The Death of Truth

by Michiko Kakutani

  “the godfather of what commentators”: Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 3.

  Steve Bannon, Trump’s now estranged: Ryan Lizza, “Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump’s White House,” New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2016.

  The conservative billionaire: Jane Mayer, “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency,” New Yorker, Mar. 27, 2017.

  “He offered simple solutions”: Sebestyen, Lenin, 3.

  Hitler devoted whole chapters: “Propaganda: Goebbels’ Principles,” physics.smu.edu/​pseudo/​Propaganda/​goebbels.html; Michiko Kakutani, “In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent from ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue,” New York Times, Sept. 27, 2016; Michiko Kakutani, “ ‘How Propaganda Works’ Is a Timely Reminder for a Post-Truth Age,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 2016.

  “Who cares whether they laugh”: Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939 (New York: Knopf, 2016), 94. See also Kakutani, “In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent from ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue.”

  “to disrupt the existing order”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), vol. 2, loc. 10605, Kindle.

  “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world”: Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 382.

  “the firehose of falsehood”: Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model” (Rand Corporation, 2016), 1.

  “Russian propaganda makes no commitment”: Ibid., 5.

  Russian propaganda, which was extensively: Ibid., 3, 4.

  “The point of modern propaganda”: twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/808750564284702720.

  “this twittering world”: T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 17.

  “In the networked public sphere”: Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017), 228–32.

  “the real genius”: Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin.”

  “He helped invent”: Peter Pomerantsev, “Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 2014.

  This same sort of Surkovian manipulation: Priscilla Alvarez and Taylor Hosking, “The Full Text of Mueller’s Indictment of 13 Russians,” Atlantic, Feb. 16, 2018; Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015.

  “to keep the great”: Peter Pomerantsev, “Inside Putin’s Information War,” Politico, Jan. 4, 2015.

  “a kitsch Putin-worshipping”: Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin.”

  RT published an essay: Vladislav Surkov, “Crisis of Hypocrisy. ‘I Hear America Singing,’ ” RT, Nov. 7, 2017.

  An argument that echoes: Andrew Sullivan, “The Reactionary Temptation,” New York, Apr. 30, 2017; Rosie Gray, “Behind the Internet’s Anti-Democracy Movement,” Atlantic, Feb. 10, 2017; Kelefa Sanneh, “Intellectuals for Trump,” New Yorker, Jan. 9, 2017.

  9. THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS

  “Attack, attack, attack”: Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, Aug. 2017.

  “The world is a horrible place”: Donald Trump and Bill Zanker, Think Big (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 174–75.

  “My donors are basically saying”: Rebecca Savransky, “Graham: ‘Financial Contributions Will Stop’ if GOP Doesn’t Pass Tax Reform,” Hill, Nov. 9, 2017; Cristina Marcos, “GOP Lawmaker: Donors Are Pushing Me to Get Tax Reform Done,” Hill, Nov. 7, 2017.

  “a chaos of peeves”: Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 676.

  “They were careless people”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 142.

  The new nihilism is WikiLeaks: Sue Halpern, “The Nihilism of Julian Assange,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2017; Haroon Siddique, “Press Freedom Group Joins Condemnation of WikiLeaks’ War Logs,” Guardian, Aug. 13, 2010; Matthew Weaver, “Afghanistan War Logs: WikiLeaks Urged to Remove Thousands of Names,” Guardian, Aug. 10, 2010.

  upward of ten thousand dollars a month: Laura Sydell, “We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned,” All Tech Considered, NPR, Nov. 23, 2016.

  “Charge the cockpit”: Publius Decius Mus, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, Sept. 5, 2016; Rosie Gray, “The Populist Nationalist on Trump’s National Security Council,” Atlantic, Mar. 24, 2017; Michael Warren, “The Anonymous Pro-Trump ‘Decius’ Now Works Inside the White House,” Weekly Standard, Feb. 2, 2017; Gray, “Behind the Internet’s Anti-Democracy Movement.”

  The new nihilism manifests itself: Hadley Freeman, “Sandy Hook Father Leonard Pozner on Death Threats: ‘I Never Imagined I’d Have to Fight for My Child’s Legacy,’ ” Guardian, May 2, 2017; Charles Rabin, “Parkland Students Face New Attack, This Time from the Political Right on Social Media,” Miami Herald, Feb. 20, 2018.

  “Hail Trump! Hail our people!”: Joseph Goldstein, “Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election with Nazi-Era Salute,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 2016.

  “A 4chan troll”: Marwick and Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.

  The Huffington Post reported: Ashley Feinberg, “This Is the Daily Stormer’s Playbook,” Huffington Post, Dec. 13, 2017.

