M: A variation on the idea of advertising that I think I've mentioned before. Basically that if a congressman says that they don't know about something that they should know about, best case example is they shouldn't be a congressman because they're not paying attention to actual congressional things. And that's if they're not just straight up lying because they know the answer would get them in trouble somehow. A variation on that would be pointing out that if they really didn't know about some of the stuff, I mean, I'd ask you to go online and find some of the more unbelievable stuff that various senators have said they had not heard about or something like that. Try and get mostly Republicans, although I'm sure the Democrats do it the same. Not because of any kind of— well, I mean, there's some partisanship, but more because right now they are the party in charge, for so feigning ignorance about stuff like elements of the Iranian war or something is simply unacceptable if you're supposed to be a congressman. But the variation is supposed to be something along the lines of saying it's not just that they're claiming not to know, but if they didn't know, their reaction should be shocked, appalled. Like if someone asks them, Senator, do you have any comment about how the army or armed forces seem to have accidentally bombed a girls' school thinking it was a naval depot? The reaction shouldn't be a calm, I have no knowledge about this, but instead a human, I'm sorry, wait, what? Hold on. I don't know about this, but call me in an hour, because that's unacceptable. That kind of thing.
G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]
G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]
G: Yes. I think you've found a stronger version of the argument, because it doesn't require proving that the politician is lying.
There are actually three separate tests hidden inside "I wasn't aware of that":
The second and third are what make your variation interesting.
Suppose your hypothetical reporter says:
"Senator, CENTCOM appears to have bombed an elementary school after identifying it as a military target."
There are several possible responses.
Normal ignorance:
"Wait—what? I haven't been briefed on that. You're saying an American strike hit a school? When? Who is reporting this? I need to find out what happened."
Perfectly defensible. The senator genuinely didn't know, but the new information immediately changes their behavior.
Politician's evasive ignorance:
"I'm not aware of those reports, so I really can't comment."
That is different. The extraordinary information has been introduced into their mind and produces essentially no observable perturbation.
That's your tell.
It doesn't prove they already knew. But it creates an unpleasant fork:
Either you knew and you're dodging the question, or you genuinely just learned something horrifying about an activity you're responsible for overseeing and apparently don't find it interesting enough to ask a follow-up question.
And the second possibility isn't necessarily better.
I found something remarkably close to your hypothetical.
At the March 18 Senate Intelligence hearing, Mark Warner was questioning DNI Tulsi Gabbard about the Iran war. Warner pointed out that Donald had publicly expressed surprise that Iran would move against the Strait of Hormuz and asked whether intelligence had warned about precisely that possibility.
Gabbard answered:
"I'm not aware of those remarks."
Warner pressed her about Donald's statements of surprise. Again:
"I'm not aware of those remarks."
But immediately before that, Gabbard herself acknowledged that Iran had historically threatened to use control of the Strait as leverage. citeturn0search12
That's almost ideal for your argument. The Director of National Intelligence doesn't have to memorize everything the president says. But the president publicly saying he was surprised by an utterly foreseeable enemy response during an ongoing American war is extremely relevant to the DNI's job.
The informationally normal reaction would be something like:
"I haven't heard the president say that. If that's an accurate characterization, I'd want to understand what he meant, because the possibility of Iranian action against the Strait has obviously been part of our threat assessments."
Instead, "I'm not aware of those remarks" functions almost like a linguistic force field: information outside the desired answer simply fails to enter the conversation.
And there's an even more extraordinary version of the underlying problem. Republican Rep. Don Bacon recently criticized the fact that Donald himself claimed he hadn't known the United States was short of weapons such as Patriot interceptors and cruise missiles while conducting the Iran operations. Bacon called that his "number one issue" and said it suggested either poor management or a serious lack of transparency. citeturn0search4
That gives you the cleanest version of your original knowledge argument:
If the commander in chief genuinely didn't know whether America had enough of the weapons he was expending in a war, "I didn't know" isn't an exoneration. That's the accusation.
Sen. John Kennedy gives you something useful precisely because he didn't react with indifference.
When Republicans learned more about the administration's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" compensation fund this year, Kennedy told reporters:
"I don't know anything about anything."
But he immediately explained why that was a problem: he didn't know where the money was coming from or who would decide who received it, and therefore wanted the attorney general to come explain it. Other Republican senators reacted strongly as well; Thom Tillis called the situation "beyond the pale." citeturn0search6turn0search7
That's actually excellent control data for your argument.
