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The thing is the left disdains to be dishonest. For us words mean things. For us truth means things. For us facts mean things. We intend to improve our lives through objectively better systems and decisions. The fascists and reactionaries can afford to lie because their actual goals are abhorrent so must be cloaked in excuses and other language.

The fact is also the reactionaries can lie because their followers enjoy it, because they are in power because capital is in power, because they're not held to account and because they don't value facts. Giving up one of our most notable differences between them and ourselves in that we are honest, they are dishonest, we care about facts and evidence, they don't seems foolish.

Is there some value in strategic deceptions? Yes. But not bald-faced lying against the entire bourgeois media machine with things that leave you easily dunked on. At that point you begin retreating into pride and start spiraling into accepting more and more lies to save face, to not challenge your beliefs rigorously, and to sink into a hole of conspiracy and wild supposition that drives people away from you.

If you fight a war based on lies the right will win. They are more experienced. They have a century of lies to draw on, they have the high ground of owning all the platforms, the media, of bourgeois academics being sympathetic to them and steeped in liberal orthodoxy.

And the thing is we'll never have a media machine capable of shouting down the right. Shouting and screaming that he was a fascist if he was indeed a communist won't convince Trump, won't convince the Trump justice department, won't convince judges, won't convince cable anchors, won't reach your average person. It's self-deception whereas the right's deception at least is broadcast and amplified and built on a series of foundations where it actually deceives others, it muddies the waters enough to frustrate their enemies in liberals because they're liberals.