by Laurence Peterson
In the long and illustrious history of bullshit, there has perhaps never been another month quite like January, 2026, at least in terms of its political manifestations. The month began with a completely unprovoked attack on Venezuela that resulted in the apprehension of the country’s president and his wife, and their subsequent abduction to the United States. This action resulted in the death of scores of people, and was done without any congressional input. Days later, the city of Minneapolis in Minnesota was occupied by some 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel (quite possibly due to the racist targeting of the large Somali community there) who proceeded to terrorize the community with many arrests and violent encounters with residents.
Days after that, Renee Good was shot 3 times and killed by a Federal agent, Jonathan Ross, who was spirited from the Minnesota and remains a free man. A little more than a fortnight later, another Minneapolis resident and American citizen, Alex Pretti, was mauled by 8 Federal agents (who likewise remain free men) and shot by two of them 10 times, resulting in his death. At the same time, US warships from the Far East are taking up positions near Iran, and the Trump administration continues to threaten that nation, again unprovoked in any demonstrable way, with military force. Closer to home, President Trump is accelerating pressure on desperately benighted Cuba, which, once more, poses absolutely no threat to the US, and without congressional authorization. By the time this piece appears (I am writing on January 29th), it is very possible that Iran will have been attacked, or that the Cuba will descend into some kind of chaos. Or God knows what else: Greenland; Canada; Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon. And another government shutdown looms. Meanwhile, there’s always Epstein.
These are only the most utterly egregious instances of outrageously inappropriate exercises of political authority, often of extremely dubious legality, that have been undertaken by Trump and his minions, during a month in which an average day could feature (sometimes quite a few) news items like “Judge blocks feds from destroying evidence in Minnesota shooting“, or “Five-year-old deported to Honduras despite being US citizen latest child victim in Trump crackdown“, “$1 billion contribution secures permanent seat on Trump’s ‘Board of Peace‘”, “Attorney General Bondi wants records of voters, Medicaid and SNAP Recipients to end chaos in Minnesota“, and “Trump pardons Florida fraudster after commuting her sentence during his first term“.
All these actions and then some have been subsequently justified, if that is what one can call it in any meaningful way, by Trump and members of the administration, by falsehoods, slander, contradictions and alternative accounts of video evidence that anyone can see. The general lack of concern on the part of associates of the administration that the blatant falsehood of the claims made will lead to any adverse consequences is utterly breathtaking. I, personally, have never experienced anything close to observing this in my lifetime.
But there is more. On January the 20th, Trump gave a press briefing that simply has to be seen to be believed, and followed it the next day with a speech and short Q&A session at the World Economic Forum in Davos that may have eclipsed even the previous day’s singular performance. Both occasions involved argumentation, again if you can call it that, of a decidedly childish nature–often being mere repetitions to the word of talking points Trump has been using for months or even longer (evidencing almost no serious effort by way of further preparation for the particular occasion), liberal deployment of patent untruths, and shameless insults directed at members of the audience and others, including the use of exaggerated foreign accents to mock certain leaders. But I would direct attention here to the reaction of the different audiences: at the press briefing, reporters unashamedly threw themselves at Trump after his speech, hoping to put largely softball or at most mildly challenging questions to him, the answers to which provided almost no new information; and at Davos, the VIP rulers of major countries and heads of vast multinational corporations sat in obedient silence during the insulting pantomime, whilst the appointed moderator went out of his way to shower Trump with flattery.
Can we still look at this sort for thing as everyday, run-of-the-mill bullshit? Do we not miss something essential if we choose to confine ourselves to such notions? I will argue that we seem, as a society, to be moving towards a situation in which, especially regarding politics, but extending into other matters, it has become effectively impossible to call bullshit. Moreover, and perhaps more disturbingly, I feel we are becoming desensitized to the emotive power that accompanies the calling of bullshit because we have become so distrustful of so many of our most basic institutions and even communicative practices that we no longer feel much disappointment when these things consistently fail to enhance or promote successful communication or action. Rather than instilling an active outrage, the calling of bullshit–or whatever it is now–reinforces a decidedly passive helplessness.
If we continue to rely on the virtually universally acclaimed philosophical conception of bullshit, that provided by the late Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton, I believe it becomes very difficult to perceive these changes, never mind to incorporate them into a theoretical understanding of bullshit. That is why I think it is so important to address the issue yet again, as Trump and related phenomena turn a reckoning with bullshit into an absolutely vital pursuit. So here goes.
Frankfurt’s position is actually very simple. He draws a distinction between the bullshitter and the liar: the liar distorts the truth, but maintains a strong interest in the ultimate truth being distorted, if only to protect the deviation from it being perpetrated from being susceptible to becoming known; the bullshitter, on the other hand, must retain no interest in the veracity of anything. The bullshitter is simply indifferent to whether or not any deviation from an underlying truth in his or her statement (Frankfurt’s analysis doe not seem to extend to actions, gestures–or even jobs (thank you, David Graeber!), which constitutes an important weakness in his analysis, in my view) exists or can become known. The liar must constantly be mindful of what s/he implicitly or explicitly denies; the bullshitter acknowledges no such constraint. The liar knows what s/he deviates from. Possession of such knowledge on behalf of the bullshitter is optional, if it exists at all.
