On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

by Lee McIntyre

If you can’t hide or destroy the truth, surround it with bullshit. You can always kill it later.

The post-truth playbook goes like this: attack the truth tellers, lie about anything and everything, manufacture disinformation, encourage distrust and polarization, create confusion and cynicism, then claim that the truth is available only from the leader himself. The goal is not merely to get people to believe any particular false claim, but to so demoralize them with a tsunami of falsehoods that they begin to give up on the idea that truth can be known at all, outside a political context.

“post-truth is pre-fascism.”

If the truth killers succeed in using reality denial to undermine democracy, the next day we’ll wake up in an electoral dictatorship.

Denialism is not a mistake—it’s a lie.

denialism is intended to benefit the people who create the lies, not the people who believe them.

Three things are necessary for strategic denialism to be successful. Disinformation must be created, it must be amplified, and it must be believed.

denialist beliefs are not based on facts in the first place; they are rooted in identity.

The goal of disinformation is not just to get you to question some particular fact about a piece of reality that clashes with the disinformer’s interests, but to erode your trust in the “truth tellers” on the other side. This undercuts the basis for a whole class of factual beliefs all at once. The genius of disinformation is that it doesn’t just get you to believe a falsehood, but to distrust (and sometimes even hate) anyone who does not also believe this same falsehood.

In one scalding example attributed to Jonathan Foster, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Sheffield, one student remembers him saying: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true.”

In a free market of ideas, wouldn’t the truth win out? Actually, no.

One doesn’t fix a polluted information stream simply by diluting it with truth. You have to remove the source of the pollution.