Republicans' 5 Worst Bad-Faith Arguments (Democracy Enjoyers HATE No. 3)
No. 1 sucks too!
This is my most earnest appeal to the elder millennials who came of age with listicles, which during the Obama years was the only legal way to consume information on the internet.
If shit wasn’t in list form, it didn’t exist. That was the law. And we liked it that way.
I vacillate on Bad Faith Times between faiths of varying badness. Sometimes the right wing’s bad faith is so transparent it seems self evident, hardly worth blogging about, even if you’re the guy who runs a site called Bad Faith Times dot com. Other times the bad faith is sneaky and insidious in ways mainstream media outlets are incapable of detecting, and therefore their news-consuming audiences never fully digest (I’ve gotten more than a few DMs and emails from folks who hadn’t smelled the bad faith of a certain issue until reading my shit, which is nice. What’s less nice is having your nostrils filled with the stench of bad faith designed to advance a hideous and anti-human ideology).
After a stroll through the BFT archives (approaching 300 blog posts!) and some chatting with the good folks on Bluesky – the only legitimate microblogging platform – here are the five shittiest bad-faith arguments deployed by the American right. And yes, before you ask: This is analytics.
5) More guns are the answer to America’s Second Amendment crisis
Let’s be real about the Second Amendment. It should be repealed, as former SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stevens said in 2018. There's no reason for the Second Amendment to exist. That should be the starting point for the “gun rights” discourse. That it’s not is a failure of those of us who hold the radical view that school massacres are bad.
It calls to mind a friend I interviewed after he fled with his family from a shooting at a public holiday event in Ohio: The gun crisis is not caused by the prevalence of high powered weapons, conservatives tell us with straight faces. It's mental health, it's video games, it's absentee fathers, it's drugs, it's alcohol, it's the lack of prayer in public schools, it's boys failing to mature into real men, it's women refusing to act like women – it's all of these things, but it's never the access to automatic weapons guaranteed by the cretins on the Supreme Court.
That's never the problem, according to the American right, which makes a concerted effort to normalize mass public killings as some perverse defense of what they think of as a constitutional right. The right to be killed, perhaps.
Ted Cruz loves to defend guns after mass shootings. You gotta hand it to him.
The bad-faith gaslighting ever present in the toxic American gun discourse reminds Drew Davenport – my buddy – of a poker game he once had with his friends. The poker game's host had recently installed a fireplace and was psyched to use it even with soaring outdoor temperatures (as someone who has hosted backyard fire pits in the crushing humidity of a July night in Maryland, I can relate). The poker players within minutes squirmed in their seats.
"Those of us sweating at the table casually mentioned that it was too hot and that maybe the giant flames were to blame," Drew said. "We've never forgotten that moment because it was so funny, but also disturbing on some level. [The poker game host] wanted us to believe that the flames in the fireplace were not responsible for it being hot in the room."
Denny Carter
And so it goes in the American gun discourse: Normal, well-adjusted – even nonpolitical – people are told over and over that mass shootings have no connection to the nation's insane gun policies. We have to reject the argument that guns are not the cause of gun violence. Don't let those beholden to the murderous gun lobby make you feel crazy for believing (correctly) that gun access has to be crushed if we are ever to be safe, if there is ever going to be an end to this American gun nightmare.
4) Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are acting out of their concern for women’s health.
For generations, those who oppose bodily autonomy for American women have said (in bad faith) that they are only looking out for pregnant folks. Abortion, they say, is dangerous. And they can say this in large part because an entire infrastructure of bogus research and statistics has crafted an unreality in which abortion care is deeply dangerous and must be banned in all circumstances. This was used to kill Roe v. Wade, as it’s been used to outlaw abortion in almost every state controlled by Republicans.
Too many liberals seem unable to process the bad faith that defines the right's war on reproductive health care. Former SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer in a March 2024 interview with The New York Times criticized the right-wing Supreme Court ending federal abortion rights not as immoral or legally dubious, but as impractical.
“There are too many questions,” Breyer told the Times. “Are they really going to allow women to die on the table because they won’t allow an abortion which would save her life? I mean, really, no one would do that. And they wouldn’t do that. And there’ll be dozens of questions like that.”
Denny Carter
Well yes, Stephen, they are going to allow pregnant women to “die on the table.” It’s happened since Roe was killed and will continue to happen until congressional Democrats do what it takes to reinstitute abortion rights protections. Republican state lawmakers ideologically aligned with the very justices who eviscerated abortion protections are passing laws that criminalize miscarriages and threaten abortion care providers with prison time or even the death penalty. As Physicians for Human Rights said in a harrowing 2023 report, the end of Roe is a "pressing human rights issue" in the United States. How Breyer doesn’t know this is beyond me. It’s infuriating.
