I think we can all agree that there are a lot of pretty stupid things that politicians say and pretty stupid theories that politicians repeat that we can mostly just ignore because it isn’t hurting anything — other than our heads. But this is not that.

It is important to evaluate interviews like AG Bill Barr's one not just in the context of fact-checking or as truth or not. These interviews construct narrative that will guide how we view, perceive, and interpret events between now and the election.

You’ve probably seen messages that claim to provide evidence that busloads of “out of state” looters, rioters, and members of antifa are coming to burn down your town or city. They are bullsh*t. They are a psychological operation being run against Americans. And we should all understand how dangerous they are.

The weeks leading up to Independence Day 2020 were a truly bizarre period in American public discourse, with an intense period of discussion about racial inequality and police violence sliding into a fraught counter-narrative about antifa radicalism and violence that failed to materialize.

We need to be more aware of whether and when our own posts are feeding narratives being pushed by adversaries and malign actors, what that means, and what we should do about it.