Big Lie Research Articles

The web of Big Lies: state-sponsored disinformation in Iran

ABSTRACT The 2022 ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protests in Iran have led to the escalation of state-sponsored online disinformation campaigns. This paper aims to examine how, amidst a growing legitimacy crisis, the Iranian regime has employed a ‘Big Lie’ to shatter hopes for change by discrediting influential dissidents and hindering the formation of an effective opposition movement. Three target groups have borne the brunt of this strategy: celebrities, political dissidents inside the country, and prominent opponents in the diaspora. By reviewing state-owned media content and tweets, this paper reveals a consistent pattern of character assassination against dissidents. The ruling regime’s ultimate goal is to foster a sense of public hopelessness for an alternative to the Islamic Republic. By conceptualizing the Big Lie online, the study engages with the mechanism of control in modern despotism in the age of the internet and social media.

Big Lies, Drag Shows, and Legal Fictions

Today, the United States faces a relentless offensive of lies and falsehoods, as we grapple with the fallout from election denialism and conservative forces work tirelessly to advance anti-LGBTQ laws that directly challenge the validity of LGBTQ identities. Although it may be appealing to dismiss these shocking lies and falsehoods as legal fictions, they are nothing of the sort. They are not legal fictions in the traditional sense because they are not offered as patently false statements. More importantly, such characterization disregards the uniquely constitutive power of the law. This article builds on my earlier observations regarding a similar misuse of the term “legal fiction” in the context of chattel slavery and the doctrine of discovery. By revisiting the controversy in a contemporary frame, it offers an opportunity to study, in real-time, the attempted construction of legal regimes that rest on errors, lies, and the relentless demonization of the Other. It concludes that just as there was nothing fictive about repressive legal systems that spanned centuries and brutalized millions, there is nothing fictive about our current democratic crisis. To the contrary, it is imperative that we remain clear-eyed about the nature and power of the falsehoods that undergird both the Big Lie and the new anti-LGBTQ laws in order to develop effective strategies to refute them. We dismiss them as legal fictions at our peril.

Stopping the Steal and Selling the Big Lie: An Analysis of Tweets and Certification Votes Among House Republicans in the Wake of the 2020 Presidential Election

As our nation struggles to make sense of the pathologies of conspiracy thinking and hyper-polarization in our body politics, this study investigates why some members of the House GOP caucus used Twitter to promote conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election. Our study first examines the predictors of conspiracy theory tweeting, and second, whether this messaging was related to voting for or against the certification of presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania on January 6th. Our results suggest President Trump’s election performance in 2020, conspiratorial tweeting, and freshman status of House members were the driving factors of voting behavior on January 6th.

Who Buys the “Big Lie”? White Racial Grievance and Confidence in the Fairness of American Elections

AbstractElection skepticism has become a persistent feature of American politics since the Obama era. Such beliefs are most prevalent among White Americans and especially Republicans, and they are resistant to change. Conspiracy theory studies have shown that such beliefs are linked to feelings of ingroup victimization, at times associated with election loss. We draw on theories of White ingroup processes to argue that White grievance—the belief that Whites are victims of discrimination—is a key correlate of election skepticism among White Americans. White grievance was employed in the Obama era, but it was weaponized by Trump in the 2020 election. Our results based on four national datasets (2012–2020 ANES, 2021 YouGov) show that controlling for negative outgroup attitudes and other factors, White grievance is a significant predictor of election skepticism in all four studies. In 2020, the effect is stronger among White Republicans and independents. We also show that White identity/consciousness has the opposite effect, generally boosting trust in elections. Furthermore, a lagged dependent variable model using the 2016–2020 ANES panel shows that White grievance remains significant even after an LDV is included in the model.