GOP lawmakers in state legislatures have stood before their colleagues and cried crocodile tears about a state inspector finding dirt in the lobby of an abortion clinic. They had no choice but to shut down the clinic for the safety of everyone who came their for abortion care, which they happen to oppose with their dying breath. The faith cannot be worse. It just can't.
Abortion rights opponents have known for decades that they couldn’t just say they didn’t believe women should have bodily autonomy; they had to come up with a legal framework based on what appeared to be reliable data and sober analysis – something to counter the actual reliable data and sober analysis coming from nonpartisan, apolitical researchers whose work showed abortion was safe and medically sound.
Denny Carter
The right’s research – conducted by carefully disguised right-wing organizations funded by wealthy abortion opponents – would be used by monstrously cynical state-level lawmakers to argue that the state had no choice but to shut down abortion clinics and pass cruel and inhumane 20 and 16-week abortion bans. What can we do, they’d say, shrugging and smirking all the while. This research paper says we must take action to restrict abortion access. No one – not major media outlets and certainly not Democratic lawmakers – understood the effectiveness of this bad-faith onslaught. In fact, this anti-abortion research was usually dismissed as the ravings of lunatics. No way, the thinking went, this will ever hold up in the courts.
Here’s the thing: This research very much did hold up in state and federal courts! The fake data and faulty conclusions were welcomed with open arms by judges who had been brought up in a far-right legal environment that has for half a century trained lawyers how to overturn the legal gains of the 20th century. Nothing these anti-abortion organizations produce – no data, no anecdotes, no conclusions – should be allowed to dictate public policy. This horseshit research was done in bad faith, with the express purpose of giving lawmakers and government officials and federal judges the legal legitimacy – the cover – to stop Americans from obtaining timely and safe abortion services.
It has been heartening to see folks refuse to fall for the right's bad faith on abortion rights. So we have that going for us, which is nice.
3) Rampant voter fraud leaves Republicans choice but to restrict voting
Republicans for generations have had to pretend the nation is rife with voting fraud, that our electoral system has crumbled under the weight of overwhelming voting illegality. They need this to be true if they’re going to create public policy designed to prevent their political opponents from voting against them and their party.
Republicans have gone so far as to suggest entire elections were stolen by hundreds of thousands or even millions of voters who cast multiple ballots, voted in states where they do not live, and have no legal standing in the US. The last one is a big one – the idea that the well-organized Democratic Party has shipped in millions of folks from Central and South America to support their candidates in U.S. elections. I guess that backfired when Latino voters leaned hard toward the fascist candidate in 2024. Nevertheless, Democrats persist.
With elections being stolen, Republicans have had no choice but to pass a raft of laws that make it exceedingly difficult to cast a ballot. Ours is the only developed country on earth that regularly erects barriers to voting. It’s almost as if we never developed into a fully-formed democracy. Makes me think.
Back in October 2022, I wrote about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ use of state police to stop people from voting in the upcoming midterm elections:
Maybe you, like me, were unfortunate enough to come across an online video made by the The Tampa Bay Times documenting Florida police arresting black folks for violating state voting laws – part of DeSantis' bad-faith crackdown on so-called voter fraud. There is no such thing as massive, systemic voter fraud, and when there are isolated cases, it's always radicalized Republicans committing the fraud. But for generations, Republican elected officials have had to pretend there is a nationwide leftist effort to subvert elections so they can apply their favored prescription: Policies drawn up in the fiery depths of hell (conservative think tanks) to discourage voting among the poor, in communities of color, and anywhere else voters might oppose the anti-human right-wing agenda.
Using the cops to stop Americans from voting was always the inevitable endpoint of Republicans' decades-long, anti-democratic program. Without gerrymandering districts and erecting barriers to the ballot box, Republicans would be forced to moderate and appeal to voters outside of their broken-brained, Facebook-addicted political base. The party could not do the bidding of radicalized billionaires who are the living embodiment of late-stage capitalism: Concentrated wealth able to purchase the government. Limiting voting access through public policy – stopping black folks from voting on Sundays, for instance – can only go so far, especially as progressive activists and Democratic lawmakers (sometimes) push back and expand voting rights for disenfranchised groups. This is precisely what happened in Florida in 2018, when voting rights activists got a measure on the ballot to reinstate voting rights for most people convicted of a felony in the state. It passed in a landslide.
It doesn't matter to DeSantis and his lackeys if the fraud charges against Democratic voters stick. Nothing matters to bad-faith nihilists like DeSantis. It doesn't matter if they get off on a loophole or whether a judge dismisses these cases because they're absurd and a clear abuse of state power (this assumes there are reasonable judges in Florida, a big assumption). The point of this dangerous and, by definition, fascist exercise is to intimidate those who threaten a Republican governor's hold on power and to show national Republicans what DeSantis would do with control over the federal government.
