https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-13-2025
"President Donald J. Trump has been trying to remove Federal Reserve governor
Lisa Cook from the board of governors, alleging she lied on a mortgage
application by claiming two homes as primary residences, which could garner a
lower interest rate. Yesterday Chris Prentice and Marisa Taylor of
Reuters
reported that documents show that, in fact, Cook told the lender who provided a
mortgage that a property in Georgia for which she was obtaining a loan would be
a “vacation home.”
It appears the documents that director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency
Bill Pulte used to accuse her of mortgage fraud were standardized forms that
her personal application specifying the house was a second home overrode. It
also appears that Cook never applied for a primary residence tax exemption for
the Georgia home and that she referred to the home on official documents as a
“2nd home.”
In contrast,
Reuters reported last week that unlike Cook, Pulte’s own father
and stepmother claimed primary residence tax exemptions for two homes in
different states. When that news broke, one of the towns in which they reside
removed their primary residence exemption and charged them for back taxes.
Trump hoped to use the allegations against Cook to advance his control of the
Federal Reserve. Now the revelation that those allegations appear to be false
highlights the degree to which this administration is attempting to achieve
control of the country by pushing a false narrative and getting what its
officers want before reality catches up. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) pioneered
this technique in the 1950s when he would grab media attention with outrageous
statements and outright lies that destroyed lives, then flit to the next
target, leaving fact checkers panting in his wake. By the time they proved he
was lying, the news cycle had leaped far ahead, and the corrections got nowhere
near the attention the lies had.
While McCarthy eventually went down in disgrace, the right wing adopted his
techniques of controlling politics by creating a narrative. Spin turned into a
narrative that denigrated opponents as anti-American, and then into the attempt
to construct a fictional world that they could make real so long as they could
convince voters to believe in it. In 2004, a senior advisor to President George
W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—lived in “the
reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on
their observations and careful study of discernable reality. But, the aide
continued, such a worldview was obsolete.
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.”
But once you have untethered the political narrative from reality, you are at
the mercy of anyone who can commandeer that narrative."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
