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Why did Chuck Todd lie so blatantly about what Bill Barr said? — 44 Comments

1. Not sure if this is meant as multiple choice, but I go with (6): All of the above. 🙂

2. WHY? Because he can.

3. “Todd has learned that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has time to get its pants on. That is especially true if the lie is promulgated by someone with a vast and trusting audience, and repeated by others.”

   Especially when the lie is forwarded by people on social media…people who actually believe it, in many cases. They don’t see the correction, because they don’t read non-Prog media, and the correction doesn’t get much attention in the Prog media. And even if they do see the correction, their incorrect post is now many items down in everybody’s newsfeed, and they don’t feel any need to do another post correcting it.

4. Have you considered he didn’t really know the content of the whole interview? Like most of the “news” reporters, he is lazy, uneducated, and predisposed to believe the worse about Trump and his team. He is a newsreader, not a reporter, and was hired for his ability to glibly spin stories.

   It is just as likely that he’s upset with his production team today.

5. Why do we keep beating this dead horse? Yet, just another example of the duplicity of the MSM, the left, and the Dems. As we all know, the only ones who care about this are “us”. And as we all keep saying, the regular folks will never know about it. So let’s stop getting worked up over it. It’s going to to take a cataclysmic shift to change this situation, and I don’t see it happening. We should just stop wasting energy on this.

   Maybe it’s the cabin fever getting the best of me.

6. If I were Bill Barr I’d call the network president and demand a one-and-one for an entire episode of Meet the Press. I’d then proceed to spend the entire time calling Todd a lier to his face, no apologies accepted. You want to play hard ball, here you go let’s play.

7. The Left learned well, LONG AGO, that to control the electorate one must control the information flow.

   https://redpilljew.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-power-of-information-flow.html

8. physicsguy:

   I ask myself that question as well. But my answer is that some people on the right keep being puzzled by how blatantly and obviously the press lies, and this post is an attempt to answer why they do that and why they will continue to do that.

   It also gives anyone who might care to discuss it with relatives and friends some information that could be part of that discussion. I am mulling over who to discuss such things with, so that I don’t waste my time. I think there are a few. I am planning my approach to it. It’s not easy, but I think it needs doing.

9. Francesca at 3:35 pm says all that needs saying on this matter.

10. Keep beating that horse. Document every lie, every cheat, every steal, every slander. Always. It’s the only honorable thing to do. If there is anything that we have learned from the last half century it is that the Left wins when honest people don’t fight back.

    Why do they get away with the ridiculous claim that there is no such thing as election fraud? Because Republicans won’t fight. Why did the news media get away with the claim it was fair and balanced for so long? Because, until Trump, the right wouldn’t fight.

    We have to fight back. If you won’t actively fight, at least document the evil.

11. How does ANY lie about Donald Trump and his administration make to to air? The media lives in an uncomfortable state of self-aware cognitive dissonance because they just KNOW Trump and anyone around him is stupid, evil, and horrible but disguise it so they rubes can’t tell. So any time any information burbles up that confirms the media’s profound faith in the awfulness of Trump and Co., they run with it because they can’t imagine it’s not true.

    I would almost bet money that whatever producer watched that Barr interview literally couldn’t hear what Barr said after the “history is made by the winners” comment. Like he entered a fugue state or something. He just grabbed that soundbite, presented to Todd, and they put it on the air.

    Mike

12. One reason I frequent this blog is because there are so many political changers here. To a man and woman, it seems that that transformation took time and repeated bludgeoning with verifiable facts. That’s why I’m grateful to neo for continuing to post things like this, even if the effort seems bootless.

13. Paul in Boston had the best solution.
    Francesca had the answer that first came to mind for me.

14. I used to wonder the same thing: “How can someone do something so transparently false, and expect to get away with it?”

    And it is not just the media. It is expressive of the progressive mindset in general

    And the answer so far as their expectations go, is just as Francesca and others have said. It’s because they can … (get away with it often enough as makes no difference to them.

    Hell, we’ve all seen this phenomenon in operation here; where a sensitive conservative or the occasional progressive will offer a blatantly false passage up, and iwithin quotation marks, as a recitation of what another commenter has said only a few exchanges before in the same thread.

    How can anyone be stupid enough, we ask ourselves, to deliberately misrepresent, or even fabricate an attribution, when the evidence of their falsehood, is mere inches of column space above?

