🧩 BND Motif Index · M1412
Presumption of regularity
An institution that courts and the public once trusted by default is said to have squandered that trust through lies and bad faith, so it no longer gets the benefit of the doubt and must now prove everything.
📜 Plots🗂️ Bad faith🗂️ Accountability🗂️ Things fall apart
- 3claims filed under it
- 1left show it came up on
- 2right shows it came up on
- 1claim retold online
⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.
A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.
🪜 Its family
what it rests on, what rests on it, and the motifs that answer it
🪜 rests on 🧩 Social trust erosion
🎙️ Who it came up with
the shows we follow where its claims came up (1 left-leaning, 0 center, 2 right-leaning so far), colored by the show's lean; the bar is how many of its claims each one heard
- left-leaning
- right-leaning
"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.
🗣️ In so many words
the words that carry it
💬 the tellers' own words: “he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt” “how deeply the admin has cratered the reputation of the DoJ” “it's actually losing the presumption of regularity it once enjoyed as an institution above reproach” “The DOJ has blown its entire history of a presumption of regularity with the federal courts” “then when COVID happened, it just broke people's brains” “these institutions, they can't be trusted in the way that we used to trust them in the past” “Why have people lost faith in institutions? Because the institutions lost faith in the truth.” “You saw the media very selectively covering things during the pandemic and created this false sense of reality”
🧶 Its claims
what's been told in this shape, in our words, by who told it: newest first in each; a claim's dots are the shows it came up on, in their lean's color (point at them for their names)
Told on the left 0
claims heard on left-leaning shows, and no right-leaning one
🦗 No claim heard only on the left so far.
Told on the right 1
claims heard on right-leaning shows, and no left-leaning one
- 2026-10-29 “People are losing faith in institutions because government agencies betrayed their trust during COVID.” 2
Told on both sides 1
claims heard on left- and right-leaning shows alike
- 2026-10-13 “People have lost faith in institutions because those institutions lost faith in the truth.” 2
Retold online 1
claims many people posted in their own words
- 2026-11-01 “The Department of Justice has lost its presumption of regularity by acting in bad faith and filing nuisance lawsuits.”
M1412 · first seen 2026-11-01 · last 2026-11-07 · what this is · how the index works