The Big Lie: discursive risk analysis and wildland firefighter safety in the Western United States

While increased length and intensity of wildfire seasons in many places have led to more concern about wildland firefighter safety, we believe ethnography has been underutilized as a method within this domain. In response, we begin building a shared idiom for ethnographic engagement with wildland firefighter safety and similar occupations. We draw on ethnographic approaches to late industrialism to develop a method called discursive risk analysis (DRA) as an initial stage in a broader collaborative and generative research practice. By collaborative, we mean cooperation among stakeholder, disciplinary, professional, and other groups. We use DRA to analyse ethnographic data and documentary sources relevant to discussions of ‘the Big Lie’ among firefighters and agency leadership. The Big Lie is a term that both firefighters and agency leaders used to suggest that wildland firefighters are being harmed by agency discourse that says firefighters will be kept safe despite the unavoidable danger of the job. It is important to the Big Lie discussion that this harm is conceptualized by firefighters as discursively driven, necessitating a research method attentive to discourse. Discursive Risk Analysis of the Big Lie discussion suggests two discursive gaps that may result in two discursive risks. The first gap, found in agency discourse, is that ‘everyone knows the job is dangerous’ but ‘zero fatalities is a reasonable goal.’ This gap is associated with a discursive risk, a possible decrease in trust among wildland firefighters in agency leadership. The second gap, observed in firefighter discourse, is that ‘the job is dangerous’ but ‘no one will get hurt today.’ This gap is associated with another discursive risk, the possibility of decreased situational awareness. Finally, we clarify each of these gaps and risks through two anthropological concepts (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and the public secret) that can bring new perspectives to discussions about institutional cultures of health and safety.

The conspiracy narrative “The Big Lie”—Psychoanalytical considerations on the development of susceptibility to an “alternative reality”

AbstractUsing the narrative “The Big Lie,” which is placed in the socio‐political context, and based on data gathered from social media, clinical material, interviews and documentaries, the author examines from a psychoanalytic perspective the effective power and dynamics of conspiracy narratives that create an “alternative reality” with “conviction capsules,” using lies and distortions of reality consciously employed as means of agitation on the breeding ground of unconscious relational and regression processes. To sketch the emergence and development of this willingness, the author combines the explanations of Wilfred Bion, Susan Isaacs and Herbert Rosenfeld and develops the hypothesis, including the concept of “perverted containing,” that due to unsuccessful containing processes in the earliest relationship experiences, defensively inflexible, sealed “conviction capsules” develop, permeated by fears of confusion and annihilation, by hatred as well as phantasies of powerlessness and superiority. Underlying these, experienced as existentially threatening, are panic about change and excessive identification with a hard, alleged omnipotent object, linked to an unconscious longing for symbiosis with a “savior”—a conglomerate that breeds susceptibility to conspiracy narratives and totalitarian, destructive populist leaders. As one example, the destructive‐symbiotic relationship dynamic between Donald Trump and his supporters is outlined with the escalation of violence.

Big Little Election Lies: Cynical and Credulous Evaluations of Electoral Fraud

Abstract The ‘Big Lie’ in American politics has sparked intense concern about the erosion of public confidence in the integrity of US elections—raising questions about the legitimacy of the authorities, institutions, and principles of democratic governance. Cynicism generated from misinformation about trustworthy elections has attracted a growing body of individual-level social-psychological research in America and Europe. Another common problem found around the world, however, which has received far less attention, concerns credulous citizens who express considerable faith and confidence in flawed contests. This study theorises that at macro-level, the accuracy of any public judgments about trustworthy elections is likely to be mediated by the information environment in open and closed societies, as well as by the type of regime. To understand these issues, Part I summarises the conceptual and theoretical argument about trust and trustworthiness. Part II describes the sources of evidence. To apply the theory, data on public opinion is drawn from around 85 societies around the globe included in Waves 6 and 7 of the World Values Survey (2010–2022), with measures of electoral trust and subjective perceptions of electoral integrity among ordinary citizens. Institutional electoral performance indices are drawn from the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem 12.0). Part III analyses how far these independent estimates match public judgments of the trustworthiness of elections in each country – and how far such relationships are conditioned by the type of information society as well as by the type of regime. Part IV highlights the key findings and considers their broader implications for understanding the macro-level conditions for trust and trustworthiness.

