“The ideal subject”: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 474.
the “danger flags”: Margaret Atwood, “My Hero: George Orwell,” Guardian, Jan. 18, 2013.
“The historian knows how”: Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, 1972), 6.
“diminishing role of facts”: Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Rand Corporation, 2018).
2,140 false or misleading claims: Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Made 2,140 False or Misleading Claims in His First Year,” Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2018.
False claims about the U.K.’s: Anoosh Chakelian, “Boris Johnson Resurrects the Leave Campaign’s £350M for NHS Fantasy,” New Statesman, Sept. 16, 2017.
“There is no such thing”: Pope Francis, “Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for World Communications Day,” Jan. 24, 2018, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/communications/documents/papa-francesco_20180124_messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html.
“one of the biggest challenges”: Jessica Estepa and Gregory Korte, “Obama Tells David Letterman: People No Longer Agree on What Facts Are,” USA Today, Jan. 12, 2018.
“2017 was a year”: “Read Sen. Jeff Flake’s Speech Criticizing Trump,” CNN Politics, Jan. 17, 2018.
five billion dollars in free campaign coverage: Philip Bump, “Assessing a Clinton Argument That the Media Helped to Elect Trump,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2017.
a dozen Diet Cokes a day: Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2017.
It is unlikely that a candidate: David Barstow, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth,” New York Times, July 16, 2016.
“Everyone is entitled”: “An American Original,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 2010.
“We can debate policies”: Sally Yates, “Who Are We as a Country? Time to Decide,” USA Today, Dec. 19, 2017.
“This is an apple”: youtube.com/watch?v=IxuuIPcQ9_I.
“spring up amongst us”: Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., Jan. 27, 1838, abrahamlincolnonline.org.
“a man unprincipled”: Alexander Hamilton, “Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration of the Government,” Aug. 18, 1792, founders.archives.gov.
“progress is neither automatic”: Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 472.
“can constantly remake ourselves”: Barack Obama, “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes,” CNN, June 28, 2005.
“experiment entrusted to the hands”: George Washington, Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789.
“the indigenous American berserk”: Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1988), 86.
“heated exaggeration”: Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (1965; New York: Vintage, 2008), 3.
“a nation, a culture”: Ibid., 4.
“Have you no sense”: “McCarthy-Welch Exchange,” June 9, 1954, americanrhetoric.com.
“the State Department harbors”: McCarthy to Truman, Feb. 11, 1950, telegram, archives.gov.
“episodic waves”: Hofstadter, Paranoid Style in American Politics, 39.
The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant: Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Know-Nothing Party.”
“America has been largely taken”: Hofstadter, Paranoid Style in American Politics, 39.
nationalist, anti-immigrant leaders: Ishaan Tharoor, “Geert Wilders and the Mainstreaming of White Nationalism,” Washington Post, Mar. 14, 2017; Elisabeth Zerofsky, “Europe’s Populists Prepare for a Nationalist Spring,” New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2017; Jason Horowitz, “Italy’s Populists Turn Up the Heat as Anti-Migrant Anger Boils,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2018.
quoted, in news articles: Ed Ballard, “Terror, Brexit, and U.S. Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 2016.
“Things fall apart”: William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” poetryfoundation.org.
Tea Party paranoids who claimed: “Tea Party Movement Is Full of Conspiracy Theories,” Newsweek, Feb. 8, 2010.
According to a 2017 survey: Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2017.
Another study conducted: Melissa Healy, “It’s More Than the ‘Rigged’ Election: Voters Across the Political Spectrum Believe in Conspiracy Theories,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 3, 2016; Shankar Vedantam, “More Americans Than You Might Think Believe in Conspiracy Theories,” NPR, June 4, 2014.
Trump, who launched his political: Eric Bradner, “Trump Praises 9/11 Truther’s ‘Amazing’ Reputation,” CNN Politics, Dec. 2, 2015.
His former chief strategist: Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, and Glenn Thrush, “Stephen Bannon Out at the White House After Turbulent Run,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 2017.
“reads to reinforce”: Haberman, Thrush, and Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.”
Because such mentions tend: Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, and Philip Rucker, “Doubting the Intelligence, Trump Pursues Putin and Leaves a Russian Threat Unchecked,” Washington Post, Dec. 14, 2017; Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris, and Greg Jaffe, “Breaking with Tradition, Trump Skips President’s Written Intelligence Report and Relies on Oral Briefings,” Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2018.
sources like Breitbart News: Charlie Warzel and Lam Thuy Vo, “Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News,” BuzzFeed, Dec. 3, 2016; Dean Obeidallah, “Trump Talks Judgment, Then Cites National Enquirer,” CNN, May 4, 2016.
eight hours a day watching: Haberman, Thrush, and Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.”
“admiring tweets, transcripts”: Alex Thompson, “Trump Gets a Folder Full of Positive News About Himself Twice a Day,” Vice News, Aug. 9, 2017.
