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With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts—a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.
today’s media-centric culture people have come to prefer the “hyperreal”—that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland—to the boring, everyday “desert of the real.”
“If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” he wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” —
‘wake up the sheeple.’ ” Recommendation engines, she adds, help connect conspiracy theorists with one another to the point that “we are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.”
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
The troll manifesto.
Freedom House warned that year one of the Trump administration had brought “further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory,”
Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that “the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters,” would appear in “the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.”
