The Honest Mark: On charlatans, César Chávez, willing audiences, and the bargain we strike with ourselves.
The New York Times just exposed César Chávez. The harder question is why so many people needed so long not to know.
The typography of an old fairground sign always promises more than the paint can deliver. Red curves, peeling gold, a smile just slightly too wide, the canvas smelling of dust and old rain. In 1939, as Europe slid toward catastrophe, W.C. Fields turned that atmosphere into a principle. You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man was the title. Underneath the joke was a diagnosis.
The thesis is simple enough to sound impolite: the charlatan doesn’t triumph because people are stupid. He triumphs because they’re hungry. The con doesn’t require innocence — it requires appetite. The desire for a shortcut, for a total explanation, for a permission disguised as revelation. The fraud works because, in a moment of relief, the victim believes she isn’t being deceived at all. She believes, finally, that someone is telling her exactly what she wanted to hear.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that while reading Charlatans, the book by Moises Naim and Quico Toro. Their central insight isn’t simply that modern demagogues lie (politicians and con men have always lied). What’s decisive is that they dissolve the very ground on which lies can be judged. They don’t just ask us to believe a falsehood; they ask us to accept that truth is merely another product on the shelf, that the expert and the demagogue are rival brands competing for market share. Once that happens, the most emotionally satisfying story wins. The facts arrive too late, and too heavily made up.
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That’s the visible story. What operates underneath is lonelier and more intimate. The authors read in Robert Putnam his description of eroding social capital: the clubs, the unions, the parishes, the neighborhood associations that once trained ordinary people in the habits of trust. And Hannah Arendt, who saw what happens when that fabric unravels. The danger isn’t only anger. It’s loneliness in its political form, the loss of that shared experience through which people test what is real. Charlatans missed the next step. Erich Fromm supplies it: people don’t flee that loneliness toward skepticism. They flee toward certainty.
What disappears when the bowling leagues close and the union hall empties isn’t only social warmth. It’s the community, the network of repeated, face-to-face encounters through which you acquire the habit of checking your perceptions against a shared reality. The daily friction of disagreeing with someone you trust, of being wrong in front of someone who will remember it: that is precisely what keeps your individual perception calibrated. Remove that friction and you’ve removed the mechanism by which you know what is real.
That’s where Arendt enters, with something more precise and more frightening than mere loneliness. The isolated individual loses the capacity to distinguish between what he believes is true and what is true. Reality, for her, is not a private discovery — it’s a social construction sustained by shared testimony. Dissolve the community, and you dissolve the instrument with which you test your own perceptions. You’re left alone with your fears and desires. And fears and desires, without the anchor of the shared, tend toward the absolute.
Fromm then explains what you do next. The obvious response to isolation would be to seek genuine community, authentic reconnection. But genuine community demands tolerance for ambiguity, acceptance of difference, and willingness to be wrong (precisely the capacities that isolation has numbed in you).
Once uprooted you cannot bear uncertainty. And the charlatan’s offer is, at bottom, an offer of certainty: not community but its simulacrum, a group that confirms each other’s perceptions without friction, that has replaced the discipline of a shared reality with the comfort of a shared conviction. Fromm called this the fear of freedom: freedom experienced as terror, once the scaffolding that made it bearable has been removed.
The charlatan thrives because he answers a real hunger. He offers total explanation, carefully labeled enemies, certified grievances, restored belonging.
What looks like credulity is better understood as relief. And at some point the victim accepts the deal because the lie confirms what she already wanted to believe.
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That is why the fall of César Chávez feels like more than a broken idol. In an investigation published on March 18, 2026, The New York Times collected accounts from women who say Chávez sexually abused them when they were girls. Two of them told the paper they were repeatedly assaulted in the 1970s, when they were twelve and thirteen years old — inside the orbit of the farmworkers’ movement. Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, said that in the 1960s Chávez pressured her for sex. She kept that secret for nearly six decades so as not to damage the movement she had helped build.
The accusations did not exist in a vacuum. They had been whispered for years, confronted in private, silenced. That is not the story of a well-kept secret. It is the story of a well-managed one.
Managed by people who decided, together and in private, that their cause was worth more than their girls. That the mural mattered more than the bodies hidden behind it.
Those who make such decisions are rarely cartoon villains. They are believers. What is unsettling is their faith.
Faith is a morally serious thing. It can raise unions, churches, nations, families. But it can also act as an acid, dissolving the obligation to see what is in front of us.
Here the argument becomes uncomfortable, because it stops being about someone else’s tribe. This is the blind spot that Naím and Toro, for all their analytical precision, don’t fully enter. Their charlatans have a recognizable face: the populist caudillo, the demagogue of the platform and the barricade. But the progressive intellectual who relativizes the crimes of a labor hero, the liberal coalition that decided a president’s politics were too important to sacrifice for his conduct, the intellectuals in London and Paris who needed the Global South to produce a redeemer and preferred not to look too closely at what that redeemer was doing to the women around him — those innocent accomplices don’t appear in the book’s case studies. They are, essentially, its readers. By not implicating them, the book offers them, in a way, the same comfort it promised to dismantle.
We like our redeemers intact. And we like them even more when their mere presence saves us the work of examining ourselves.
None of this means responsibility is evenly distributed. A powerful man who exploits women and girls carries a guilt of an order the audience does not share. The institutions that bury accusations make their own decisions. The victims are not naive — they are victims. But public fraud endures only when private appetite washes itself into moral innocence, when admiration becomes a permit not to know. The charlatan doesn’t manufacture our credulity from nothing. He finds it waiting for him, dressed as loyalty, as sophistication, or as historical necessity.
That is why stronger institutions, better journalism, and a more committed civic life are necessary but not sufficient. The public scaffolding matters. But part of the infrastructure that sustains the charlatan is inside us — that small customs office of the soul that waves through, unexamined, the stories that flatter us, while forcing the difficult truths to open their luggage.
One of the women who named Chávez condensed the matter into a sentence that should accompany every public idol: “César Chávez is only a man.”
She was nineteen when she said it. It cost her her job.
The sentence matters not because it is cynical, but because it cleans. It rebalances the scale. It reminds us that no cause is purified by being faithful to a single body, and that no body becomes sacred because history found it useful.
That is where honesty begins, and also its price. Not in discovering the con after the money is gone and the circus tent has been taken down. Not in denouncing the frauds of the other side while protecting our own. The task is harder and closer: to build, in private and in public, the habit of asking what we’re being sold every time a figure appears embodying everything we wish were true.
Charlatans are architects of consent. But the blueprints are ours. And we’re the ones who sign off on the project.