Though this insight is very helpful in mapping out a posture implied by the statements of bullshitters, perhaps as a first step in a philosophical treatment of bullshit, it seemed incomplete, perhaps woefully so, to me from the beginning. It told me nothing specific about those on the receiving end of perceived bullshit, and was especially poor in accounting for the strangely intense emotional state that accompanies such perceptions so very often. And it offered very little by way of providing for a significant account of the the intention of the bullshitter: why adopt such a communicative strategy in the first place? Indeed, why is such adoption so very, very popular? And what does the peculiar popularity of bullshit, combined with the equally uniquely vivid offense so often taken when one finds one’s self on the receiving end of it, say about our society, its institutions and its practices? Can and does this change over time in important ways? Frankfurt hinted at certain things regarding some of these questions in his essay On Bullshit, but did not seem to suggest anything essential was required to follow up in these directions to finish his inquiry. And, as far as I have been able to make out, neither has anyone else, at least in the popular literature on the subject.
What would serve as a proper follow up to the questions I have posed? If you will allow me to quote at length from the first piece I wrote on the subject:
“What seems to make bullshit so exasperating is precisely the reliance of the bullshitter on accepted (though not necessarily well understood) norms, laws and conventions that effectively protect the bullshitter from objection, even and especially when such a reliance clearly clashes with different beliefs of the bullshitter that should also be clearly evident to the wider community, not just the person/s being bullshitted. And I would submit that the thing that provides the word with the emotive power of forbidden fruit, and installs it in its rightful place as one of the language’s most cherished obscenities, consists in the fact that it is felt that there are no effective means of appeal which might allow the contested statement-or deed-to be challenged.
In consequence, we are forced to walk away from situations we find somehow unsatisfactory without enjoying recourse to any more developed discursive or more binding devices to tease or tear out of the statement, deed or outcome, more acceptable ones, or simply a better explanation why we must ultimately submit in the first place. Indeed, it is worse than this: we feel that these means are, to a not insignificant degree, already available; and that we must submit precisely on occasions when clear-cut conventions or rules should automatically generate objections from the wider community of listeners or witnesses surrounding us. It is this visceral sense of casually enforced rules and subsequent illegitimate isolation from a community who, according to their own publicized standards of behavior and communication, would seem to be committed to an enthusiastic hearing of our objections, that seems to characterize bullshit and take it out of the realm of normal discourse and provide it with the emotional power that has always been the wellspring of the profane. Ultimately, it seems that an identification of the posture of the bullshitter as being indifferent towards truth can only be a preliminary first step in getting to the heart of the matter where bullshit is concerned: there must be a subsequent establishment of what makes this motivation sensible and effective in real social settings if any account of bullshit is to be set in motion coming from the direction of Frankfurt’s efforts. It is precisely because the bullshitter can be so aggressively and manifestly confident that the truth condition of her/his statements will not be investigated, or deeds interrogated, or that adverse consequences cannot follow upon conclusion of such efforts, that the bullshitter can possibly feel at all indifferent to the “truth” Frankfurt speaks of; the social setting provides the indispensable condition for the attitude towards truth; and no account of bullshit can be considered complete before that has been holistically integrated into said account.”
I believe this account provides the kind of follow up that Frankfurt neglected to work out. But there is another question that must be answered: how does the conception account for any kind of social change that might alter our notion of bullshit? Frankfurt’s unrefined position suggests a kind of unchanging essence where bullshit is concerned, and simply cannot be useful in charting any significant alterations that might affect the word’s meaning in actual practice. I would like to try to show how my notion of bullshit can.
I spoke in the quoted passage of people being forced to walk away from situations they find “somehow unsatisfactory” when they believe they are the victims of bullshit, and that this gives rise to a visceral sense that the (often very strongly) implied communicative and institutional standards of the group in question, or even society, which would seem to support the specific objection being made to the bullshit are not operative or even present. I believe that this sense of dissatisfaction, especially in politics, has been, to a palpable degree, disappearing. This is clear, I think, in many of the instances I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. For many people, the stories and headlines I provided fail to provoke the kind of outrage any more that they once might have. There is, for many, such a lack of belief in the kind of standards that might provoke outrage if denied that, rather than eliciting a further, visceral, active response, leads to an accumulating sense of powerlessness. Such people have come to expect that most group standards they have relied on in the past are no longer reliable for their purposes. They are no longer dissatisfied, because they don’t expect anything meaningful at all. Is this still compatible with any proper conception of vigorous idea of bullshit, at least in politics? Maybe it does. But it is different.
And more people seem to be resuscitating the old notion of bullshit, in response to the utter depravity and dangerousness of the Trump regime, amongst other things. But there is a long, long way to go, and, given the fact that the courts and media in particular are so ridiculously slow to challenge, never mind reverse, the cascading outrages that burst forth, such that they tend to become forgotten within days, it is hard to see how such sentiment, and, more important, a truly effective resistance to not only Trump, but the so very many other corrosive forces that preceded and gave rise to Trump, will manifest themselves.
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