Misinformation and lies show need to modify interpreation of the First Amendment

In the great American marketplace of ideas, a troubling commodity is being traded with increasing brazenness: the deliberate falsehood.

The right to access truth, a principle intertwined with the very concept of human dignity, is being systematically undermined in the nation’s political discourse, particularly around the volatile issue of immigration.

While the First Amendment rightly precludes the government from acting as an arbiter of truth, this freedom has been weaponized to create a polluted information environment where productive political debate suffocates, and the public’s right to an honest foundation for self-governance is violated.

The mechanics of this deception often mirror a criminal fraud scheme, where a narrative is constructed not on fact, but on the strategic intent to deceive for gain.

Consider the case of President Donald Trump, whose political fortunes were inextricably linked to the prolific propagation of verifiable untruths. His relentless assertions about immigrant “invasions” and endemic criminality were not mere rhetorical flourishes; they were central to his brand.

When he claimed, for instance, that the U.S. government was allowing undocumented immigrants to “pour into” the country to inflate census counts for Democrats, this was not a policy dispute but an evidence-free fabrication.

Like a merchant selling counterfeit goods, he presented a distorted reality to his customers—the voting public—to secure their support.

The fact that such claims were repeatedly debunked by official data and independent fact-checkers did little to diminish their political utility, demonstrating that in the modern arena, a lie can often travel faster and farther than its correction.

This playbook is not new. Decades before, a different industry executed a masterclass in deceptive narrative-building to derail a policy that threatened its profits.

In the early 1990s, as the Clinton administration sought to create a system of universal health care, the insurance industry responded with the “Harry and Louise” advertising campaign. Those ads featured a ‘concerned couple’ fretting over a hypothetical government bureaucracy that would take away their choice of doctor.

The campaign’s genius was its use of emotional, relatable fear, artfully sidestepping the complex realities of the proposed policy. The result was a triumph of perception over substance: public opinion turned, legislation died, and the industry preserved its lucrative status quo.

The human cost of that victory, however, can be measured in grim arithmetic.

Studies from Public Citizen, Harvard, Families USA, and the Institute of Medicine have consistently estimated that over 1.3 million American citizens have died in the ensuing decades due to a lack of health insurance or inadequate coverage—a direct, if delayed, consequence of a debate skewed by intentionally misleading information.

The throughline from Harry and Louise to the modern immigration panic is the understanding that a well-told story, even a fictional one, can overpower a cumbersome fact.

In the immigration debate, complex legal frameworks—like the actual role of immigration courts, the legal basis for asylum claims, or the statistical reality of crime rates among immigrant populations—are flattened into sensational, often wholly invented, anecdotes.

These stories then spiral through media ecosystems and political speeches, becoming accepted wisdom without their origins ever being checked, much like the infamous British tale of a deportation halted because a child disliked foreign chicken nuggets.

The consequence is a democracy operating under a form of duress, where consent is not so much governed as it is manufactured.

The right to free speech protects the right to speak, but it does not absolve speakers from the moral and civic responsibility to ground their claims in reality.

When truth becomes merely one option among many in the political marketplace, the very foundation of the Republic—informed self-governance—is compromised.

A nation cannot solve its problems if it cannot agree on what they are, and it cannot agree on what they are if the public square is flooded with fictions designed not to illuminate, but to obscure and to profit.