evidence: And because the government—unlike the rest of us—has no constitutional rights of its own, under some circumstances speech that is protected by the First Amendment when uttered by a nongovernmental speaker may still violate specific constitutional protections when uttered by the government. To be sure, the Supreme Court has recognized that we don’t have a First Amendment right to shut down the government’s speech just because we disagree with it: The government must speak on a wide range of issues and take a variety of policy positions in order to govern. But the constitutional analysis is very different when the government’s speech—including its lies—interferes with or punishes its targets’ exercise of their constitutional rights. [...] And to be sure, many governmental lies—like the government’s lies to avoid political and legal accountability for its misconduct—may inflict more diffuse and less tangible harm, such that it may be hard to trace a causal connection between the government’s speech and the denial of a specific constitutional right. That these lies’ harms are intangible or diffuse, however, does not mean that they’re painless or unimportant: They are instead often deeply dangerous, threatening to corrode our democracy. But constitutional law often has limited capacity to address diffuse, collective, or causally complicated harms. As I’ve written elsewhere, "[t]hese complexities suggest that the government’s most catastrophic lies may be those especially resistant to redress."