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

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.

Playing all sides against one another to create chaos was a way to ensure that the Kremlin held all the puppets’ strings while using disinformation to remake reality.

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.

his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his

Lenin specialized in promises he

People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.”

the Nazis’ obsession with numbers and superlatives; everything had

Russia still uses propaganda to achieve these very same ends: to distract and exhaust its own people (and increasingly, citizens of foreign countries), to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives.

HyperNormalisation,