Unsourced testimony: When unfounded isn't much better than false

This week a claim went around on Twitter that Kurt Russell had made a statement about deporting immigrants:

There has been no confirmation of this quote, there is no public record of this quote, and there is ample evidence that Kurt Russell, a person who has said his personal view is that actors should stay out of politics would not say such a thing.

Russell has often been the target of false citation, such as the 2021 rumor that he had praised Trump for being “relentless”, which was the recirculation of a false 2018 quote. Such attributions are common to celebrities. The Rock supposedly attacked the “snowflake generation”.  Photoshopped pictures of Taylor Swift wearing vulgar anti-Trump shirts often come across my timeline.

These sorts of quotes plug into a loose argument that goes something like “Right thinking people support the policy I support” and since it’s unlikely so many right thinking people would be wrong, my position is virtuous:

I am drawing this out very fuzzily. Maybe the real claim of a particular person posting the Kurt Russell quote isn’t even about the policy. Maybe it is that they are virtuous. 

In this particular case, the timing was interesting. The false quote from Kurt Russell appears after a Time magazine article where Trump talks about building detention camps to forcibly eject all undocumented immigrants in this country, about 20 million people, many who have been here decades. 

I don’t think that timing is coincidental. Rather, the reaction to Trump’s Time piece from the mainstream media was that this particular policy of Trump’s was insanity, it was anti-American, it was un-Christian. It’s reasonable to see the emergence of the Russell quote as part of a counter argument. If it is so anti-American, after all, would a person like Kurt Russell embrace it? We don’t see that initial argument here, but to me this feels very much like counter evidence. It’s the elite press here that are out of step – or at least that is the story being told.

Unfounded testimony vs. fabricated testimony

Despite floating around for almost a week this claim is still rated by many fact-checkers as “unfounded” or unsubstantiated. This is because Russell hasn’t come out and denied saying this. It’s certainly a false quote, but given his feelings about actors and politics, he’s unlikely to comment unless it gets much more traction. 

People often conceive of things that are “unsubstantiated” as having a truth value that is higher than things that are false. But this isn’t always true when you’re talking about evidence. Look again at our diagram:

If anyone is able to simply add unsubstantiated support into the backing, arguments fall apart. I could sit here and say, well, Jimmy Carter came out in support of deportation, that Penn guy from Penn and Teller, Oprah too, also Conan O’Brien. What you would rightly say is “How do you know that?” and if my response was “I just do” you would correctly say that’s not enough. You’d say you can’t support your point with random unsourced assertions, come up with something else. 

Notice that that is not any different than if I say that those people said those things and you produce absolute proof they didn’t. In both cases the evidence is no evidence at all. It’s possible that that might change in the future in one case – not likely, but maybe possible. But from the point of view of the argument people are making, having a completely unsourced quote is little different than having a verifiably false one. The quote is not the claim, it’s evidence, this sort of thing just doesn’t clear the bar.