855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About

Ira Glass

Kasey is autistic, and she says it's puzzling, neurotypical people and how much they lie. And she's not alone.

Ira Glass

She gave me this example. When she worked in HR, they caught this guy who was having an inappropriate relationship with his administrative assistant. A naked picture of her was on his work computer. And still, he denied it, kept lying.

Ira Glass

Looking around on Reddit, we found a lot of autistic people writing about this exact thing. Here's somebody who posted saying, "I recently realized that a lot of things I had always categorized as lies are not seen that way by NT people--" neurotypical people.

"Like, they say it, knowing it isn't literally true, but they don't think of it as a lie because they don't expect others to believe it. For example, here are some things that I always thought were weird, inexplicable lies--" and then there's a list. "It was great to see you. Let's do this again soon. I hope you have a great holiday. You are so funny. I love your hairdo. Where did you buy that dress? I need to get one, too. Oh, wow, that's very interesting. See you later."

They continue-- "I've decided to start translating a lot of NT chatter from its literal meaning into a simple form of, 'Hello, I want you to see me as friendly so I am making friendly noises.'"

Ira Glass

She remembers when she realized just how widespread lying is for neurotypical people. She was a teenager, and she says she was heavyset, from a heavyset family.

Ira Glass

Now, of course she's used to it. When I talked to her, she was just about to go to a conference where she knew people who barely remember her, who'd be saying, so great to see you, and not mean a word of it. And she's OK with that. She ignores it, moves on. But she tries to keep things more strictly truthful.

Ira Glass

That is obviously a very hard example to argue against. She told me another one where her dog pooped all over her car, and she was late to a meeting. And when she got there, she did not tell the truth about why. She didn't want to gross anybody out. Also, none of their business.

Otherwise, she almost always picks honesty. When kids picked on her nieces about their weight, they came to her crying and asked, am I fat? And she says, it was really hard not to say the kinds of lies that people said to her when she was their age. But she didn't. She said, let's talk about your body and being fat. There's nothing wrong with being fat. Honesty, she says, is the only way to vulnerability and intimacy, which, of course.

I was very curious how she does not lie at work. I definitely do most of my lying on the job. Not here, on the air, of course, where everything I say is deeply, thoroughly fact-checked, but just around the office, just white lies. I don't understand how you get by without a little pretending now and then in a workplace. I don't actually understand how you would get things done. Kasey has none of that.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, lies that really just leave you scratching your head sometimes. Seriously, we have some fun stories for you. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. Act One, "The Real L Word." OK, so to kick things off today, we're going to revisit some recent historical events. I think that's all I'm going to say for now. Dana Chivvis tells what happened.

Dana Chivvis

Liz Flock was just starting out as a reporter in 2011, living in DC, working at the Washington Post. This was the golden age of blogging and social media. Instagram was just a year old, basically a toddler. Twitter was five.

And news outlets realized they could use these blossoming tools of the internet to do a hybrid version of reporting. They called it "the breaking news blog." Liz was a reporter at the Washington Post's breaking news blog--

Dana Chivvis

The job was a combination of actual reporting and aggregation, basically reading other reporters' stories and various social media accounts and repackaging it all. I was doing a similar job around this time at AOL News.

Our blog was called Surge Desk because we were supposed to create a surge of traffic for the website. Only I worked at AOL News, not the Washington Post, so I was reporting on Groundhog Day in Staten Island and writing posts about how solar flares are kind of like the sun is farting. Liz was writing about the Arab Spring.

Dana Chivvis

To keep up with all this from her desk in DC, she followed a bunch of social media accounts and blogs. The Arab Spring, you might remember, was one of the first big social movements to use these online tools to organize. Rightly or wrongly, it was called the "Facebook revolution."

One of the blogs Liz followed was written by a 35-year-old Syrian-American woman named Amina Arraf, who had recently moved back to Damascus from the US. Her blog was called A Gay Girl in Damascus.

Dana Chivvis

She's openly critical of the Bashar al-Assad regime, at a time when the regime was arresting, torturing, and murdering critics and activists. In one post, titled "Irony," there's a photo she's taken of a billboard. On it, Assad's smiling face and the headscratcher of a tagline, "Syria believes in you." Below the photo, Amina writes, "SURE," in all caps and multiple exclamation points. She's provocative.

