The Death of Truth

by Michiko Kakutani

  One of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, “it’s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.”

  Many misogynist and white supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news like Pizzagate, originate or gain initial momentum on sites like 4chan and Reddit—before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors—including foreign governments like Russia—to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get.

  DiResta warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks—which give people news that’s popular and trending, rather than accurate or important—are helping to promote conspiracy theories. This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters like vaccines, zoning laws, and water fluoridation. Part of the problem is an “asymmetry of passion” on social media: while most people won’t devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, “passionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to ‘wake up the sheeple.’ ”

  Recommendation engines, she adds, help connect conspiracy theorists with one another to the point that “we are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.” At this point, she concludes, “the Internet doesn’t just reflect reality anymore; it shapes it.”

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  THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE

  Without clear language, there is no standard of truth.

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  Language is to humans, the writer James Carroll once observed, what water is to fish: “We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language.” This is why Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader’s real and declared aims. This is why America and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the president’s use of language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co-opted everyday language in an effort to control not just how people communicate but also how they think—exactly the way the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 aims to deny the existence of external reality and safeguard Big Brother’s infallibility.

  Orwell’s “Newspeak” is a fictional language, but it often mirrors and satirizes the “wooden language” imposed by Communist authorities in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. 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 the world into things good and things evil (and nothing in between).

  Mao’s Communist Party also adopted a plan of linguistic engineering soon after taking power in China in 1949, creating a new political vocabulary: some words were suppressed; others were injected with new meanings; and party slogans were drummed into people’s brains through constant repetition. People were made to understand that there were “correct” and “incorrect” ways to speak, whether it was delivering a work report or engaging in a required round of self-criticism.

  One of history’s most detailed accounts of how totalitarianism affects everyday language was written by Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish linguist who survived World War II in Dresden. Klemperer kept a remarkable set of diaries chronicling life under Nazi rule in Germany (I Will Bear Witness), and he also wrote a study (The Language of the Third Reich) about how the Nazis used words as “tiny doses of arsenic” to poison and subvert the German culture from within. The book is a harrowing case study in how the Reich “permeated the flesh and blood of the people” through idioms and sentence structures that were “imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.” It’s also a cautionary tale, every bit as unnerving as Orwell’s 1984, to other countries and future generations about how swiftly and insidiously an autocrat can weaponize language to suppress critical thinking, inflame bigotry, and hijack a democracy.

  Klemperer didn’t think Hitler compared with Mussolini as a speaker, and he was surprised that the Nazi leader—whom he saw as an angry, insecure man with an annoying voice and a propensity to bellow—amassed such a following. He attributed Hitler’s success less to his heinous ideology than to his skills at going around other politicians to reach out directly to the people—the word Volk was regularly invoked, and Hitler portrayed himself as their voice, their messiah. The big spectacles (effectively pseudo-events) that he and Goebbels staged were a help. “The splendour of the banners, parades, garlands, fanfares and choruses” that surrounded Hitler’s speeches, Klemperer notes, served as an effective “advertising ploy” that conflated the führer with the grandeur of the state.

  As in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, words underwent a sinister metamorphosis in Nazi Germany. The word fanatisch (fanatical), Klemperer wrote, went from denoting “a threatening and repulsive quality” associated with bloodlust and cruelty to being an “inordinately complimentary epithet,” evoking the qualities of devotion and courage needed to fuel the Reich. The word kämpferisch (aggressive, belligerent) also became a word of praise, meaning admirable “self-assertion through defense or attack.” Meanwhile, the word “system” was scorned, because it was associated with the Weimar Republic, which the Nazis despised in much the same way that right-wing Republicans today despise what they call the deep state.

  Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published in 1925, and Klemperer notes that the book “literally fixed the essential features” of Nazi oratory and prose. In 1933, this “language of a clique became the language of the people.” It would be as if, say, the argot of the alt-right—its coded use of language to identify fellow travelers; its racial and misogynist slurs—were to be completely mainstreamed and made a part of routine political and social discourse.

  Klemperer devoted an entire chapter to the Nazis’ obsession with numbers and superlatives; everything had to be the best or the most. If a German from the Third Reich went on an elephant hunt, Klemperer wrote, he would have to boast that he’d “finished off the biggest elephants in the world, in unimaginable numbers, with the best weapon on earth.” Many of the Nazis’ own numbers (regarding enemy soldiers killed, prisoners taken, audience numbers for a radio broadcast of a rally) were so exaggerated that they took on what Klemperer calls a “fairy-tale quality.” In 1942, he writes, “Hitler says in the Reichstag that Napoleon fought in Russia in temperatures of minus 25 degrees, but that he, Commanding Officer Hitler, had fought at minus 45, even at minus 52.” All the lying and hyperbole eventually reached the point, Klemperer continues, that it became “meaningless and utterly ineffective, finally bringing about a belief in the very opposite of what it intended.”

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  Trump’s mendacity is so extreme that news organizations have resorted to assembling lengthy lists of lies he’s told, insults he’s delivered, norms he’s violated, in addition to hiring squads of fact-checkers. And his shamelessness has emboldened politicians around him to lie with even more effrontery than ever. Republicans in Congress, for instance, blatantly lied about the effects their tax bill would have on the deficit and social safety net provisions, just as they lied about how much it would help the middle class, when in fact it was all about giving ta
x breaks to corporations and the very rich.

  Trump’s assault on language is not confined to his torrent of lies, but extends to his taking of words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating them with personal agendas and political partisanship. In doing so, he’s exchanged the language of democracy and its ideals for the language of autocracy. He demands allegiance not to the U.S. Constitution but to himself, and he expects members of Congress and the judiciary to applaud his policies and wishes, regardless of what they think best serves the interests of the American people.