    Well, it’s because they have gotten away with it on their usual stomping grounds, and they really don’t care what the people who they happen to be trolling that season, think of them or their lies. It’s a tactic turned habit, and too bad if people they dislike anyway, object.

    But the other aspect to consider, as Neo and others have done, is how they came to think that lying in this manner is justified in the first place.

    And that is the deeper question when it comes to assessing whether the people doing it are good people, or not. Especially when so many of them appear to advocate sensitivity, compassion, and altruism.

    Your answer depends on whether you think that lying in this manner expresses a fundamental and more original corruption of their mind or psyche. And the answer to that, will be conditioned by whether you think that truth has an objective status as a value independent of our proximate aims, and is a principle which should condition and inform those aims.

    If you accept that truth exists, and that man should properly conform himself to a truth which exists independently of any specific feelings or urges he has, then you will come to the disturbing conclusion that these habitual and nonchalant liars have chosen at a very deep yet conscious level, to embrace the Lie.

    They may protest that it’s just the way of t he world, or that it is done for a greater ( so they will claim) good. But this stance which takes manipulation, deception and exploitation as fundamental features of human reality which are to be embraced by the knowing as standard operating procedure, is basically what we mean by evil.

    At some intuitive level we know this, even if we are irreligious. That is why we wonder to ourselves, just how our supposed “friends” would behave when confronted by the Beast’s demands of fealty , and your sacrifice, in return for their personal advantage and security.

    Unlike other nations, we Americans have not had to face being sold out by neighbors since the days of the Revolution. (Apart from some border state areas during the Civil War)

    But we may be approaching such conditions again. Or be there already.

15. DNW: “we Americans have not had to face being sold out by neighbors since the days of the Revolution.”
    We ARE there already. The neighbors and drones are watching to see if we have our masks on correctly.

16. It’s necessary to call a spade a spade. Churchill wasn’t shy about calling Hitler “a filthy little gutter-snipe”.

    Chuck Todd is gutter-scum.

    Let’s drop the genteel posturing – we’re involved in a war.

17. “There are thousands of Chuck Todds in the press today.”

    Long past time to cull the herd. But… to a great degree … a lot of the left has been culled by the lockdown.

    Never a thorn without a rose.

18. Objective facts are intentionally buried under layers of lies, distortions, misdirections and silent nonrecognitions. The Right plays the game too, but it is woefully out-gunned and outsmarted, pehaps it’s our larger capacity to be honorable and feel shame. I suggest we do everything we can to attack post modernism — and defund all its advocates whether they be journalists, pundits, professors or politicians.

19. DNW:

    I dealt with those questions to a certain extent in in this post.

20. Hmm. It surprises me, the lack of successful efforts from the center-right to rebut this kind of thing with their own news stream and journalism brand. Surely there are Centrist and Republican and Conservative (and even Libertarian) billionaires out there who get mad enough to put their money where their mouth is. How come there isn’t an alternative source of information/news/commentary yet?

    I think there’s a hunger for it. Imagine how attractive it would be to have an actual unbiased news source, or at least where bias wasn’t the point of the content.

21. “This post and others like it also are attempts to give anyone who might care to discuss journalistic lies with relatives and friends some information that could be part of that discussion.” [Neo]

    Some time ago I was watching a documentary about Wild Bill Hickock’s wild west show. While traveling in England, Annie Oakley was touring with the show along with another female sharpshooter. The other woman, not Oakley, was favored by a particular reporter back in the U.S. (Boston, I believe) and was writing articles about how this woman was wowing the Brits while Oakley was falling flat on her face. This was not a matter of interpretation, but an outright lie to aggrandize a favored performer.

    Now this was not a world changing event but is does imply that, speaking generally not absolutely, there never was a golden age of journalism which stood for truth, justice, and the American way. There may be, and may have been reporters who broke that mold, but as a caste, reporters have always been in service to producing stories and headlines that grabbed attention and promulgated the reporters’ own views of the topic. To name just a few, from Walter Duranty and Walter Cronkite to Dan Rather, and Brian Williams most of them make used car salesmen look pretty good by comparison.

    It’s only now, with the internet-availability of multiple new sources and original sourcing that we really see how skeezy they have always been.

