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

tends to overwhelm and numb people while simultaneously defining deviancy down and normalizing the unacceptable. Outrage gives way to outrage fatigue, which gives way to the sort of cynicism and weariness that empowers those disseminating the lies.

Among the characteristics of “wooden language” that the French scholar Françoise Thom identified in a 1987 thesis (La langue de bois) were abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete; tautologies (“the theories of Marx are true because they are correct”); bad metaphors (“the fascist octopus has sung its swan song”); and Manichaeanism that divides

“Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man.” But such postmodernist arguments would clear the way for today’s anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers, who refuse to accept the consensus opinion of the overwhelming majority of scientists.

the culture wars—as the vociferous debates over race, religion, gender, and school curricula were called during the 1980s and 1990s—have

Ur-fascism employs “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco added, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

kind of playbook for aspiring autocrats: 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.

of the New Journalism (which put a new emphasis on the voice and point of view of the reporter),

No longer were biographies simple chronicles of other people’s lives. Instead, they became platforms for philosophical manifestos

the Rashomon effect—the point of view that everything depends on your point of view—has