“I’m the only one”: Benjamin Hart, “Trump on Unfilled State Department Jobs: ‘I Am the Only One That Matters,’ ” New York, Nov. 3, 2017; Bill Chappell, “ ‘I’m the Only One That Matters,’ Trump Says of State Dept. Job Vacancies,” The Two-Way, NPR, Nov. 3, 2017.
Commonsense policies like: Lydia Saad, “Americans Widely Support Tighter Regulations on Gun Sales,” Gallup, Oct. 17, 2017.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans: Max Greenwood, “Poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Want DACA Recipients to Stay in US,” Hill, Jan. 18, 2018.
And 83 percent of Americans: Harper Neidig, “Poll: 83 Percent of Voters Support Keeping FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules,” Hill, Dec. 12, 2017; Cecilia Kang, “F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2017.
“addiction to infotainment”: Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 307; Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008); Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
“the popular equation of intellectualism”: Jacoby, Age of American Unreason, xviii.
“does a poor job of teaching”: Ibid., 307.
“the persistent and sustained reliance”: Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 1.
“America’s political reality”: Ibid., 38–39.
Indeed, the Iraq war remains: Michiko Kakutani, “How Feuds and Failures Affected American Intelligence,” New York Times, June 18, 2004; Michiko Kakutani, “All the President’s Books (Minding History’s Whys and Wherefores),” New York Times, May 11, 2006; Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” Guardian, July 17, 2003; Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfuss, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, Jan./Feb. 2004; Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003; Michiko Kakutani, “Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2004; Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, “Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,” Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2003.
“something on the order of several”: Kakutani, “All the President’s Books.”
“A cakewalk”: Ken Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2002.
“pasting feathers together”: Michiko Kakutani, “From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong,” New York Times, July 25, 2006.
Although Trump frequently criticized: Eugene Kiely, “Donald Trump and the Iraq War,” FactCheck.org, Feb. 19, 2016.
“deconstruction of the administrative state”: Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for ‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State,’ ” Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2017.
crucial role of ambassador: Victor Cha, “Giving North Korea a ‘Bloody Nose’ Carries a Huge Risk to Americans,” Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2018.
world confidence in U.S. leadership: Bill Chappell, “World’s Regard for U.S. Leadership Hits Record Low in Gallup Poll,” NPR, Jan. 19, 2018; Laura Smith-Spark, “US Slumps in Global Leadership Poll After Trump’s 1st Year,” CNN, Jan. 18, 2018.
“the wisdom of the crowd”: Michiko Kakutani, “The Cult of the Amateur,” New York Times, June 29, 2007.
“every opinion on any matter”: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 20.
“If citizens do not bother”: Ibid., 11.
Unqualified judges and agency heads: Carlos Ballesteros, “Trump Is Nominating Unqualified Judges at an Unprecedented Rate,” Newsweek, Nov. 17, 2017; Paul Waldman, “Donald Trump Has Assembled the Worst Cabinet in American History,” The Plum Line (blog), Washington Post, Jan. 19, 2017; Travis Waldron and Daniel Marans, “Donald Trump’s Cabinet Is on Track to Be the Least Experienced in Modern History,” Huffington Post, Nov. 24, 2016.
Rick Perry, who was famous: Tom DiChristopher, “Trump Once Again Seeks to Slash Funding for Clean Energy in 2019 Budget,” CNBC, Jan. 31, 2018.
the new EPA head, Scott Pruitt: Brady Dennis, “Scott Pruitt, Longtime Adversary of EPA, Confirmed to Lead the Agency,” Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2017; Umair Irfan, “Scott Pruitt Is Slowly Strangling the EPA,” Vox, Jan. 30, 2018.
Congressional Budget Office: Alan Rappeport, “C.B.O. Head, Who Prizes Nonpartisanship, Finds Work Under G.O.P. Attack,” New York Times, June 19, 2017; Steven Rattner, “The Boring Little Budget Office That Trump Hates,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2017.
“science-based” and “evidence-based”: Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, “CDC Gets List of Forbidden Words: Fetus, Transgender, Diversity,” Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2017.
“the empirical method of thought”: George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 193.
In addition to announcing: Lisa Friedman, “Syria Joins Paris Climate Accord, Leaving Only U.S. Opposed,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 2017.
the Trump administration vowed: Lisa Friedman, “Expect Environmental Battles to Be ‘Even More Significant’ in 2018,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 2018.
Scientists were dismissed: “President Trump’s War on Science,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2017; “Attacks on Science,” Union of Concerned Scientists, ucsusa.org; Tanya Lewis, “A Year of Trump: Science Is a Major Casualty in the New Politics of Disruption,” Scientific American, Dec. 14, 2017; Joel Achenbach and Lena H. Sun, “Trump Budget Seeks Huge Cuts to Science and Medical Research, Disease Prevention,” Washington Post, May 23, 2017; Julia Belluz, “The GOP Tax Plan Would Blow a Hole in American Science,” Vox, Dec. 11, 2017.