Dana Chivvis

Legally, I can't let her read you the rest of this poem-- FCC rules.

So a young, pretty Syrian-American lesbian taunting the brutal Assad regime. It's not much surprise when the secret police show up at her house one day.

On April 26, Amina publishes a post titled "My Father the Hero." She describes a harrowing scene. It was the middle of the night, and these two young, muscly guys in leather jackets rang the doorbell of her family's home. They've come for Amina. They know about her blog, know that she's a lesbian. They threaten to rape her.

But Amina's father argues with them, chides them. He knows them, knows their families. He says to them, quote, "Do you know what is our family name? You do? Then you know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina. You know who it was who liberated al-Quds. You know, too, maybe, that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners." He tells them to leave, and they do. Amina's post goes viral. Back in DC, Liz decides to write about it.

Dana Chivvis

Amina emails her back, and the next day, Liz publishes a post-- "Syria blogger says she faced arrest but remains defiant." In the article, Amina tells Liz, quote, "If we want to live in a free country, we need to start acting as though we live in a free country."

Six weeks later, Liz goes into the office.

Dana Chivvis

The post says Amina was abducted by three government agents.

Dana Chivvis

Liz was shocked and upset by this news.

Dana Chivvis

Homosexuality was, and still is, illegal in Syria. Liz writes a post about Amina's disappearance. So does the Washington Post's Syria correspondent, and The New York Times and The Guardian and others. Liz calls the State Department. They tell her they're looking into it. A Twitter campaign gets going, #FreeAmina, and multiple Facebook groups, which get over 10,000 followers overnight. It's a big deal. And then--

Dana Chivvis

Has anyone actually met Amina in person, not just on the internet? It's a good question. In fact, when Liz emailed Amina asking for an interview, Amina had responded that for her own safety, she couldn't talk on the phone, so Liz had sent her questions by email.

Dana Chivvis

The Wall Street Journal reported that the photo of Amina on A Gay Girl in Damascus was actually a photo of a woman named Jelena Lecic, who is of Croatian descent and was living in London at the time. So Liz and her editor, Melissa Bell, start trying to figure out who Amina actually is.

They look up the IP address of the Gay Girl blog. It leads back to Scotland, to the University of Edinburgh. And they get a mailing address for Amina from one of her online friends. It's a house in Georgia, the state, not the country, owned by an American couple who were studying in Scotland. They narrow in on the wife, a woman named Britta.

Dana Chivvis

"Syria believes in you." It's the same photo from Amina's blog post titled "Irony."

Dana Chivvis

So they got to call Britta, but they can't find Britta's phone number. But they do find Britta's mom's phone number. They call her up.

Dana Chivvis

Tom, Britta's husband, Tom MacMaster.

Dana Chivvis

Aha! One of those husbands. What they learned about Tom-- he's 40 years old, a Middle East fanatic, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He's getting his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh. There's more.

OK, one last important detail about Tom's extracurricular activities.

Dana Chivvis

She's not just writing lesbian erotica. She's on dating sites. She's had an online girlfriend in Canada for the last six months. The girlfriend started one of the Facebook campaigns to free Amina. And Amina--

LezGetReal.com, for those of you who don't remember the sapphic offerings of the internet in the year 2011, was a website where a variety of writers blogged about lesbianism and the lesbian news of the day. Amina had written a bunch on LezGetReal.com. And the founder, Paula Brooks, had encouraged her to start A Gay Girl in Damascus that winter. And, Paula told Liz, they'd had a little online fling.

Dana Chivvis

Liz explained to Paula what was going on with Amina.

Dana Chivvis

LezGetReal.com posted an apology to readers for publishing 19 articles Amina had supposedly written.

Time to confront Tom. Liz reaches him on the phone. He's on vacation with his wife in Istanbul.

Dana Chivvis

Other reporters had figured it out, too. Liz and Melissa decide to run with the story that A Gay Girl in Damascus was actually Tom, a white dude living in Scotland. But before they can publish, Tom beats them to it. He confesses in a post on A Gay Girl.

