piece started with this headline: Vance Urged Routh to Purchase AK-47 Used in Trump Assassination Attempt.

If I were a big-time pundit, that libelous headline would make news. But I’m not a big-time pundit and the headline is untrue, but that’s OK according to the logic J.D. Vance has used to justify his lies about the Haitian citizens of Springfield, Ohio. I would be justified in spreading falsehoods, according to Vance, as long as they served a higher calling. In my case, banning assault rifles.

Vance has admitted he is spreading lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats. But he feels righteous in doing so. Here’s how he put it to Dana Bash on CNN:

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Vance, however, ignores how he has directly added to the suffering of the people of Springfield, who have faced a series of bomb threats due to his repeated fabrications. That’s apparently justifiable collateral damage in service to a loftier goal, and fellow Republicans officials have been more than willing to follow along. They keep repeating the big lie that Haitian immigrants are eating American pets, claiming it raises the profile of the immigration issue. That, they believe, is a solid justification for spreading the lie.

Creating a Vance-like “Story” About Vance

Let’s concoct a Vance-like lie, I mean “story,” in the name of banning AK-47s. The “story” is about how Vance met Ryan Wesley Routh and encouraged him to purchase his weapon. To give this lie an air of truth we build upon what Vance said after the recent Georgia school shooting by a 14-year-old using a AR-15-style rifle: “Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them.” Which is a lie. That isn’t Harris’s position.

To make the story more potent we add two embellishments. First, we put into Vance’s mouth something he might have said, though we have no record of him saying it: “The Constitution gives you the right to own an AK-47, and we will not let the Democrats take that right away from you.”

Secondly, we mix in a bit of “some claim” hearsay, the kind Trump/Vance repeatedly use: “Some claim that when Vance defended the purchase of AK-47s, Routh was in the audience.”

So, one real statement from Vance plus two we made up equals a more powerful “story”—one lie perhaps big enough to take off like a “cat meme.” All in the service of our desire to end gun violence in the United States.

Most of us were brought up to know such fiddling with the truth is utterly immoral. But using Vance’s amoral logic, our made-up “story” of Vance and Routh is justified because we want to protect the American people from gun violence.

Vance, Trump, and McCarthyism

Vance’s shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics that harkens back to Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting crusade. During the 1950s, lies about Communist Party affiliations were used to destroy the livelihoods of political opponents and enhance the political power of the liars.

But take heart, maybe the tide is turning. Bill Maher recently said, “It’s over for Trump. I just think he’s going to lose.” Maher too sees a Trumpian parallel to McCarthy, whose public support eventually collapsed after it became clear his claims about Communist infiltration were lies. But what Maher failed to mention was that McCarthy went down only after he attacked the Army. At that point, the most popular person in America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, turned on him, as did most of the elite political establishment, including McCarthy’s fellow Republicans.

Today, however, the Republican elites are still sucking up to Trump, which means more Trump/Vance lies will be disgracefully repeated by their Republican sycophants, large and small.

Fortunately, we’re not yet near the dark days of McCarthyism and much further from Nazi Germany. At least until this November. In the meantime, you’ve got to wonder if Trump, Vance, and the Republican elite have memorized the OSS profile of Hitler, or if they conjured it up again on their own.