The EPA alone was facing: Brady Dennis, “Trump Budget Seeks 23 Percent Cut at EPA, Eliminating Dozens of Programs,” Washington Post, Feb. 12, 2018.
In April 2017, the March for Science: “Marchers Around the World Tell Us Why They’re Taking to the Streets for Science,” Science, Apr. 13, 2017.
British scientists worry about: “How Will Leaving the EU Affect Universities and Research?,” Brexit Means…(podcast), Guardian, Sept. 13, 2017.
“I liken the attacks on science”: “Marchers Around the World Tell Us Why They’re Taking to the Streets for Science.”
“its very opposite, terror”: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (New York: Viking Press, 1943), loc. 5297, 346, Kindle.
“the transmission of the human word”: Ibid., 419, 425, 924.
“We had a passion”: Ibid., 403, 5352.
“The few among writers”: Ibid., 5378, 5586.
“preached their gospel”: Ibid., 1269, 5400.
“They practiced their method”: Ibid., 2939.
“put through by force”: Ibid., 5378.
The death of objectivity: David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 75. See also Michiko Kakutani, “Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2006.
“a kaleidoscope of information”: David Foster Wallace, “Host: Deep into the Mercenary World of Take-No-Prisoners Political Talk Radio,” Atlantic, Apr. 2005.
The Republican Party: Stephen Collinson and Jeremy Diamond, “Trump Again at War with ‘Deep State’ Justice Department,” CNN Politics, Jan. 2, 2018.
“We’re trying to disrupt”: Donald J. Trump, “Remarks at a Rally at Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wisconsin,” Sept. 28, 2016. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119201.
“failed and corrupt political establishment”: Ben Illing, “Trump Ran as a Populist. He’s Governing as an Elitist. He’s Not the First,” Vox, June 23, 2017.
“Look, I read postmodernist”: Andrew Marantz, “Trolls for Trump,” New Yorker, Oct. 31, 2016.
“seen as no more than”: Christopher Butler, Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15.
“resisted the cultural changes”: Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 285.
“the final form of human government”: Ishaan Tharoor, “Fukuyama’s ‘Future of History’: Is Liberal Democracy Doomed?,” Time, Feb. 8, 2012.
“with populist and nationalist forces”: Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2017, freedomhouse.org.
“a slow erosion”: Ishaan Tharoor, “The Man Who Declared the ‘End of History’ Fears for Democracy’s Future,” Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2017.
And Trump, as both candidate: Jasmine C. Lee and Kevin Quealy, “The 425 People, Places, and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2018.
Russian trolls used an impostor Facebook account: Donie O’Sullivan, “Russian Trolls Created Facebook Events Seen by More Than 300,000 Users,” CNN, Jan. 26, 2018.
“all these things”: William J. Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Evangelicals Defend Trump’s Alleged Marital Infidelity. But His Infidelity to America Is Worse,” NBC News, Jan. 30, 2018.
Tony Perkins, president: Jennifer Hansler, “Conservative Evangelical Leader: Trump Gets a ‘Mulligan’ on His Behavior,” CNN, Jan. 23, 2018.
“commitment was understood”: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 314.
“it is not only futile”: Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Knopf, 1994), 135.
“knowledge about the past”: Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 8.
“The postmodern view fit well”: Shawn Otto, The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2016), 180–81.
“Atmospheric CO2 is the same”: Ibid., 177.
“What is peculiar to our own age”: George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” A Collection of Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 199.
“the potential to alter”: Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993), loc. 19, Kindle. See also Michiko Kakutani, “When History Is a Casualty,” New York Times, Apr. 30, 1993.
As David Lehman: Michiko Kakutani, “The Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 1991.
De Man, a professor at Yale: Jon Wiener, “Deconstructing de Man,” Nation, Jan. 9, 1988; Robert Alter, “Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud,” New Republic, Apr. 5, 2014; Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Liveright, 2014).
A very different portrait: Barish, Double Life of Paul de Man; Jennifer Schuessler, “Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by Scandal,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 2014; Louis Menand, “The de Man Case,” New Yorker, Mar. 24, 2014.
The most shocking news: Lehman, Signs of the Times, 163–64.
“we are determined to forbid”: Ibid., 180.
“Jewish writers have always”: Kakutani, “Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic”; Paul de Man, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” Le Soir, Mar. 4, 1941, reprinted in Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man (New York: Routledge, 2001).
“considerations of the actual”: Kakutani, “Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic.”
More disturbing still: Lehman, Signs of the Times, 137, 158, 234.
“one of detached mockery”: Ibid., 238, 239, 243, 267.
“have to take each word”: David Brunnstrom, “Ahead of Trump Meeting, Abe Told Not to Take Campaign Rhetoric Literally,” Reuters, Nov. 15, 2016.
“You guys took everything”: Jonah Goldberg, “Take Trump Seriously but Not Literally? How, Exactly?,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 6, 2016.
“Our subjectivity is so completely”: James Mottram, “Spike Jonze Interview: Her Is My ‘Boy Meets Computer’ Movie,” Independent, Jan. 31, 2014.
