The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

by Michiko Kakutani

“Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind. In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.”

“a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse.”

“We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.”

2018 Politico analysis found that voters in so-called news deserts—places with low numbers of news subscribers—went for Trump in greater numbers than voters in places where independent media could check his assertions.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. —ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

appeal to people’s emotions, not their intellects; use “stereotyped formulas,” repeated over and over again; continuously assail opponents and label them with distinctive phrases or slogans that will elicit visceral reactions from the audience.

the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

“Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

“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 goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.”

Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. —THE JOKER IN THE DARK KNIGHT

“Make America Great Again” translates into turning the clock back to the 1950s, before the civil rights movement, before the women’s movement, before LGBT rights, before Black Lives Matter.

Congress has failed to act on immigration reform again and again, and it’s refused to act on gun control year after year, tragedy after tragedy.

NPR reported that one entirely fictional story with this headline—“FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide”—was shared on Facebook more than half a million times and was created by a California-based company named Disinfomedia that oversees several fake news sites.

The most appalling racist, sexist, and perversely cruel remarks are served up on social media, often with a wink or a sneer, and when called out, practitioners frequently respond that they were simply joking—much the way that White House aides say Trump is simply joking or misunderstood when he makes offensive remarks.

“The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” the author of the style guide advised. “There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor—I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously. “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.”

Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.