Very disturbing thing I have noticed recently is that U.S. officials no longer care about being perceived as lying. After the "SignalGate" scandal several top officials went public to claim that the information they shared was not classified (immediately disproved after it was then published) or that it was somehow "planted" there by a nefarious infiltrator, for which no evidence at all was provided.

The reason they are doing this is because they don't care about convincing people necessarily, they just have created their own separate right-wing media echo chamber that just need to feed narratives to run with. We are well past the era of reasoned debate or persuasion. 

We are still far from that point thanks to separation of powers and a strong judiciary, but this is how dictatorships operate. Over time it generates a level of cynicism in the system that makes it unsupportable.

what is the counter position to this take? i sense this to be true but do others reasonably not?

My counter is that this is not that recent. Remember when Biden was incharge and good health and their wing of the media supported that narrative?

Co-founder, Scout Game. 
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I can never decide on how useful these kinds of comparisons are.

Dem operators hid the truth from the public, but once the truth was revealed, voter sentiment forced the party to reposition.

Here, we have an objective lie that all can see, yet there seems to be little motivation to end the deceptive.

I also didn’t read that quote to mean this phenomenon just started, but that we are at some new high—even if on the same curve.

Yea definitely a total lack of accountability rn.