“ethic of self-preservation”: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 51, xiii, 239.
“intense feelings of rage”: Ibid., 36–38.
“remaking, remodeling, elevating”: Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, Aug. 23, 1976.
“the preening self”: Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 315.
“My net worth fluctuates”: David A. Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “Trump: A True Story,” Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2016; Kiran Khalid, “Trump: I’m Worth Whatever I Feel,” CNNMoney.com, Apr. 21, 2011.
“I believe that he feels”: Scott Horsley, “Trump: Putin Again Denied Interfering in Election and ‘I Really Believe’ He Means It,” The Two-Way, NPR, Nov. 11, 2017.
“I understand your view”: Transcripts, CNN, July 22, 2016, transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1607/22/nday.06.html.
“small private societies”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1990), 215, 319, 318, 321.
Norman Vincent Peale: James Barron, “Overlooked Influences on Donald Trump: A Famous Minister and His Church,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 2016; Tom Gjelten, “How Positive Thinking, Prosperity Gospel Define Donald Trump’s Faith Outlook,” NPR, Aug. 3, 2016.
“Any fact facing us”: Tamara Keith, “Trump Crowd Size Estimate May Involve ‘the Power of Positive Thinking,’ ” NPR, Jan. 22, 2017.
Ayn Rand, also admired: Mackenzie Weinger, “7 Pols Who Praised Ayn Rand,” Politico, Apr. 26, 2012.
over the years, The Fountainhead: Kirsten Powers, “Donald Trump’s ‘Kinder, Gentler’ Version,” USA Today, Apr. 11, 2016.
“highest moral purpose”: Jonathan Freedland, “The New Age of Ayn Rand: How She Won Over Trump and Silicon Valley,” Guardian, Apr. 10, 2017.
“a kind of embarrassment”: Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary, Mar. 1, 1961.
“head out into this wild”: Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” Harper’s, Nov. 1989.
“depends on what the meaning”: “From the Starr Referral: Clinton’s Grand Jury Testimony, Part 4,” Washington Post, washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/bctest092198_4.htm.
“the sheer fact of self”: Roth, “Writing American Fiction.”
“wholly fabricated or wildly embellished”: Kakutani, “Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways.”
“most of what”: Laura Barton, “The Man Who Rewrote His Life,” Guardian, Sept. 15, 2006.
“spread in tandem”: Adam Begley, “The I’s Have It: Duke’s ‘Moi’ Critics Expose Themselves,” Lingua Franca, Mar./Apr. 1994.
In her 1996 book: Michiko Kakutani, “Opinion vs. Reality in an Age of Pundits,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1994; Michiko Kakutani, “Fear of Fat as the Bane of Modernism,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 1996.
Personal stories or agendas: Michiko Kakutani, “A Biographer Who Claims a License to Blur Reality,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1999.
“understand the first thing”: Ibid.
“feeling of tenderness”: Michiko Kakutani, “Taking Sides in Polemics over Plath,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 1994; Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (New York: Knopf, 1994), loc. 67, 32, Kindle.
“Teach both,” some argued: Sam Boyd, “Sarah Palin on Teaching Intelligent Design in Schools,” American Prospect, Aug. 29, 2008; Massimo Pigliucci, “Is Sarah Palin a Creationist?,” LiveScience, Sept. 1, 2008.
“Teach the controversy”: John Timmer, “Ohio School District Has ‘Teach the Controversy’ Evolution Lesson Plan,” Ars Technica, May 18, 2016.
“some very fine people”: Rosie Gray, “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides,’ ” Atlantic, Aug. 15, 2017; Mark Landler, “Trump Resurrects His Claim That Both Sides Share Blame in Charlottesville Violence,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 2017; Sonam Sheth, “Trump Equates Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with George Washington in Bizarre Press Conference,” Business Insider, Aug. 15, 2017; Dan Merica, “Trump Condemns ‘Hatred, Bigotry, and Violence on Many Sides’ in Charlottesville,” CNN Politics, Aug. 13, 2017.
As Naomi Oreskes: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 6.
“Doubt is our product”: Ibid., 34.
The strategy, essentially, was this: Ibid., 6–7, 217.
the “Tobacco Strategy”: Ibid., 6, 215.
This false equivalence: Alister Doyle, “Scientists Say United on Global Warming, at Odds with Public View,” Reuters, May 15, 2013; NASA, “Scientific Consensus: Earth’s Climate Is Warming,” climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/; Justin Fox, “97 Percent Consensus on Climate Change? It’s Complicated,” Bloomberg, June 15, 2017.
“undue attention to marginal”: David Robert Grimes, “Impartial Journalism Is Laudable. But False Balance Is Dangerous,” Guardian, Nov. 8, 2016.
Or, as a headline: Sarah Knapton, “BBC Staff Told to Stop Inviting Cranks on to Science Programmes,” Telegraph, July 4, 2014.
“Like many people watching”: Christiane Amanpour, speech on receiving the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award, Nov. 22, 2016, cpj.org.
