1 Power, Bald - Faced Lies and Contempt for Truth Forthcoming 2020 Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Michael Patrick Lynch Introduction Imagine you are standing in the rain at a bus stop. You turn to the man next to you and make a banal comment about the weather: “Sure is wet today, isn’t it?” (or some such). Instead of agreeing, he turns and says, “It is not raining.” You chuckle and sputter that you are both soaked. He is adamant: “It is not raining. And even it was, I wouldn’t be getting wet”. At this point, you will no doubt find yourself needing to answer an urgent text and wishing the bus a speedy arrival. In ordinary non-political life, serious utterances of such obvious falsehoods—what are often called “bald-faced lies”—are uncommon and unsettling. We are prone to interpret them as jokes, or as expressions of irony, or perhaps as unserious, petulant linguistic foot-stompings borne out of frustration. But earnest expressions of them—overt denials of obvious matters of fact—are rare amongst adults in democratic societies, both in personal and political life. Or so it once seemed. For arguably, bald-faced lies are on the uptick by political leaders in democracies worldwide. In the United States, for example, we are becoming numb not only to outrageous falsehoods, but to the bizarre self-assurance with which they are pronounced. We were told crowds were bigger than they were, that the sun shined when it didn’t, that Trump won in a landslide—and that was just in the first few days after his election. What has shocked so many is the fearlessness in the face of the facts, the willingness to simply deny reality outright, and the apparent toleration, even joy with which Trump's followers greet the practice. Bald-faced lying by political leaders is an important phenomenon, but it is easy to misunderstand in ways that undermine our ability to combat its strange effectiveness. In this paper, I aim to first analyze political bald-faced lies and then examine the threat they pose to the norms of democratic discourse. My goal is not to answer the empirical question of how frequently denials of obvious facts occur in politics; it is the normative