This chapter considers how investigative deceptions fit into the traditional rationales for protecting free speech, and offers guidance on where the law is likely to evolve on these questions.

This chapter considers how investigative deceptions fit into the traditional rationales for protecting free speech, and offers guidance on where the law is likely to evolve on these questions.

This chapter uses a famous article on the communicative features of “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005) to shed fresh light on select statements by Donald Trump. Frankfurt’s central observation was that in bullshitting, unlike lying, the speaker isn’t deliberately aiming to deceive and cover up the truth; rather, he can’t be bothered to care about the truth conditions of a statement. While Trump has undoubtedly told countless willful lies, some of his utterances suggest instead a predominance of bullshit. This chapter investigates Trump’s bullshit from a communicative perspective, focusing on Trump’s stance in using bullshit (in particular his desire to produce a positive self-impression) and his use of Twitter as a medium that particularly encourages bullshit in its short character bursts. Bullshitting becomes another tool in Trump’s strategy of branded entertainment, used for self-aggrandizing and to boost his impression management, to create the Trump’ spectacle, and to test others’ loyalty.

This section introduction furnishes an overview of Trump’s verbal behavior when it verges on or crosses into falsehood, by way of innuendo, gaslighting, and plausible deniability. It compares the Trump administration’s symbolic practices with those of Nazi Germany, including the use of superlatives and hyperbole so extreme it takes on a “fairy tale quality.” The chapter further identifies a favorite Trump discourse sequence here termed “reactive reversal,” related to the concept of “plausible deniability” discussed in a later chapter. First, Trump stakes out a hyperbolic claim, and if a public outcry follows, Trump reacts by reversing his claim and blaming others for their inference. Then he may triumphantly declare victory over whoever “really” claimed/did what he originally claimed. This is one of Trump’s methods of gauging reaction from the public.

Housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the assiduously organized (and carefully curated) Coetzee Papers include manuscript drafts of Coetzee’s novels (formerly available at the Houghton Library, Harvard College), as well as notebooks, correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs. Only recently opened, this archive has prompted a new wave of critical studies, only some of which have been sufficiently alert to, or indeed sceptical of, the procedures and decisions involved in its establishment and organization. Reflecting on this, this chapter considers the provenance and particular character of these papers in light of Coetzee’s career-long quarrying of autobiographical materials, his project of self-archiving, his explorations of archival themes and use of archival energies in his fictions, and his particular interest in the nature of secrets and lies, of concealment, distortion, and revelation. It argues that it is vital that critics think carefully about their own purposes in reading the archives; about the writer’s purposes in producing them; and about the kinds of truth at stake in the works, the archives, and the literary criticism they occasion.

The introduction presents the book’s primary themes of truth, the postcolony, borders and violence. Situated in the historiography of African decolonisation, it emphasises the necessity of considering the emergence of the postcolony in the relationship between states and peoples, rather than through the relationship with the coloniser alone. It treats decolonisation as a search for certainty around what community and authority would mean in the postcolony, a process lasting far beyond the date of independence. Surveying approaches to citizenship as action and as words, it focuses on variations of political language in historiography and linguistic anthropology, and contextualises the setting of the book in literature on African borderlands and the ‘margins’ of the state. It provides preliminary observations on truth, truth-speaking and their role in official political speech and unofficial rumour in 1950s Burundi, while observing some common philosophical conceptions of the relationship between truth and violence. It then presents the methodologies employed, along with the practical and ethical questions concerning the focus on truth, and ends with an overview of the book.

This chapter considers when the government’s speech deprives its targets of life, liberty, or property in violation of the Due Process Clause. It starts with a brief tour of the government’s lies and other falsehoods, illustrating their wide array of audiences, topics, motives, and effects. It then examines the government’s speech that interferes with its listeners’ choices in ways that would violate the Due Process Clause if the government accomplished those same changes through its lawmaking or other regulatory action: examples include law enforcement officers’ lies that coerce their targets’ waiver of constitutional liberties and the government’s lies that deny their targets the ability to exercise reproductive or voting rights. Next, it turns to the expressive harms sometimes inflicted by the government’s speech, investigating whether the government’s speech that shames or humiliates its targets offends due process protections. Finally, it turns fromt the effects of the government's speech to its purposes, exploring whether the Clause limits the government’s speech motivated by its intent to interfere with protected liberties or to inflict injury.

This chapter considers when the government’s speech about others’ speech violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech or Free Press Clauses. It starts by exploring how the government’s speech can change, deter, or punish its targets’ speech: think of the government’s threats, disclosures, and designations that silence its targets’ speech, or its expressive attacks that incite or encourage third parties to punish its targets for their speech. It then examines the expressive harms inflicted by the government’s speech that disparages disfavored speakers, and whether that speech infringes Free Speech or Free Press Clause protections apart from any adverse effect on its targets’ choices and opportunities. Finally, turning from the consequences of the government’s speech about speech to its motives, it considers whether the Constitution prohibits the government’s expressive choices motivated by its intent to silence or punish speech to which it objects or its intent to interfere with the press's constitutionally protected functions. To illuminate the three approaches’ various strengths and limitations, the chapter closes by applying them to a range of problems both real and hypothetical.