“Do I want to interfere”: Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant,” in Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), Kindle, p. 384 of 467.
at a time when nineteen kids: Christopher Ingraham, “19 Kids Are Shot Every Day in the United States,” Washington Post, June 20, 2017.
“It stupefies, it sickens”: Roth, “Writing American Fiction.”
“perception is reality”: Simon Kelner, “Perception Is Reality: The Facts Won’t Matter in Next Year’s General Election,” Independent, Oct. 30, 2014; Roxie Salamon-Abrams, “Echoes of History? A Lesson Plan About the Recent Rise of Europe’s Far-Right Parties,” New York Times, Apr. 19, 2017.
But Atwater’s cold-blooded use: Lawrence Freedman, “Reagan’s Southern Strategy Gave Rise to the Tea Party,” Salon, Oct. 27, 2013.
Depicting America as a country: Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, and Robert Farley, “President Trump’s Inaugural Address,” FactCheck.org, Jan. 20, 2017; Chris Nichols, “Mostly True: Undocumented Immigrants Less Likely to Commit Crimes Than U.S. Citizens,” PolitiFact California, Aug. 3, 2017; Akhila Satish, “The Nobel Laureate Exclusion Act: No Future Geniuses Need Apply,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14, 2017; Rani Molla, “The Top U.S. Tech Companies Founded by Immigrants Are Now Worth Nearly $4 Trillion,” Recode, Jan. 12, 2018; “Fact Check: Donald Trump’s Republican Convention Speech, Annotated,” NPR, July 21, 2016.
Long before he entered politics: Vivian Yee, “Donald Trump’s Math Takes His Towers to Greater Heights,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2016; Marc Fisher and Will Hobson, “Donald Trump Masqueraded as Publicist to Brag About Himself,” Washington Post, May 13, 2016; David Barstow, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth,” New York Times, July 16, 2016; Fahrenthold and O’Harrow, “Trump: A True Story.”
He spent years as a real-estate developer: Aaron Williams and Anu Narayanswamy, “How Trump Has Made Millions by Selling His Name,” Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2017; “10 Donald Trump Business Failures,” Time, Oct. 11, 2016.
“planned, planted, or incited”: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 11.
for his “well-knownness”: Ibid., 65.
would even host a show: Laura Bradley, “Trump Bashes Schwarzenegger’s Celebrity Apprentice, Forgets He Still Produces It,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 6, 2017.
“prince of humbugs”: Boorstin, Image, 209–11.
Much the way images: Ibid., 241, 212.
“desert of the real”: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Jean Baudrillard”; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
“a secret society of astronomers”: Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), loc. 21–22, 34, Kindle.
“Reality gave ground”: Ibid., 33.
“If there is something comforting”: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973), loc. 434, Kindle.
In a 2016 documentary: Brandon Harris, “Adam Curtis’s Essential Counterhistories,” New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2016.
“red-pilling the normies”: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “The Online Radicalization We’re Not Talking About,” Select All, May 18, 2017.
study on online disinformation: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, Data and Society Research Institute, May 15, 2017.
“once groups have been red-pilled”: Marwick and Lewis, “Online Radicalization We’re Not Talking About.”
“it’s a surprisingly short leap”: Ibid.
a lot of fake news: BBC Trending, “The Saga of ‘Pizzagate’: The Fake Story That Shows How Conspiracy Theories Spread,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2016.
Reddit can be a useful testing ground: Ali Breland, “Warner Sees Reddit as Potential Target for Russian Influence,” Hill, Sept. 27, 2017; Roger McNamee, “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us,” Washington Monthly, Jan./Feb./Mar. 2018.
“asymmetry of passion”: Renee DiResta, “Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality by Boosting Conspiracy Theories,” Fast Company, May 11, 2016.
“Without clear language”: John le Carré, “Why We Should Learn German,” Guardian, July 1, 2017.
“We swim in language”: James Carroll, Practicing Catholic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 302.
“political chaos is connected”: George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1954), 177.
Ministry of Truth: Orwell, 1984, Kindle.
characteristics of “wooden language”: Roger Scruton, “Newspeak,” in The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); “The Wooden Language,” Radio Romania International, old.rri.ro/arh-art.shtml?lang=1&sec=9&art=4166.
Thom identified in a 1987 thesis: Françoise Thom, La langue de bois (Paris: Julliard, 1987).
Mao’s Communist Party also adopted: Ji Fengyuan, Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003); Perry Link, “Mao’s China: The Language Game,” NYR Daily, May 15, 2015.
One of history’s most detailed: Timothy Snyder, “A New Look at Civilian Life in Europe Under Hitler,” review of An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, by Peter Fritzsche, New York Times, Nov. 22, 2016.
“tiny doses of arsenic”: Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12, 15.
Klemperer didn’t think Hitler: Ibid., 54–55, 30, 118, 44–45.
“a threatening and repulsive”: Ibid., 60–62, 5, 101–3.