2) The United States is being invaded by an army of immigrants recruited and organized by the Democratic Party
This is an ugly one, championed by the most monstrous among us – guys like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, who reportedly have similar taste in women. Miller, for his part, has advanced the idea that Americans are under siege in every city and town in the nation, threatened by marauding criminal gangs of migrants flooding over the border to destroy American sovereignty. He's done this with no evidence and without being challenged by any single member of American media. Miller, effectively operating as the president these days, has called for federal wartime powers because migrants are coming to the southern border seeking decent jobs and extravagant things like food and water.
Denny Carter
Neither Miller nor Musk nor any other fascist influencer on X or Facebook or Instagram believes this is true. They don’t care about that. They care about creating a pretense to use governmental power to terrorize communities of color and build concentration camps that will be home to those poisoning the country’s blood, as Trump once said, echoing a vicious fascist talking point from a century ago.
Once a fringe idea discussed by the most odious, raving-mad white supremacists, fully half of Republican voters now agree that the Democratic Party is conducting a white replacement campaign. Polling shows Republicans endorsing the idea that immigrants are not coming to the US for economic opportunity, but to influence elections and dilute the power of the Republican Party. The widely-held belief that immigrants are in on the grand plan crafted by liberal elites is particularly dangerous, for there's only one solution to stopping immigrants complicit in white replacement. And immigrants, unlike politicians, don't have security details.
These are the seeds of genocide. They are planted with great care by Republican elected officials and far-right media. These genocidal seeds are nurtured with bad faith. The worst part, somehow, is that none of these assholes raving about the Great Replacement actually believe in it. They’re doing a bit – one that shapes an unreality that calls for state violence against migrant families. Same fascist story, different fascist era.
- Money is speech.
Perhaps no one has used bad faith to advance the fascist cause more than John Roberts. The Supreme Court chief justice has played ball with every single far-right fantasy over the past decade to undermine the constitution and stop the federal courts from holding Trump accountable and stopping the steady march of authoritarianism in the US. Many are calling Roberts a doctor of bad faith. He went to school for it. He learned from the best.
Denny Carter
The crowning jewel of judicial bad faith has to be Citizens United, a veritable legal nuke dropped right on the head of American democracy. In no way can a democratic republic survive for long when there are no more legal limits on how much influence the wealthy can have on politics. Eleven years after Roberts and the Court’s right wingers effectively did away with the concept of one person, one vote, we had the world’s richest man paying people to vote for his preferred candidates and shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign of an insurrectionist presidential candidate. Thankfully the world’s richest man is softer than baby shit and bowed out after losing one obscure off-year election in Wisconsin.
Equating money with speech was soaked is a particularly vile form of bad faith, for no one – not a single person living or dead – has ever believed this to be true. If it is true – is money is a form of speech – then folks with a lot of cash have a whole fucking lot of speech to use, far more than you and me. It's the same for the concept of corporate personhood. No one really believes corporations are people, not even Mitt Romney. That legal unreality, for the wealthy and well connected, is far too tantalizing to deny. It has to be so.
Roberts allowed billionaires at home and abroad to buy the United States, dismantle it, and sell it for parts. That’s his doing. He is the most destructive figure in the country’s history and no one is particularly close. Trump can’t happen without Roberts. Musk can’t happen without Roberts. We had the safeguards in place to stop authoritarianism and Roberts made it his sworn duty to dismantle them, one at a time. It's why Trump thanked Roberts so warmly in what might be the bleakest scene in the history of U.S. politics.
Draining the infection that is money in politics is one issue – maybe the issue – that has to be addressed before any other issue can be tackled and we can beat back the anti-constitutionalists running this joint. Without creating real and strict limitations on how much money someone can spend on a campaign, politicians are beholden to a bunch of Silicon Valley dorks who think they're god because they made a cool app fifteen years ago (a utopian vision would see candidates funded exclusively through public funding, a vaccine for fascism). Our politics today reflect the goals of the ultra-wealthy and nothing more. That's because John Roberts said it's their right to buy Congress, buy the White House, even buy the Supreme Court, as a mere business expense. Maybe they can write it off on their taxes under the Big Beautiful Bill.
Roberts has used legal bad faith – including the ludicrous idea that a rich man’s First Amendment rights have been infringed if he cannot spend unlimited money on a political campaign – to usher in an age of competitive authoritarianism that can only end when the Roberts Court is neutered by Supreme Court reform.
Money isn’t speech and John Roberts knows it. The faith will remain bad until morale improves.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
Comments ()