Dana Chivvis

Tom writes the quintessential non-apology apology, says that while the narrative voice might have been fictional, he was describing a very real situation on the ground in Damascus, and he doesn't think he harmed anyone. Maybe you saw the whole thing coming, internet scams being what they are these days. Maybe you're thinking, hey, this whole story is a scam. I can't believe I paid no dollars for this. But calm down a second. There's more.

Liz and her editor, Melissa, published their story on Sunday, six days after Amina was supposedly abducted. Their headline is "A Gay Girl in Damascus Comes Clean." After they post their article, Liz and Melissa are talking with a more senior editor. Everyone's pretty happy with the story. But there's something still nagging at Liz, a detail she can't get out of her head. It has to do with that other lesbian she interviewed, Paula Brooks, from LezGetReal.com. She says to her editors--

Liz had emailed with Paula Brooks. Paula had sent Liz a photo of her driver's license as proof of identity, but Liz had only ever spoken with Paula's dad.

So instead of celebrating a great scoop outing Tom as Amina, Liz dove straight into investigating Paula Brooks.

Dana Chivvis

Bill told Liz he'd had some lesbian friends who were mistreated, and he wanted to help. He also wanted a platform where he could write in support of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The real Paula Brooks, Bill explained, was his partner, who didn't know he'd been using her identity online to pose as a lesbian.

Dana Chivvis

For the uninitiated, a sock puppet hoax is when someone uses a false identity online. The day after they published their story about Tom being Amina, Liz and Melissa published another one, with the headline, "Paula Brooks, editor of LezGetReal, also a man."

Dana Chivvis

By the time Tom's little lie had rolled all the way downhill, it was a pretty sizable lie with real-world consequences. The Syrian government used it to suggest that everyone in the West was lying about the Assad regime's murderous tactics against activists and bloggers. They used it to suggest that gay people in Syria were really just agents of the West.

In retrospect, Amina's writing, it's so bad. Like when her father supposedly says to the secret police, "You know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina," it's like the 1950s Hollywood version of how a Syrian man would talk.

But what was good about Amina's writing-- Tom's writing-- is that it played for emotion. It confirmed what we were all feeling here in the West, what excited us about the Arab Spring. Democracy was ascendant. The bad guys were going down. The lesbians were taking over, or whatever. Amina was the lie we all wanted.

I reached out to Tom, Bill, and Britta for this story. Tom and Bill definitely did not want to talk to me. Britta didn't respond. But the day after he was outed, Tom did some press. He said he had wanted to wind Amina down for a while. And he was going on vacation, so having her abducted was kind of his out-of-office message.

A lot's changed since then. The Washington Post, where Liz worked, is now owned by Jeff Bezos. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. Instagram is owned by Facebook. Facebook has done away with fact-checking. And the president has his own social media platform, called Truth Social, where he regularly posts falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

It kind of makes you long for the good old days, when the internet wasn't dominated by the most powerful, and people still cared what was true and what wasn't. The truth-- so retro. It's a whole new world now, except over here on the dusty, old radio, where I still can't say "shit" or "piss" or "fuck" or "cunt" or "cocksucker" or "motherfucker" or "tits"-- not even "tits"-- because, of course, think of the chaos that would ensue if I did.

Ira Glass

Dana Chivvis is a reporter on our program. Liz Flock is still a reporter, but now she spends years reporting her stories. Her latest book, The Furies, which she traveled to Syria multiple times for, is out in paperback.

Coming up, an American dad makes an impassioned argument for more unnecessary lies. Also, Masha Gessen. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "That's a Weird Thing to Lie About." We have stories today of unnecessary lies, outrageous lies that make you wonder, why lie about that in the first place? We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "Bully Pulpit."

There's a particular kind of lie that somebody who's been on our show a few times, Masha Gessen, wrote about a few years ago. And when I read what they wrote, I realized, oh, I had not thought about this as a specific way that a person can lie that is different from all the other ways a person can lie.

