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

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.

three decades since the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine (which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues)

flowering of memoir writing, including such classics as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—works

the Nazis’ obsession with numbers and superlatives; everything had

the thinking

would never keep. “He offered simple solutions to complex problems,” Sebestyen wrote in his biography of the Bolshevik leader. “He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people.’ He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything: the ends justified the means.”

very broadly speaking, postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables.

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.

Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William