Confidence in US Elections After the Big Lie

This paper examines how individual-level partisanship and state-level factors affect perceptions of electoral integrity in the United States. We find that evaluations of the integrity of the 2020 US presidential election national outcome were only modestly conditioned by the quality of election administration in a person’s state. Perceptions of electoral legitimacy were much more substantially conditioned by motivated reasoning associated with a person’s partisanship, the partisan context Republicans resided in, and Republican partisans’ residence in a swing-state where final results from 2020 were delayed due to late-counted ballots. Overall, estimated effects of the quality of election administration on confidence in elections are null or modest. Partisan factors associated with Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 US presidential election were the strongest forces predicting lack of confidence in US elections and perceptions that election officials were altering results. These factors were not evident in 2016. We discuss how these findings may reflect a fundamental alteration of attitudes among Republican voters and elites about the legitimacy of democratic elections in the US, rather than reflecting cyclical variation in partisan confidence associated with which party won the past election.

Donald Trump: Pontifex Minimus of the Civil Religion of the Big Lie

ABSTRACT The American president is the pontifex maximus of the American Civil Religion (ACR). While each U.S. president has their own ‘take’ on ACR, they all endorse democratic values and serve as national pastors. All until Donald J. Trump. This article argues that Donald Trump is the first pontifex minimus in American history: the first leader to self-consciously endorse an anti-democratic civil religion as president. After providing the necessary background in ACR studies and the presidency, it explores Trump's religious values (derived from Norman Vincent Peale's power of positive thinking) and his political beliefs (especially his deep hostility toward democratic governance). It documents both throughout his presidency, but argues that they mature in the waning days of his term. Trump's decision to strike at the heart of the election ritual—the time during which American politics is at its most vulnerable—establishes him as the pontifex minimus of the civil religion of the Big Lie (CRBL).

The Dimensions, Origins, and Consequences of Belief in Donald Trump’s Big Lie

Abstract Donald Trump’s claim that he actually won the 2020 election, that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent and that his presidency is thus illegitimate, has been exhaustively debunked, but large majorities of ordinary Republicans and other Trump voters continue to say they agree with him. Using a wide variety of survey data, this paper examines the dimensions and origins of belief in Trump’s big lie and its effects on the Republican Party, the 2022 elections, and U.S. politics going forward.

Who Buys the “Big Lie”?: White Political Grievance and Confidence in Electoral Outcomes

Who Buys the “Big Lie”?: White Political Grievance and Confidence in Electoral Outcomes

Big Lies, Drag Shows, and Legal Fictions

Big Lies, Drag Shows, and Legal Fictions

The Global Consumption of Truths and Big Lies in the Epoch of Digital Information Technologies: A Theoretical Analysis

This paper asserts that political leaders around the world and the emergence of digital information technologies have contributed remarkably to the amplifications and normalizations of telling big lies, thus the noticeable increase in the global consumption of big lies at varying degrees. To underscore this assertion, this paper uses the theoretical framework of utility maximization to show that human beings, in a world in which “we are all liars,” consume truths and big lies subject to their information constraints. Furthermore, we use the concept of welfare economics to underscore the assertion that truths generate positive externalities, which can lead to outcomes that are social welfare-enhancing while big lies generate negative externalities, which can result in outcomes that are social welfare-retarding. The United States provides an illustrative example of a country where the consumption of big lies may be outpacing the consumption of truths because big lies have become the political philosophy of one of the political parties whose objective is to use big lies as the weapons of democracy destruction.

The Big Lie: Expressive Responding and Misperceptions in the United States

AbstractMisinformation about events surrounding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic pose an existential threat to American democracy and public health. Public opinion surveys reveal that high percentages of Republicans indicate that they endorse some aspects of mistaken beliefs surrounding election fraud in the 2020 election. Still, understanding how to measure the endorsement of misperceptions is critical for understanding the threat at hand. Are high levels of mistaken beliefs genuinely held, or are they partially a function of expressive responding? I address this question through a set of survey experiments encouraging accuracy-oriented processing among the general public. Using well-powered surveys of Republicans and Independents, I find that treatments designed to encourage more accurate responses are ineffective in reducing the endorsement of partisan electoral and public health misperceptions and can in some cases even backfire. These findings suggest that support for these misperceptions is genuinely held.