22. @T 9:59- Beside the point, but you mean Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Hickock joined them briefly:
    “In 1873, Cody invited “Wild Bill” Hickok to join the group in a new play called Scouts of the Plains. Hickok did not enjoy acting and often hid behind scenery; in one show, he shot at the spotlight when it focused on him.”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill#Buffalo_Bill's_Wild_West

23. T:

    I very much disagree, and I’ll tell you why. Yes, there were always people like Duranty who lied. And yes, there was “yellow journalism” and newspapers that were biased.

    The difference was that people knew the biases of the papers, because they usually didn’t hide that they were Democrat or Republican, or some were obviously sensationalistic tabloids. In addition, when I was young (50s and early to mid 60s), reporters were much more “just the facts, ma’am.” with a separation between the news reporters and the opinion page.

    Things began to really change with the Vietnam war. I’ve written about some of these changes and why they happened, including and especially in my posts about Walter Cronkite.

    Prior to that, at least during my lifetime, news was for the most part pretty factual. Not always, of course. But ever since the late 60s the amount of lying has increased and increased and increased. It’s a matter of percentages. At this point, if there is anything that can be given a biased political spin it will be given such a spin, and the relationship between the news and the truth is far more tenuous than ever before in my lifetime. The lies that used to be the exception are now the consistent rule.

24. @ Neo,
    Ok. 2009. Wow. We have seen that theme and references reiterated in the last several years, but that seems to be a post that pretty comprehensively covers the apparent psychology of the so-called true believer early on: a willingness to tactically discount, and knowingly discard , the truth in the name of a supposed higher good.

    So the shamelessness of the ideologue or operative has been explained. The proximate basis of the mental gymnastics has been more or less covered.

    And we know too that the original leap was a conscious act. Now, an out-loud rumination follows.

    But there is still that ostensible justification for making that conscious choice; an instrumentalist choice, a no limits pragmatism, which flies in the face of 3 thousand years of moral insights and history.

    For whom then is the Marxist paradigm persuasive? Where do you already have to be psychologically in order to embrace the kind of cultural or superstructural values relativism that you must as a precondition already accept before making the Marxist move, lest the action be logically incoherent?

    What I am suggesting, is that you already have to have become a metaphysical and values nihilist, and become so by a kind of moral choice BEFORE you can adopt these new enthusiasims and justifications.

    Do some come by it honestly, and face a disenchanted world without any internal moral dissembling, and without the resentment precursor so often remarked upon nowadays as a prominent psychological or chacteriological feature of progressives? Uhhhhh, maybe.

    But the longer I consider the matter, the more persuaded I am that there is a moment of free choice wherein one selects from various views: ostensibly according to their intellectual persuasiveness. But in fact the choice seems to me to be the result of a process of self conditioning; the end result of a long and accumulating series of earlier moral choices and acts which eventually determine which view you will annoint with the title of intellectual credibility or respectability.

    I don’t like this conclusion. It too much resembles the religious notion of the sin darkened intellect. But it is the only explanation that seems to me to come even close to touching on that mysterious explanatory void at the center of the progressive person’s supposed adoption of a worldview and then a moral system.

    In fact, it’s probably in the other order.

    And now that I think about it, this reverse order, from willed moral preference first, to metaphysic second, jibes with some of the autobiographical revelations of certain left leaning secular philosophers, who’ve admitted outright that their views on the nature of foundational reality, were shaped by the way tbey wanted the world to be, and themselves to be authorized to behave.

    So after all this, I guess it’s not such a groundbreaking insight after all. But it does seem to me to solve the mystery question, by dissolving it. There is no logic problem to the progressives deep amorality, because it never began with a neutral and authentic deduction or inference regarding the nature of reality or the world, in the first place.

    The constructed filter or disposition, not the “science”, came first.

25. Oliver T,
    Yes Buffalo Bill. Thanks for the correction,

26. It is curious, and infuriating, to see a prog look at the Barr/Todd affair, along with a million other examples, put the metaphorical nose in the air, and insist the lie was the truth.
    Sometimes I think the guy presumes I’m dumb enough to believe the opposite of what I’ve just seen. Which he knows I’ve just seen.
    Or it looks as if he’s showing me his intellect is secure. Or something. “You can’t”…..convince me, or something.
    The basic question is whether he believes this, or knows it’s false but that the falsehood has to be believed, seen to be believed, and sold as if true to achieve his goal(s).