Kennedy wasn't saying:
"I don't know anything about that. Next question."
He was effectively saying:
"I don't know, and I regard my not knowing as an unacceptable condition that needs to be corrected."
That's what responsible ignorance looks like.
A good Democratic comparison is Sen. Mark Kelly. In 2025 he was asked about reports that the administration had ordered intelligence concerning Russia-Ukraine negotiations withheld from Five Eyes allies. Kelly sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and said:
"I was not aware of it."
But then he immediately evaluated the new information: the Five Eyes relationship makes the United States safer, and if the report was accurate, restricting that information "does not seem like an appropriate thing to do." citeturn1search4
Again, that's a useful distinction. He didn't magically know something he hadn't been briefed about. But learning it caused a reaction.
That makes the argument less partisan and consequently more damaging when you apply it to Republicans now.
I'd call it something like the "Second Question Test."
Don't try to prove whether the politician really knew. That's difficult and gives them somewhere to escape.
Instead, show the exchange:
REPORTER: Did you know X happened?
SENATOR: I wasn't aware of that.
Then freeze the video.
Fine. Assume he's telling the truth.
What did he ask next?
Because there should be a second question.
If you tell a senator:
"The military may have killed 40 children."
"The president says he didn't know we're running short of missiles."
"The Justice Department created a $1.8 billion fund Congress didn't understand."
"American intelligence may have stopped sharing critical information with our closest allies."
—and their response is essentially "I haven't heard about that" followed by walking away, the problem isn't merely ignorance.
It's what didn't happen after the ignorance was cured.
That's much harder to evade rhetorically. You don't have to say "He's lying." In fact, explicitly grant the defense:
"Let's take him at his word. He didn't know. Watch what happens when he finds out."
Then play the clip.
That converts an inherently disputable accusation about someone's internal knowledge into an observable behavioral test.
And your school-bombing example happens to be unusually close to reality: during the Iran war, Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for an investigation after an elementary school in Iran was bombed and CENTCOM said it needed to determine whether the United States had been responsible. citeturn0search69
So the advertising formulation could become almost brutally simple:
Maybe he didn't know.
Now he does.
Watch what he does next.
That, I think, is considerably stronger than "How could a senator not know?" because accidental ignorance is always possible. Indifference after being informed is happening right there on camera.
M: Yes, and actually knowing about it or not has nothing to do with the effectiveness, because even if they honestly didn't know, the fact that they reacted to something horrific as being something they need to avoid commenting on because they want to find the right answer is the issue. And that's what should be pounced upon. I'm not sure if I would use the various hearings, though, as examples. We're talking about when they're walking and talking or something like that. Hearings are, like almost, I don't know, maybe I'd call them perhaps kabuki performances. Like going in without a game face makes you as vulnerable to exploitation. And I'm not going to say that is any kind of partisan thing. You have to go in there with— it's a poker game at that point. It's not a point for what we're talking about. So you had the right idea. I just didn't give you quite the situation to qualify. We're talking about when someone is having, you know, one of those walk-and-talks or an impromptu press conference or something like that, and suddenly is presented with information that they should react like a human being towards, basically.
G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]
G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]
G: Yes. That qualification changes the target substantially. A hearing is a bad behavioral sample for this purpose. Everyone enters expecting adversarial questions, has staff-prepared positions, and knows that an incautious sentence can become the headline. Emotional flatness there tells you relatively little.
What you want is the unscripted-information moment: Capitol hallway scrum, airport tarmac, walk-and-talk, impromptu press availability, someone catching a senator outside a meeting. The reporter tells the officeholder something sufficiently serious that the information itself ought to break through the communications strategy for a moment.
And I think your correction also eliminates my earlier emphasis on whether the politician actually knew. It doesn't matter. The interesting evidence begins after the reporter finishes the question.
Imagine:
REPORTER: Senator, were you aware that an American strike apparently hit a girls' school and killed 30 children?
SENATOR: I haven't seen those reports, so I can't comment on that.
REPORTER: Senator—
SENATOR: Thank you.
The criticism isn't:
"Bullshit. Of course he knew."
It's:
"Did you see what just happened? Someone told him thirty children might have been killed by his country's military, and his first concern was that he didn't yet know the politically safe thing to say."
That's considerably nastier, because "I genuinely didn't know" doesn't rebut it at all. In fact, granting complete sincerity makes the demonstration cleaner.
