“The president doth protest too much, methinks"

UFT President Michael Mulgrew can’t stop shouting about “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Recently, Mulgrew has been crying left and right about this, raising the suspicion that he who denies something very strongly is hiding the truth. Unity would not lie, would they?

Why would Unity and Mulgrew claim everything is misinformation, disinformation and lies in an election year?

The primary rationale is to undermine the trust in the other slates and to justify their censorship and any fact checking by the members and those affected by Unity policies. It allows them to claim that they are the only ones dealing in truth.

Unity and Mulgrew are accusing anyone who questions their policies and/or motivations of using misinformation and disinformation. This is from the “Dirty Politics Handbook 101”.

The first chapter is called, “Delegitimizing Opponents” which focuses on framing the opposition as dishonest and manipulative so as to undermine their credibility but most importantly to distract from the actual issue or policy.

Chapter Two is all about rallying the base so as to energize supporters by creating a sense of moral superiority (“We have the facts; they lie”) while at the same time creating an urgency or crisis (“They’re misleading the public—we must stop them!”). This is the tactic Unity is using against our retirees and any group standing up for our retiree health benefits.

Chapter 3 is called, “Shifting the Narrative”. If Unity is caught in a controversy, the handbook requires them to accuse the alternative slate of disinformation to divert attention from the facts and realities of the situation. Politics is as much about narrative as facts. By calling out the other side for spreading falsehoods, Unity tries to claim authority over what’s real or factual and thus shape the members’ perception of the issues.

The final chapter of the playbook might as well be titled, “When All Else Fails: Attack, Deny, Distract—Repeat.” Or more formally: “Ad Hominem and Gaslighting 101.”

Attacking someone’s character sparks outrage, fear, or plain old distrust—emotions resonate more easily than policy details. Emotional appeals will always trump logic.

Ad hominem attacks are like the microwave meals of political discourse—fast, easy, and wildly unhealthy. An ad hominem attack simplifies the debate. Complex and nuanced policies are reduced to: “This person or slate is bad, so their ideas or policies must be bad.” It distracts from their own record and controversial policies and places the spotlight on their opponents. Forget sensible debate. Now it's a cartoon villain contest – extra credit if it buries your own skeletons.

My mother used to say “He who defines the terms, wins the argument.” And that is why gaslighting is so effective in politics.

Gaslighting messes with a member's perception of reality—and once reality becomes unclear, power fills the vacuum. Once you control perception, you don’t need to win arguments.

The constant rewriting of history, denial of obvious truths, and blame-shifting creates this exhausting loop where the opposition is stuck fact-checking, correcting, and reacting. Members become exhausted, confused and disengaged, and that favors the incumbent. That, of course, is Unity’s goal. They don’t want the membership engaged. If they did, they would have figured out how to engage the membership over the last 60 years so that voter turnout would exceed the perennial 25-27%.

To enhance the gaslighting effect, Unity supporters will twist themselves into knots to stay aligned with their caucus. They will bend over backwards to stay on script. Logic? Evidence? Inconvenient. This loyalty becomes more important than the truth, and the denial of facts becomes a loyalty test. If you’re not denying reality with the rest, are you even in the caucus? And therein lies the ultimate problem, the loyalty is to the caucus and not the members.

So let’s look and all this supposed misinformation and disinformation in Part 2, starting with our pension system and then our health benefits….