  Trump, of course, is a troll: Amy B Wang, “Trump Retweets Image Depicting ‘CNN’ Squashed Beneath His Shoe,” Washington Post, Dec. 24, 2017; twitter.com/​realDonaldTrump/status/326970029461614594.

  In his revealing 2017 book: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 139, 147–48.

  “a far too novelistic and bourgeois belief”: Butler, Postmodernism, 35.

  as David Foster Wallace observed: “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993); David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–94.

  “You have my word”: Roger Wolmuth, “David Leisure—a.k.a. Joe Isuzu—Finds That the Road to Success Is Paved with Lies, Lies, Lies!,” People, Nov. 10, 1986.

  EPILOGUE

  “the technological distractions”: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 2006), 156, 141.

  “Our priests and presidents”: Ibid., 98.

  “Orwell feared those”: Ibid., xix.

  too narcotized by “undisguised trivialities”: Ibid., 16.

  “aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin”: George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 12, 6, 18.

  have made 1984 timely again: Michiko Kakutani, “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017.

  “further, faster erosion”: Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2018,” freedomhouse.org.

  “the 21st-century catastrophe”: Charles McGrath, “No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 2018.

  “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men”: George Washington, “Washington’s Farewell Address 1796,” avalon.law.yale.edu.

  “in common efforts for the common good”: Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” Mar. 4, 1801, avalon.law.yale.edu.

  serve as “reciprocal checks”: Washington, “Washington’s Farewell Address 1796.”

  “that man may be governed”: Jefferson to John Tyler, June 28, 1804, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. James P. McClure, vol. 43 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), loc. 18630, Kindle. See also Scott Horton, “Jefferson—Pursuit of the Avenues of Truth,” Browsings (blog), Harper’s, Aug. 15, 2009.

  “A popular Government”: James Madison to W. T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822, in The Writings of James Madis
on, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900–1910), vol. 9.

  ADDITIONAL SOURCES

  Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  Avlon, John, Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

  Campbell, Jeremy, The Liar’s Tale (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

  Chernow, Ron, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).

  Clark, Christopher, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014).

  Confessore, Nicholas, “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far,” New York Times, Apr. 4, 2018.

  D’Antonio, Michael, The Truth About Trump (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016).

  Diepenbrock, George, “Most Partisans Treat Politics Like Sports Rivalries, Study Shows,” Kansas University Today, Apr. 15, 2015.

  Ellis, Joseph J., Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage, 2002).

  Ellis, Joseph J., The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789 (New York: Vintage, 2016).

  Frum, David, “How to Build an Autocracy,” Atlantic, March 2017.

  Gray, Rosie, “How 2015 Fueled the Rise of the Freewheeling White Nationalist Alt-Movement,” BuzzFeed, Dec. 27, 2015.

  Halpern, Sue, “How He Used Facebook to Win,” New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017.

  Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Dublin, Ohio: Coventry House Publishing, 2015).

  Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963).

  Hughes, Robert, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).

  Ioffe, Julia, “Why Trump’s Attack on the Time Warner Merger Is Dangerous for the Press,” Atlantic, Nov. 28, 2017.

  Johnston, David Cay, The Making of Donald Trump (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017).

  Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

  Kaplan, Fred, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: Harper, 2008).

  Kasparov, Garry, Winter Is Coming (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).

  Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1989).

  Luce, Edward, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017).

  McCullough, David, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).

  Murphy, Tim, “How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” Mother Jones, Nov./Dec. 2016.

  O’Brien, Timothy L., TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007).

  Pluckrose, Helen, “How French ‘Intellectuals’ Ruined the West,” Areo, Mar. 27, 2017.

  Pomerantsev, Peter, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).

  Remnick, David, “A Hundred Days of Trump,” New Yorker, May 1, 2017.

  Ricks, Thomas E., Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

  Rosenberg, Matthew, and Gabriel J.X. Dance, “ ‘You Are the Product’: Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook,” New York Times, Apr. 8, 2018.

  Snyder, Timothy, On Tyranny (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).

  Stanley, Jason, How Propaganda Works (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).

  Timberg, Carl, Karla Adam and Michael Kranish, “Bannon Oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s Collection of Facebook Data, According to Former Employee,” Washington Post, Mar. 20, 2018.

  Wolfe, Tom, ed., The New Journalism (New York: Picador Books, 1975).

  Wolff, Michael, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2018).

  Wood, Gordon S., The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).

  Wylie, Christopher, “Why I Broke the Facebook Data Story—and What Should Happen Now,” Guardian, Apr. 7, 2018.

  Yglesias, Matthew, “American Democracy Is Doomed,” Vox, Oct. 8, 2015.

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