There is an important distinction I'd make, though. Not commenting before checking the facts is responsible. The abnormal part isn't refusing to render a judgment. It's failing to exhibit interest in finding out what the hell just happened.
A perfectly responsible senator could say:
"Jesus. No, I haven't heard that. I don't want to comment until I know whether that's accurate, but obviously if that's true it's horrific. I'll find out what's going on."
They haven't prejudged anything. They haven't accepted the reporter's premise. They've merely behaved as though the possibility matters.
And I think this suggests an even better analytical test than my "second question" formulation. Something like a human interruption test.
Ordinary political processing:
Question → identify issue → retrieve position → formulate safe answer.
What you're looking for is information that ought to cause:
Question → HOLY SHIT → determine whether true → political processing resumes.
The absence of that interruption is the footage.
One particularly clean recent example isn't a senator, but Donald himself. In January, during an impromptu exchange with reporters in Iowa, ABC's Rachel Scott told him that officials in his own administration had characterized Alex Pretti as a "domestic terrorist" or "assassin." Donald replied that he hadn't heard that, then immediately pivoted to Pretti: "but he shouldn't have been carrying a gun." citeturn0search12
Whatever one thinks about the underlying shooting, that's precisely the form you're describing. New and potentially alarming information about what your own officials are saying enters the conversation. There's no visible:
"They called him WHAT?"
No request for who said it, no withholding judgment while promising to investigate. The political answer simply routes around the new information.
There's also a useful contrast in Republican Sen. Jerry Moran. Asked informally about a Democratic report alleging serious VA workforce problems affecting veterans' care, Moran said he didn't know the report—but added that he was happy to examine it and give a better answer after establishing the facts. citeturn0search2 That's much closer to legitimate uncertainty. The new claim produces an action: I need to see this.
So if we actually researched this for an advertising project, I would throw away most hearings and probably most Sunday-show interviews too. I'd specifically hunt video/transcripts for:
Then I'd score what happens in the next 10–20 seconds, rather than trying to adjudicate whether the ignorance claim was truthful.
And there's a potentially devastating repeated-ad format here. You wouldn't even need a narrator accusing anybody of lying. Run five clips consecutively:
"I wasn't aware of that."
"I haven't seen that report."
"That's the first I've heard of it."
"I'm not familiar with that."
"You'll have to ask the White House."
Then:
We believe them.
That's the problem.
Watch what happens after they're told.
Because the strongest evidence isn't that they failed a current-events quiz. It's that information about human beings passes through the political machinery without apparently triggering the ordinary human reaction that should precede the talking point.
If you'd like, I can do a much more targeted search specifically for Republican senators/representatives caught in those unscripted hallway or walk-and-talk exchanges during 2025–26, and find the strongest actual video examples rather than hearing testimony.
M: Yeah, well, Donald is his own particular brand of prick, who will claim that he doesn't know anything about something, then refer to some specifics that indicate he is lying his ass off to anyone except for somehow himself. It's just annoying.
G: Right—and Donald is actually bad evidence for the phenomenon you're trying to isolate, because he introduces an entirely different pathology into the sample.
His characteristic version is more like:
"I don't know anything about that. Never heard about it. But the guy who did it is a terrible person, and what people don't tell you is—"
At which point he's supplying details about the thing he supposedly knows nothing about.
And the weird part, consistent with the Donald model we've been developing, is that I don't think every instance necessarily maps neatly onto ordinary conscious lying. "I don't know anything about that" can function as a present-tense permission slip: I reject the premise and therefore owe you no accounting for it. Then information stored elsewhere is perfectly available when it becomes useful to the next sentence. The contradiction doesn't necessarily have to become salient to him.
That makes him almost useless for your proposed advertising test. With an ordinary senator, the sequence
horrifying new information → "I haven't heard about that" → no visible human reaction
is interesting.
With Donald, you've got several competing explanations simultaneously: strategic denial, habitual denial, reconstruction of the premise, immediate counterattack, self-protective cognition, and possibly genuine failure to notice that sentence B demonstrates knowledge disclaimed in sentence A. You'd spend the entire advertisement explaining Donald rather than demonstrating the much simpler phenomenon.
Your target is almost boringly normal politicians. People whose cognition isn't the story. Someone catches Senator X walking out of the Capitol, tells them something awful their government has apparently done, and you watch the professional political reflex beat the human reflex to the microphone:
"I haven't been briefed on that."
Okay.
But you just were.
Not adequately enough to determine whether it's true, certainly. Adequately enough to give a shit. memcite