It's a kind of lie that President Trump does a lot. He kicked off his presidency with one of these lies in the very first minutes on the very first day of his very first term. You may remember that he insisted that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than they were, even though photos clearly showed that he was wrong.

Ira Glass

That's something that Elon Musk claimed without presenting any evidence at all in an Oval Office press event, where he also suggested that Social Security may be sending out checks to people 150 years old-- also without evidence, seems to be flatly untrue.

Masha says these kind of lies, these bully lies, are different from the kind of lies that we've been used to in American politics for most of our history, where the two sides argue back and forth, present evidence, try to convince each other-- or try to convince voters, at least.

The bully lie is different. It doesn't try to convince you. It doesn't present evidence. It just tells you to pick a side. So when the president said that diversity programs caused the plane crash over the Potomac, when he called the president of Ukraine a dictator without elections, he didn't lay out a set of facts to make his case. He wasn't interested in rebuttal.

When he does this kind of thing, Masha writes, he's "asserting control over reality itself" and splitting the country into those who agree to live in his reality and those who resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts.

I don't know if it's worth complicating this analysis with this example, but I was actually able to think of one instance of the Democrats doing the kind of bully lie that Masha writes about, and it's a big one that we all just lived through. It seemed like it was done more out of desperation than anything else and not part of a daily pattern of making false claims with no facts behind them. The thing I'm talking about is Joe Biden and his advisors concealing how he had aged in office. I talked to Masha about this.

Ira Glass

The reason Masha is so aware of what that feels like is that they grew up in Russia, left, came back, then fled when it became impossible for them to keep living there under Vladimir Putin. Masha says the bully lie is significant because it's not a traditional part of American politics, but it is a very standard tactic of authoritarian leaders around the world and in history.

Masha has actually written and reported a ton about this. They wrote a book about Putin and another one about Russia's recent turn to totalitarianism. And authoritarian government, just to remind you, is basically a government run by one person, a strongman leader, who holds all the power, which, of course, is different from our system of checks and balances.

Masha wrote about the bully lie in their book about Donald Trump's first term. The book is called Surviving Autocracy. That's what I asked them to read from a little earlier. In that book, Masha argues that Donald Trump does lots of things that we normally see from authoritarian leaders, not just the bully lies.

And I think it's worth talking about it for a little bit here. I found it eye-opening to see it laid out point by point. And I just want to say, if you like the president and you think talking about him this way is just way, way out of line, just stay with me. We talked about that.

Ira Glass

That is actually almost the definition of an autocrat-- acting like you have ultimate and unchecked power. And there are other specific things, Masha says, that Donald Trump has done in the last few weeks that are standard moves for an autocrat. Number one, punishing press outlets who don't do what he says. Trump kicked the Associated Press from covering him in the Oval Office, on Air Force 1, and at major events after they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America like he wants.

Autocrats go after their enemies. Donald Trump has been going after so many enemies publicly. Former aides. He fired Justice Department officials who prosecuted cases against him. And this week, even went after the law firm that is giving advice to one of those officials, taking away their security clearances which will make defending that official harder. That is very autocratic leader. And then there's Donald Trump's basic campaign message, make America great again.

Ira Glass

Masha Gessen. Their book about Donald Trump and his autocratic tendencies is called Surviving Autocracy. These days, they're an opinion columnist at The New York Times.

They recently wrote in The Times-- "Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you, most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening. It is stultifying. It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe underwater because you're submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism, and eventually, in bad literature and bad movies."

Just this week, lawyers nominated for top positions in the Justice Department, including solicitor general, were asked if the president could ignore or disobey a court order. And they hedged. They did not say that he should obey. Vice President Vance said earlier this month that judges should not be allowed to control what the president does.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "In Defense of Unnecessary Lies." Well, it's been nearly a whole hour talking about far-fetched lies that do not seem to make the world a better place at all. Our tone, I'll admit, has been skeptical, sometimes incredulous. In this act, we turn that around. I present one of our coworkers here at the radio show, Ike Sriskandaraja.

Ike Sriskandaraja

Sometimes in my own life, just for fun, I'll make up something and tell people. Here's one from years ago. You remember Karl Rove, the guy who helped get George W. Bush elected to be governor and then president? I told my friend Charles that this man, well into his 60s, was really only 36. He just looked old.

