Written Report on Day 2 of 2020 Republican National Convention: Lies

I didn't watch much of last night's First Night of the 2020 Republican National Convention.  I made up for that by watching just about all of the Second Night of the convention, tonight.  Here's what I saw and heard: lies.

• Lies from Senator Rand Paul, who praised Trump for bringing home our troops.  The truth: Trump has brought home no troops, as far anyone in the public knows or the press has reported.  I've been against overseas American military involvement since Vietnam.  Trump has done nothing to reduce that.
• Lies from Director of the U. S. National Economic Council Larry Kudlow, who said that Biden wants to raise everyone's taxes.  The truth: Biden only wants to raise taxes on people who earn more than $400,000.   That leaves me out.  What about you?
• Lies from former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the Chinese Communist Party "covered up" the deadly COVID-19 virus.  The truth: No evidence for that.  Although the Chinese government may not have been as helpful as they could have been in alerting the world to COVID-19, Chinese scientists were the first to publicly let the world know about the deadly disease.
• Lies from Eric Trump (Donald Trump's son), who said Biden will raise taxes on over 80% of Americans.  See what I pointed out about Kudlow above, and do the arithmetic: those in America who earn more than $400,000 a year are a small fraction of the American people, not 80%.  Ok, I did the research and math: those earning more than $400,000 a year are in the top 1%.
• Lies from Melania Trump, First Lady, who said Donald Trump "loves" this country.  I don't believe that.  I think the truth is that Trump loves only himself.  But I'm willing to acknowledge that this is a difference of opinion, not an outright lie.  So perhaps, technically, Melania Trump didn't lie tonight. 

But even if Melania Trump didn't actually lie, she would be the only one of the speakers mentioned above.  That's a very poor percentage for truth in what we heard tonight.

Melania Trump's Plagiarism in Academic and Historical Perspective

Putting Melania Trump's plagiarism and the Trump campaign's response to it in perspective - as a professor, who, like most professors, has on occasion dealt with plagiarism, and who also has studied what happens when dictators get caught up in lies -

- What Melania did was actually worse than a student who plagiarizes. Students usually are taking more than one course, get caught up in final exams, are just becoming adults, etc. Under that kind of pressure, plagiarism is wrong and must be called out, but it happens. Trump's campaign had months to prepare for yesterday's speech by Melania - the fact that she so blatantly plagiarized shows Trump's continuing disdain for both truth and democracy.

 - The denial by Chris Christie and Paul Manafort of plagiarism is the same as Trump denying a tweet contained an anti-semitic Jewish star.  Trump's approach is just double down and deny the truth when caught in a wrongdoing. This is right out of the Goebbels-Hitler propaganda playbook. Why does this work?  As Erich Fromm pointed out in Escape from Freedom, some people don't want the responsibility of thinking for themselves - they want their leaders to do it for them, and are happy to accept as truth whatever their leaders say.   This, alas, is one of the foundations of fascism.

 -Trump has already gone after the press. We'll soon see him go after academics, because professors are the in-the-trench experts on plagiarism. Attacks on the press and academics are another hallmark of leaders who don't like democracy (Erdogan in Turkey has arrested both journalists and professors).

The Trump campaign has thus far shown an astonishing resilience, often picking up rather than losing support after getting caught up in an outrageous lie.  Plagiarism, and then denying it, is part of the same pattern.   Will it have a similar effect on Trump's success?  The very future of our democracy may reside in the answer to that question.