    And then there’s manners: I live on Michigan’s west shore. The lakes are rising and making a lot of trouble. Expensive trouble. One woman said that it’s global warming causing the seas to rise and backing up the Lakes. Nobody in the discussion mentioned Niagara Falls. What would have been the point? Either we’d be seen as making fun of the hugely ignorant, or …what? Would her view have changed? Did she already know better? This is of particular interest to me because the metric is eight tons of boulders per linear foot of shoreline and….. I wish the family owned a quarry. Anyway, it’s one of those minor examples that keeps bugging. How can somebody be so stupid? Are we expected to be convinced? Is there an eight year old someplace who might?
    And of the millions of examples of items more important to the general public…what is to be done?

27. To Jamie’s point, and as an attempt at an answer to the question: I guess I am a “changer.” For me it was a somewhat natural process. I did not use to think very deeply about these things. There are a few episodes that were major enough in my life (the Clarence Thomas hearings, the NBC Dateline fake truck explosion, the fall of the Berlin wall) to spur me to dig deeper, but mostly I wanted an enemy, a foil, and the 2 dimensional, leftist cartoons and jokes Leftists put forth amused me and made me feel superior, so I didn’t dig any deeper.

    As the scales started to fall from my eyes I looked back on many of the things I accepted. I remember thinking about Chevy Chase’s portrayal of Gerald Ford as a bungling, uncoordinated half-wit. Gerald Ford was a self made and tremendously accomplished man. Born into abject poverty and given up for adoption. Developed into a stellar athlete who played football at the Division 1, College level. Good student. Law degree. Exemplary career in public service. Chevy Chase was born into wealth and comfort with a silver spoon in his mouth. Never really held a serious job. Did nothing of note academically. And folks who worked with him would leak to the entertainment press that he was a rude, selfish asshole. Yet I’d laugh at his mockery of Ford. Funny thing was, even before the scales fell I knew all those things about both men, but I laughed anyway and would think, “Yeah, Ford, would a dunce.” I’ve even gone back and watched some of the bits. They are literally, objectively not funny. Just Chase bumping into things and falling. There isn’t even an attempt at mimicking Ford’s speech, accent or mannerisms. It’s terrible comedy. Base. Slapstick in its most immature form.

    Most all my political thinking was at that simple, basic level. Phil Collins made a music video about Ronald Reagan as a puppet mistaking the nuclear “button” for the snooze button on his alarm and destroying all humanity (“Land of Confusion”) and I thought it was clever and biting political commentary (although it still didn’t make me think Collins had any talent). I watched that video years later and realized what an unclever script it was. A junior high level idea. What was I thinking? “Ha, look, puppets!”

    I still don’t completely understand how I fell for it at the time, but it is a very common, human trait. I guess SNL and music videos were huge, cultural phenomenon so I simply accepted the narratives they spun?

28. Regarding Chuck Todd, no question he is disingenuous. A possible excuse is he’s a busy guy and someone in the news room fed him the edited clip as a potential discussion point for his show and Todd was not aware of the full statement. That is possible.

    However, if that is what happened, someone with integrity and a platform as big as his would dedicate a large portion of his next show to a sincere apology. Behind the scenes, or maybe publicly he’d find out who on his staff did this and make sure there were repercussions. Those things did not happen, so there are only two possible explanations: Chuck Todd is a drone, a mindless, amoral hack who will read anything that scrolls on his prompter, OR, Chuck Todd is consciously disseminating lies.

29. They’ve all been lying since gosh, since forever—even before Obama entered the WH.

    To be sure, in the Obama era, their lying became a supreme virtue. The sublime handiwork of craftsmen (and craftswomen). A formidable art form. Awesome, Exciting. And, well yes, they certainly did “make a difference”.

    So they were going to stop lying when Trump won the 2016 elections?

    Right. And they’re going to stop lying now?

    Um, don’t think so. No, somehow, I just don’t think so….

    …keeping in mind that:
    Lies are Truth;
    Freedom is Slavery;
    Ignorance is Strength;
    Who controls the past controls the future;
    [and especially] Who controls the present [at this point, the MSM starts giggling uncontrollably] controls the past;

    Oh, and [BTW] Trump—and his supporters—are Our Misfortune…

30. Rufus: You are not alone.

31. People continue to do what works for them.

    Has there been any attempt to selectively edit Chuck Todd’s words, to make them sound (for instance) like a full-throated endorsement of President Trump? He’s on air so much that it shouldn’t be that difficult. (And it would be fun!)