“literally fixed the essential features”: Ibid., 19.
“finished off the biggest elephants”: Ibid., 222, 227, 223, 224, 228.
“WAR IS PEACE”: Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1950), 16.
“the single greatest witch hunt”: Rebecca Savransky, “Trump: ‘You Are Witnessing the Single Greatest WITCH HUNT in American Political History,’ ” Hill, June 15, 2017; Michael Finnegan, “Trump Attacks on Russia Investigation Threaten U.S. Democracy, Authors Say,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 6, 2018; Anne Gearan, “Trump’s Attacks on Justice and FBI Echo Election Claims of a ‘Rigged System,’ ” Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2018.
Trump has the perverse habit: Jessica Estepa, “It’s Not Just ‘Rocket Man.’ Trump Has Long History of Nicknaming His Foes,” USA Today, Sept. 21, 2017; Theodore Schleifer and Jeremy Diamond, “Clinton Says Trump Leading ‘Hate Movement’; He Calls Her a ‘Bigot,’ ” CNN Politics, Aug. 25, 2016; “Excerpts from Trump’s Interview with the Times,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 2017.
“two mutually contradictory meanings”: Orwell, 1984, 212.
the “largest audience”: Linda Qiu, “Donald Trump Had Biggest Inaugural Crowd Ever? Metrics Don’t Show It,” PolitiFact, Jan. 21, 2017.
“to assert power over truth”: Masha Gessen, “The Putin Paradigm,” NYR Daily, Dec. 13, 2016.
“It is not merely that speeches”: Orwell, 1984, 213.
within days of Trump’s inauguration: Oliver Milman and Sam Morris, “Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site at a Time,” Guardian, May 14, 2017; Brian Kahn, “The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information,” Climate Central, Feb. 2, 2017; Leila Miller, “As ‘Climate Change’ Fades from Government Sites, a Struggle to Archive Data,” Frontline, Dec. 8, 2017.
Some of their fears were realized: Megan Cerullo, “EPA Removes Climate Change Page from Website to Reflect New ‘Priorities’ Under President Trump,” New York Daily News, Apr. 29, 2017; Bill McKibben, “The Trump Administration’s Solution to Climate Change: Ban the Term,” Guardian, Aug. 8, 2017; Oliver Milman, “US Federal Department Is Censoring Use of Term ‘Climate Change,’ Emails Reveal,” Guardian, Aug. 7, 2017; Lydia Smith, “Trump Administration Deletes Mention of ‘Climate Change’ from Environmental Protection Agency’s Website,” Independent, Oct. 21, 2017; Michael Collins, “EPA Removes Climate Change Data, Other Scientific Information from Website,” USA Today, Apr. 29, 2017; Oliver Milman and Sam Morris, “Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site at a Time,” Guardian, May 14, 2017.
USDA employees were informed: Valerie Volcovici and P. J. Huffstutter, “Trump Administration Seeks to Muzzle U.S. Agency Employees,” Reuters, Jan. 24, 2017; Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. Cancels Talk on Climate Change by Agency Scientists,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 2017; Dan Merica and Dana Bash, “Trump Admin Tells National Park Service to Halt Tweets,” CNN Politics, Jan. 23, 2017.
“He wants to see”: Michiko Kakutani, “Donald Trump’s Chilling Language, and the Fearsome Power of Words,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 21, 2017.
He is equally nonchalant about spelling: Aidan Quigley, “Make America Spell Again? 25 of Donald Trump’s Twitter Spelling Errors,” Newsweek, June 25, 2017; Jennifer Calfas, “Trump’s Official Inauguration Poster Has Glaring Typo,” Hill, Feb. 12, 2017; Eli Rosenberg, “ ‘State of the Uniom’: Misspelled Tickets to President Trump’s First Address Require a Reprint,” Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2018.
Trump’s tweets have been deemed official: Elizabeth Landers, “White House: Trump’s Tweets Are ‘Official Statements,’ ” CNN Politics, June 6, 2017; Matthew Weaver, Robert Booth, and Ben Jacobs, “Theresa May Condemns Trump’s Retweets of UK Far-Right Leader’s Anti-Muslim Videos,” Guardian, Nov. 29, 2017.
His rants against journalism: Steven Erlanger, “ ‘Fake News,’ Trump’s Obsession, Is Now a Cudgel for Strongmen,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2017; Anne Applebaum, “The ‘Trump Effect’ Will Help Authoritarians Around the World,” Washington Post, May 4, 2016; “Record Number of Journalists Jailed as Turkey, China, Egypt Pay Scant Price for Repression,” Committee to Protect Journalists, Dec. 13, 2017.
“the limits of what the public”: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “An American Authoritarian,” Atlantic, Aug. 10, 2016.
“Mussolini did not have any philosophy”: Umberto Eco, “Ur-fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
“I’m with you”: “Full Text: Donald Trump 2016 RNC Draft Speech Transcript,” Politico, July 21, 2016.