I guess I liked the world where things aren't quite as they appear, and the people running the show are more like children in grown-up suits. And Charles, he went with it, so hard that years later, he came back and told me he'd told dozens of people before catching the lie, which, to be honest, made me feel great and enjoy the lie even more that strangers I never met got to step into this funny little warped reality.

But sometimes these lies of amusement don't work out so well. Like, for instance, when my dad came to visit me years ago and was staying over in my small apartment, he noticed a diploma on my desk ordaining me as a minister.

Ike Sriskandaraja

My dad.

Ike Sriskandaraja

It would have been easy to correct this misunderstanding and tell my dad the real story-- that my friends had asked me to officiate their wedding. And to legally marry them, I had to get ordained in an online church. It just seemed funnier to go along with the story that I was now a minister in a Christian cult.

Ike Sriskandaraja

My mom.

Ike Sriskandaraja

While my dad met my fake conversion story with resigned disappointment and no follow-up questions, my mom just called me.

Ike Sriskandaraja

Honestly, this all surprised me that my dad couldn't tell I was joking, mostly because I learned this type of joke from him.

Ike Sriskandaraja

My dad tells people he came to America by going through a tunnel under the wall. Other times, it's a boat. When I was a kid, he told me the stretch marks on his shoulders were from a fight he had with a tiger. I told everybody.

But my favorite lie he told happened during a math class my dad used to teach at Madison Area Technical College. My good friend Buskus was taking it, and I decided to go with him. Now, before the lesson started, my dad introduced me to the class.

Ike Sriskandaraja

My dad and my friend Buskus started laughing so hard they were wiping tears from their eyes. The rest of the class seemed confused why their teacher was misidentifying a new South Asian student as being from Central America. It was very funny, especially for those of us who have to field a lot of those "Where are you from originally?" types of questions.

Anyone carefully observing my dad might notice he has a tell-- quick eyebrow raise and a big grin. I have the same tell, and people close to me know it. But apparently, that doesn't make it any less frustrating to live with. Early in our relationship, my now-wife Emma told me it was driving her crazy. She didn't want to look over her shoulder to check for my tell or second-guess everything I was telling her.

Like, do you really want to go to an info session on a timeshare in Juarez? Or what do you mean, the president says he will raise the black flag of ISIS over the White House? She told me to stop. Neither of us remember the exact lie that drove her over the top, but she remembers the feeling very clearly.

Ike Sriskandaraja

Emma compared it to this thing I did when I was 26 and had just moved into my own apartment, when I used to use my kitchen drawers for non-kitchen items, which is not exactly a lie, but felt like waking up on the set of a surrealist play.

Ike Sriskandaraja

Emma didn't want to live in Wonderland. It's too crazy, too hard to find the forks. If we were going to make plans together for the rest of our lives, she wanted straight answers. So I stopped lying to her. For years, I packed this part of me away, in the dresser I ended up buying for my underwear. But now we have two kids, and I've brought lying back into our house, especially with our oldest.

Ike Sriskandaraja

Leroy gets it. So far, he hasn't asked me to stop yet. Maybe you would like to try this in your own house. In fact, maybe it's a valuable lesson for your kids. It trains them to determine fact from fiction. It seems useful in our world.

Ira Glass

Ike Sriskandaraja is one of the producers of our show.

By the way, his friend Charles, who Ike lied to about Karl Rove, Charles told me recently that he never thought that that was true. He lied to Ike about believing it and also about telling others, just to amuse himself.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Diane Wu. The people who put together today's show include Jendayi Bonds, Michael Comite, Angela Gervasi, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Lilly Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Andy Carvin, Anna Starecheski, Annika Hotta, Natasha Nelson, Ira Kraemer, Eric Garcia, and Matt Miller. Our website, thisamericanlife.org.

I know you. You're living your life, doing stuff. You need something to listen to. What are you going to listen to? Go to our website. You can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. That is still happening. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. Have you heard he is doing a one-man show based on the children's book The Very Hungry Caterpillar? It opens this way.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.