    His complaints would be fun too. And the response could simply be: “You started it, Chuck.”

32. Neo,

    FYI Have tried to post a response since 1:00 am this morning, but the site will not let me post.

33. Neo,

    We will have to agree to disagree, then.

    I don’t dispute what you write above (@ 10:24 pm), but your position, like mine, is mostly supposition. You write “Prior to that [the war in Viet Nam], at least during my lifetime, news was for the most part pretty factual.” How do you know? The problem is that this so-called factual material was controlled by a small group of outlets. How many local papers then, as now, simply ran with an AP story from the newswire or a column written by the New York Times? While that, in itself, does not speak to a factual or non-factual report, neither you nor I nor our parents were in any position to corroborate those stories without extensive, time-consuming research which most people are neither trained for nor have the time to do while earning a living. We simply believed what we read (The Gell-Mann effect).

    Furthermore, as you well know from your legal training, facts can be carefully structured in support of one’s own supposition. This Chuck Todd thread is one current example of such a technique. You called it “the old technique of deceptive editing.” How old? Going back beyond the golden age of news gathering, but eschewed during those altruistic times? Todd did quote what Barr said and quoted him accurately, but not completely. In doing so he failed to give the whole truth and did so most likely intentionally to achieve his desired effect.

    You write that “The difference [then] was that people knew the biases of the papers, because they usually didn’t hide that they were Democrat or Republican, . . . ” Do you mean to suggest that media went from a history of known biased reportage to altruistic seekers of truth and reporters of fact and did so within a generation or two? Would that be the same seekers of fact that refused to report on JFK’s indiscretions in the 1950s and 1960s? The fact that the press corps knew and failed to report this in the 1960s (the whole truth) is no different than Chuck Todd’s knowing but not reporting the latter half of Barr’s quote today.

    Even the sainted Edward R, Murrow is not above reproach,

    Today, Edward R. Murrow’s name is synonymous with integrity in journalism. He reported from the frontlines during World War II and took on Joe McCarthy’s communist witchhunt in the 1950s. But what’s less well known to Americans today is his role as the country’s leading propagandist in the early 1960s. A new book by Gregory M. Tomlin called Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration seeks to remedy that.***

    Frankly, I think that it is easier to see news biases today than even when newspapers were labeld the So-And-So Democrat or the Our Town Republican primarily due to the internet. The internet doesn’t just make sourcing easier. It has democratized facts and has broken the monopoly of the media industry with regard to presenting such a partial “truth” as Todd did with his truncated quote. Todd was called on the carpet almost instantaneously upon airing his deceptive clip. That speed was not possible in the goodold days and there was little likelihood of it ever being questioned.

    I think you and I can agree that during our early lives (you and I are about the same age) news divisions were seen as a public service fulfilling an FCC committment to the public. Today it seems that news divisions are seen as another profit engine much like entertainment divisions of the various broadcast networks. Perhaps this is the throwback to Annie Oakley, but I stand by my belief that the media has always been a hive of scum and villiany and that it’s only been by a matter of degrees.

    ***https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/new-book-reveals-edward-r-murrows-years-as-a-governmen-1776957623

34. Sorry about the formatting. Blockquote should end at Frankly. System will not let me edit.

35. once again, response has been disappeared. This is strange.

36. T:

    For unknown reasons, your comment kept going into the spam folder. I took it out, so now it appears above at 10:26.

37. T:

    You ask “How do you know?”

    To answer that would be a long chapter, but I’ll just do a short incomplete summary version here.

    One way you know is by reading old articles (not from before my time, but from the time I was talking about prior to Vietnam). The way they were written was very different; the whole style. Nowadays you can see – although only if you’re keyed into it – the editorializing within the body of supposed reporting. I’ve described this time and again in post after post. You don’t see that sort of sly stuff in the old articles.

    And I don’t know who you hang around with, but the vast majority of my friends are convinced that the NY Times and the WaPo are completely objective reporters of the facts.

