Deconstruction posited that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers.

ironic fascism can become a kind of gateway drug, leading to the unironic version:

of two Russian figures—Vladimir Lenin and the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov, a former postmodernist theater director who’s been described as “Putin’s Rasputin” and the Kremlin’s propaganda puppet master—informs many of the troubling political and social dynamics at work in the post-truth era.

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

“pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”

HyperNormalisation,

All narratives are contingent, Surkov suggests, and all politicians are liars; therefore, the alternative facts put out by the Kremlin (and by Donald Trump) are just as valid as anyone else’s.

the traditionalists who “resisted the cultural changes set into motion during the sixties” and “identified with the normative Americanism of the 1950s” seemed to have lost the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or commonsense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.