  With other phrases, Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (“WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean. It’s not just his taking the term “fake news,” turning it inside out, and using it to try to discredit journalism that he finds threatening or unflattering. He’s also called the investigation into Russian election interference “the single greatest witch hunt in American political history,” when he is the one who has repeatedly attacked the press, the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, any institution he regards as hostile.

  In fact, Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Crazy Bernie.” He accused Clinton of being “a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,” and he has asserted that “there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats.”

  In Orwell’s language of Newspeak in 1984, a word like “blackwhite” has “two mutually contradictory meanings”: “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”

  This, too, has an unnerving echo in the behavior of Trump White House officials and Republican members of Congress who lie on the president’s behalf and routinely make pronouncements that flout the evidence in front of people’s eyes. The administration, in fact, debuted with the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisting that Trump’s inaugural crowds were the “largest audience” ever—an assertion that defied photographic evidence and was rated by PolitiFact a “Pants on Fire” lie.

  These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself.” In the case of Ukraine, Gessen wrote in late 2016, “Putin insisted on lying in the face of clear and convincing evidence to the contrary, and in each case his subsequent shift to truthful statements were not admissions given under duress: they were proud, even boastful affirmatives made at his convenience. Together, they communicated a single message: Putin’s power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality.”

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  In 1984, another way the party and Big Brother exert control over reality is by adjusting the past to conform with their worldview: “It is not merely that speeches, statistics and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten.”

  Consider this: within days of Trump’s inauguration, changes were being made to the climate change pages on the White House website. Meanwhile, environmentalists were frantically trying to download and archive government climate data—worried that it might be destroyed or lost or hidden by a hostile administration. Some of their fears were realized later in 2017, when the EPA announced that its website was “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction,” including this Orwellian phrase: “updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership.”

  On educational pages controlled by the Department of Energy, phrases about renewable energy were switched to ones advocating the use of fossil fuels, and links to the Obama administration’s 2013 climate report and references to UN meetings on climate change vanished from State Department pages.

  USDA employees were informed that their social media posts should be reviewed by administrators “to remove references to policy priorities and initiatives of the previous Administration.” And after the National Park Service retweeted a post showing aerial photographs that compared the size of Trump’s inaugural crowds with those of President Obama’s, the agency’s digital team was told to temporarily suspend its use of Twitter. That retweet was soon deleted.

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  At the same time, Trump continued his personal assault on the English language. Trump’s incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith, and his inflammatory bombast) is both emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s tool kit. His interviews, off-teleprompter speeches, and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations, and innuendos—a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarize, and scapegoat.

  Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor—without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”

  He is equally nonchalant about spelling. There was the famous “covfefe” tweet: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” And his description of the Chinese seizure of a U.S. Navy drone as an “unpresidented act.” He also tweeted that he was “honered to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States!” Twitter typos are common, of course, and they are hardly the most alarming aspect of Trump’s compulsion to tweet. But they are indicative of his impulsive, live-in-the-moment, can’t-think-about-the-fallout posture. And his typos are contagious. The White House released a statement about a presidential trip to Israel, saying that one of his goals was to “promote the possibility of lasting peach.” Other White House releases misspelled the name of Jon Huntsman Jr., Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Russia, and misspelled the name of the British prime minister, Theresa May. The official inauguration poster read, “No dream is too big, no challenge is to great.” And tickets for his first State of the Union address (which had to be reprinted) read, “Address to Congress on the State of the Uniom.” Harmless enough glitches, perhaps, but indicative of the administration’s larger carelessness and dysfunction—its cavalier disregard for accuracy, details, and precision.

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  Trump’s tweets have been deemed official pronouncements of the president of the United States and will no doubt one day be printed out, finely bound, and shelved by someone wearing white gloves in a gold-shellacked presidential library. Whether they are distractions meant to divert attention from the Russia investigations, the stream-of-consciousness rants of an attention-craving narcissist, or part of a more deliberate strategy to acclimate people to the aberrant, the tweets have immediate consequences around the planet, escalating nuclear tensions with North Korea, alienating whole countries and continents, and sending tremors through the post–World War II order. Trump’s retweeting of anti-Muslim videos from the far-right group Britain First earned a sharp rebuke from the U.K.’s Theresa May and helped mainstream a heretofore mar
ginal hate group.

  His rants against journalism as “fake news” have enabled further crackdowns on press freedom in countries like Russia, China, Turkey, and Hungary where reporters already work under duress. And they have been taken as license by leaders of authoritarian regimes to dismiss reports of human rights abuses and war crimes in their own countries. After Amnesty International reported that up to thirteen thousand prisoners were killed at a military prison outside Damascus between 2011 and 2015, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said, “You can forge anything these days”—“We are living in a fake news era.” And in Myanmar, where the military is carrying out a horrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, an officer in the state security ministry declared, “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.”

  The scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who has drawn parallels between Trump’s rise and that of Mussolini, argues that authoritarians typically test “the limits of what the public, press, and political class will tolerate” and that Trump’s incendiary tweets and remarks are efforts “to see how much Americans and the GOP will let him get away with—and when, if ever, they will say ‘enough.’ ”

  A 1995 essay about Mussolini and “ur-fascism” by the Italian scholar Umberto Eco also sheds light, when read retrospectively, on Trump’s language and use of authoritarian tropes. Many of the features Eco described as being intrinsic to fascism will ominously remind the reader of Trump’s demagoguery: an appeal to nationalism and people’s “fear of difference”; a rejection of science and rational discourse; an invocation of tradition and the past; and a proclivity for equating disagreement with treason.