“We’re all islands”: Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, in Selected Works of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Collier & Son, 1900), 2:61.
“How can the polls”: Deborah Solomon, “Goodbye (Again), Norma Jean,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 2004.
A 2016 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016, June 22, 2016.
It’s telling that the old national motto: David Nakamura and Lisa Rein, “It’s ‘Very Gold’: The Presidential Coin Undergoes a Trumpian Makeover,” Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2017.
These growing divides in America: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 130–32, 12.
“As we’ve lost trust”: Ibid., 216.
“as the parties have come to represent lifestyle”: Ibid., 232.
A 2017 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, “Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions,” July 10, 2017.
“This is not designed”: Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), loc. 4247, Kindle.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign: Molly Ball, “Why Hillary Clinton Lost,” Atlantic, Nov. 15, 2016.
a 2014 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” June 12, 2014; Pew Research Center, Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016.
And then there is gerrymandering: Julian E. Zelizer, “The Power That Gerrymandering Has Brought to Republicans,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016; Ronald Brownstein, “America, a Year Later,” State: The Digital Magazine from CNN Politics, Nov. 2017.
“further apart from one another”: Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public”; Pew Research Center, Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016.
“the Four Corners of Deceit”: “The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up,” Rush Limbaugh Show, Apr. 29, 2013.
In the three decades since the FCC: Dylan Matthews, “Everything You Need to Know About the Fairness Doctrine in One Post,” Washington Post, Aug. 23, 2011; Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, Mar. 3, 2017; Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, “Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2017; Michael J. de la Merced and Nicholas Fandos, “Fox’s Unfamiliar but Powerful Television Rival: Sinclair,” New York Times, May 3, 2017.
“truth-based content”: John Ziegler, “How Donald Trump’s Election Has Helped Me Decide to End My National Radio Show,” Mediaite, Dec. 18, 2016.
Charlie Sykes observed: Charles Sykes, “How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump,” Newsweek, Sept. 21, 2017; Charles Sykes, “Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong,” New York Times, Dec. 15, 2016.
A 2017 Harvard study: Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda”; Alexandra Topping, “ ‘Sweden, Who Would Believe This?’ Trump Cites Non-existent Terror Attack,” Guardian, Feb. 19, 2017; Samantha Schmidt and Lindsey Bever, “Kellyanne Conway Cites ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ That Never Happened to Defend Travel Ban,” Washington Post, Feb. 3, 2017.
Trump supporters who booed: Alexander Nazaryan, “John McCain Cancer Is ‘Godly Justice’ for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims,” Newsweek, July 20, 2017.
“The enduring, complicated divides”: Andrew Sullivan, “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” New York, Sept. 19, 2017.
confirmation bias: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017.
“does not encourage dissent”: Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87.
“the information and views”: Ibid., 4.
“binary tribal world”: Sykes, “How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump”; Sykes, “Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong.”
“In the new Right media culture”: Charles Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 180.
“With Google personalized”: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 3.
“an endless you-loop”: Ibid., 16.
“If algorithms are going to curate”: Eli Pariser, “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles,’ ” TED2011, ted.com.
“When you want to know”: William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Putnam, 2010), 212.
Tim Berners-Lee: “History of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee,” World Wide Web Foundation.
“The rise of the web”: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), loc. 332–33, Kindle.
“We don’t see the forest”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 91.
“urge to share was activated”: Wu, Attention Merchants, 320.
“a commons that fostered”: Ibid., 322.
two-thirds of Americans: “ ‘Who Shared It?’ How Americans Decide What News to Trust on Social Media,” American Press Institute, Mar. 20, 2017; Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 7, 2017.
Fake news is nothing new: “Yellow Journalism,” in Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War, PBS, pbs.org; Jacob Soll, “The Long and Brutal History of Fake News,” Politico, Dec. 18, 2016; “Gaius Julius Caesar: The Conquest of Gaul,” Livius.org.
man behind the massacre: Kevin Roose, “After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2017; Jennifer Medina, “A New Report on the Las Vegas Gunman Was Released. Here Are Some Takeaways,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 2018.
During the last three months: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016.
A study from Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, “Trump Supporters and Extreme Right ‘Share Widest Range of Junk News,’ ” Feb. 6, 2018; Ishaan Tharoor, “ ‘Fake News’ and the Trumpian Threat to Democracy,” Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2018; Shawn Musgrave and Matthew Nussbaum, “Trump Thrives in Areas That Lack Traditional News Outlets,” Politico, Apr. 8, 2018.
“the monetization and manipulation”: Pierre Omidyar, “6 Ways Social Media Has Become a Direct Threat to Democracy,” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2017; Omidyar Group, Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?, Oct. 1, 2017.
“The system is failing”: Olivia Solon, “Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web: ‘The System Is Failing,’ ” Guardian, Nov. 15, 2017.
“the level of political discourse”: McNamee, “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us”; Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, Feb. 12, 2018.
“We got elected”: Michael Lewis, “Has Anyone Seen the President?,” Bloomberg View, Feb. 9, 2018.