    And by the press in my earlier remarks I mean the major papers such as the Times and the WaPo, etc., not the local rags that talked mostly about when the city council was meeting. I grew up reading the NY Times, and it was a very different kettle of fish back then. It had, among other things, correspondents everywhere abroad, and didn’t rely on foreign stringers like today. Plus, these days most of the “journalists” are very very VERY young (I’ve written about that, too), or old leftist warhorses who cut their teeth on “speaking truth to power” during Vietnam and have never let go. And most of the younguns are graduates of journalism schools where they’re taught that they have a political mission, and it’s not just to tell the facts. It’s to influence people. That was not the way it used to be, although of course there were exceptions. Most reporters came up through the ranks and not J schools.

    And the standards were very very very different, regarding anonymous sources and what sort of checking was required before something was published. See this, for example, as well as this and this.

38. Neo,

    Thank you for your consideration in getting my response online.

39. Anonymous sources are one of the chief reasons the media has went downhill. I’m a journalism major (late 80s grad) and I was taught to never use an anonymous source without getting someone to confirm it. Now they run with whatever gossip or lie someone wants to get out there.

    Today’s journalists don’t work. They sit on their Twitter feeds until they get that anonymous tip and then they write up a story. It’s depressing.

40. for the “news” media (now properly called infotainment) – follow the money. Large media outlets have devolved into about 6 large corporate entities with substantial interests in and revenue generation from China. There is no more mystery about it than there was about the establishment of the AP and the media growing more reliant on it for cheaper operations – then the sale or takeover of it by Al Jazeera and the gradual morphing of the story lines toward a more Muslim friendly reporting. Because that’s where the money is.
    For those progressives that unthinkingly consume the so called news – how is it that these soi-disant intelligentsia don’t seem to notice the 180 degree gyrations of the narrative in a matter of days? So-and-so is a hero; two days later he/she is a goat and the worst person ever. Or thus and such didn’t happen; then well if it did it wasn’t so bad…

41. Commenters above are talking about “truth” and “lies”. Yes, it used to be that the truth of a statement mattered in a discussion/ debate. But …. The “Search for Truth” was expunged from our universities a generation or two ago. It is, in our Brave New World, irrelevant to those of our Supremely Credentialed Class.

    The Chuck Todds, the Chuck Schumers, the James Comeys, — they’re not “ashamed to be caught lying”. The game is to Sway The Masses. All techniques to that end are permissible, and there is no shame attached to the tools used. Remember the immortal words of Harry Reid: “Well it worked, didn’t it?”

42. “This post and others like it also are attempts to give anyone who might care to discuss journalistic lies with relatives and friends some information that could be part of that discussion. I’m mulling over doing that myself, and considering who I might discuss such things with so that I don’t waste my time. I think there are a few people I know who are open-minded and willing to have such a discussion without descending into screaming and insults. I’ve been planning my approach. It’s not easy, but I think it needs doing.” – Neo

    This looks like a big step to me; good luck.

43. Relevant to Neo’s step inviting friends to consider new information — there’s a problem for anyone “changing” political viewpoints.

    https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/stealth-trump-voter-presidents-secret-weapon

    quotes from here:
    https://news.yahoo.com/secret-voters-favored-trump-over-clinton-two-to-one-090000746.html

    “Slepian, the study’s lead author, told Yahoo News that many Trump supporters feared “getting in arguments with people and creating conflicts with those around them,” electing instead to keep quiet. “They didn’t have anyone to talk to,” Slepian explained.

    Such feelings of social isolation can drive people to online communities, where their prejudices are accepted, but also amplified and reinforced. That, in turn, could further stifle civic discourse, hardening convictions and silencing debate.”

44. Well – people do change! (h/t Artfldgr in China thread)

    https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/did-emma-sulkowicz-mattress-performance-get-redpilled.html

    In the past, Sulkowicz dismissed opposing views without understanding them, but now she sees intellectual curiosity as intertwined with respect: she wants to disagree with people on their own terms. This is an ethical position, but one with personal resonance. “I’ve always been upset,” she admits, “that there are people out there who assume that I’m a bad or mean person without ever having met me.” When she describes her political journey, she fixates on the experience of surprising people, of walking into a group who might otherwise dislike her and “disrupting their expectations.” At these [libertarian] parties, she reflects, “I can become fuller to certain people rather than staying the same caricature. I’m going from flat to round.”

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