The Ghosts of Calhoun

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that gutted a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the door for a dramatic surge in laws restricting access to the right to vote that particularly targeted racial minorities. These new laws were enacted in states controlled by Republican-dominated legislatures and Republican governors, and overwhelmingly in jurisdictions formerly subject to the preclearance under the VRA. In the wake of the “Big Lie” following the 2020 presidential election, many of these same states “doubled down” on new voter suppression measures and enacted new laws that make it easier to subvert election results. I argue that the recent wave of attacks on the voting rights of racial minorities is an example of the doctrine of nullification—the tendency to allow legislation and constitutional amendments designed to protect the rights of African Americans to remain technically the law of the land while divesting them of their enforcement powers. Utilizing principles derived from the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833, I argue that the doctrine of nullification provides a useful framework with which to analyze the history of attacks on the voting rights of African Americans and other racial minorities—both during the Reconstruction period and in the current era.

Two Truths and a Big Lie: The “Honest” Mendacity of Fascist Rhetoric

Abstract One key to understanding fascist rhetoric is to understand fascists’ relationship to truth. Considerations of truth are central to fascism, and they are central to how fascists use rhetoric. Identifying key distinctions between factual and fascist truth contextualize fascist investments in “honest” mendacity. The distinctions between these two kinds of truth illuminate the grounds of fascist truth—specifically the development of a transhistorical myth, fascism’s reliance on the leadership principle, and the persuasive significance of authenticity in fascist rhetoric. Rhetorical considerations in performances of authenticity, in particular, explain fascists’ efforts to recruit people to their cause—and that suggests entry points for thinking about resisting fascist movements by exposing the appeal(s) of fascist rhetoric.

Embracing Donald Trump’s Big Lie and Making Voting Harder Are Republicans Sure They Know What They are Doing?

Abstract Following the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump claimed that the election had been stolen and that fraud was widespread. His voter base widely accepted that and that has prompted numerous state legislatures to enact laws creating hurdles that make voting more difficult. The presumption of most reactions to these laws is that they are directed at reducing non-white voting. This study suggests that they may also affect the white working class. The party needs their votes and they have a historical record of not voting at high levels. More hurdles may diminish their turnout. The analysis draws on voting patterns from 1952–2020.

The Big Lie(s): Situating the January 6th Coup Attempt Within White Supremacist Lies

Donald Trump’s attempts to retain power despite losing the 2020 presidential election by engaging in a wide-ranging mis/disinformation campaign has been framed as The Big Lie. By framing Trump’s attempts at stealing the election as The Big Lie, it erases the systemic presence of white supremacy and situates all other lies as truths. We utilize critical discourse analysis to construct an intersectional understanding of how Trump utilized lies in preparation for his attempted insurrection. In doing so, we situate these claims within the network of larger lies used to protect whiteness within the United States. Through this work, we highlight how educators can situate white supremacist lies within historical and contemporary racial realism in pursuit of anti-racist civic understanding.

“The Big Lie”: How Fact Checking Influences Support for Insurrection

This experimental investigation explores the influence of election fraud fact-checking and cognitive processing styles on participants’ confidence in the 2020 U.S. presidential election’s legitimacy and characterizations of the January Sixth Capitol Hill Attack. The results indicate fact-checking, accuracy motivated reasoning, and systematic processing exerted positive effects on participants’ legitimacy levels, especially among Republicans. We also found that participants’ systematic processing, affiliation with the Democratic Party, and negative attitudes toward Donald Trump were associated with their characterizations of the January Sixth Capitol Hill Attack as violent and extreme. Overall, these results support both motivated reasoning and dual process models, but partisan motivated reasoning exerted the greatest effects. Further, these findings suggest Republican and pro-Trump participants who rely on heuristic processing may find violent, extra-political actions acceptable means of attempting to achieve their goals.

The Ugly Truth to Canada’s Big Lie: A Tale of Ongoing Settler Colonial Genocide of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of an Apartheid State

ABSTRACT Drawing heavily on Indigenous authors, this paper explores the historical roots to the emergence of Canada as a genocidal and apartheid state with respect to its Indigenous peoples. A major theme of the paper is that historical injustices grounded in settler colonial priorities continue to inform contemporary socio/political contexts that maintain Canada’s status as a racist, apartheid and genocidal state with respect to Indigenous peoples. Examples drawn from the Lytton fire of 2020 and the November floods in British Columbia highlight that the needs and rights of Indigenous peoples will always take a back seat to Canada’s corporate economic interests. A corollary to the paper constitutes the dismantling of Canada’s “Big Lie” that Canada is a progressive country that has shown considerable progress in its relationship with Indigenous peoples.