Trump campaign made shrewd: Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, “After Working for Trump’s Campaign, British Data Firm Eyes New U.S. Government Contracts,” Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2017; Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, “Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 2017; Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go,” Bloomberg, Oct. 27, 2016.
Facebook revealed: Matthew Rosenberg and Gabriel J.X. Dance, “ ‘You Are the Product’: Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook,” New York Times, Apr. 8, 2018; Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, “Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach,” Guardian, Mar. 17, 2018; Olivia Solon, “Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica May Have Gained 37m More Users’ Data,” Guardian, Apr. 4, 2018.
voter persuasion effort: Craig Timberg, Karla Adam, and Michael Kranish, “Bannon Oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s Collection of Facebook Data, According to Former Employee,” Washington Post, Mar. 20, 2018; Isobel Thompson, “The Secret History of Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix, Explained,” Vanity Fair, Mar. 21, 2018.
The Trump campaign’s digital director: Lesley Stahl, “Facebook ‘Embeds,’ Russia, and the Trump Campaign’s Secret Weapon,” 60 Minutes, Oct. 8, 2017.
The campaign also used: Green and Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go”; David A. Graham, “Trump’s ‘Voter Suppression Operation’ Targets Black Voters,” Atlantic, Oct. 27, 2016.
The master manipulators of social media: Shane Harris, “Russian Hackers Who Compromised DNC Are Targeting the Senate, Company Says,” Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2018; Raphael Satter, “Inside Story: How Russians Hacked the Democrats’ Emails,” Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2017; Priyanka Boghani, “How Russia Looks to Gain Through Political Interference,” Frontline, Dec. 23, 2016; Rick Noack, “Everything We Know So Far About Russian Election Meddling in Europe,” Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2018; U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Jan. 10, 2018.
In the case of the American election: David Ingram, “Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts,” Reuters, Oct. 30, 2017; Shane Goldmacher, “America Hits New Landmark: 200 Million Registered Voters,” Politico, Oct. 19, 2016; Scott Shane, “These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2017; Leslie Shapiro, “Anatomy of a Russian Facebook Ad,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2017.
“The strategy is to take a crack”: Craig Timberg et al., “Russian Ads, Now Publicly Released, Show Sophistication of Influence Campaign,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2017.
Reporting from several publications: Jack Nicas, “How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2018; Paul Lewis, “ ‘Fiction Is Outperforming Reality’: How YouTube’s Algorithm Distorts Truth,” Guardian, Feb. 2, 2018; Jon Swaine, “Twitter Admits Far More Russian Bots Posted on Election Than It Had Disclosed,” Guardian, Jan. 19, 2018; Philip N. Howard et al., “Social Media, News, and Political Information During the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States?,” Computational Propaganda Research Project, Sept. 28, 2017.
Russians had become very adept: Ben Popken and Kelly Cobiella, “Russian Troll Describes Work in the Infamous Misinformation Factory,” NBC News, Nov. 16, 2017; Scott Shane, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” New York Times, Sept. 7, 2017.
When the Access Hollywood tape: Ryan Nakashima and Barbara Ortutay, “Russia Twitter Trolls Deflected Trump Bad News,” USA Today, Nov. 10, 2017; Issie Lapowsky, “Pro-Kremlin Twitter Trolls Take Aim at Robert Mueller,” Wired, Jan. 5, 2018.
repeal net neutrality: Neidig, “Poll: 83 Percent of Voters Support Keeping FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules”; Todd Shields, “FCC Got 444,938 Net-Neutrality Comments from Russian Email Addresses,” Bloomberg, Nov. 29, 2017; “Over Half of Public Comments to FCC on Net Neutrality Appear Fake: Study,” Reuters, Nov. 29, 2017; Susan Decker, “FCC Rules Out Delaying Net Neutrality Repeal over Fake Comments,” Bloomberg, Jan. 5, 2018; Jon Brodkin, “FCC Stonewalled Investigation of Net Neutrality Comment Fraud, NY AG Says,” Ars Technica, Nov. 22, 2017; Brian Fung, “FCC Net Neutrality Process ‘Corrupted’ by Fake Comments and Vanishing Consumer Complaints, Officials Say,” Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2017; James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg, “Millions of People Post Comments on Federal Regulations. Many Are Fake,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2017; James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg, “Many Comments Critical of ‘Fiduciary’ Rule Are Fake,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 2017.
“Sometimes, when political parties”: Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, “Troops, Trolls, and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” Computational Propaganda Research Project, working paper no. 2017.12.
The use of bots: Omidyar, “6 Ways Social Media Has Become a Direct Threat to Democracy”; Omidyar Group, Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?
Things are only likely to get worse: Julia Munslow, “Ex-CIA Director Hayden: Russia Election Meddling Was ‘Most Successful Covert Operation in History,’ ” Yahoo News, July 21, 2017; Cynthia McFadden, William M. Arkin, and Kevin Monahan, “Russians Penetrated U.S. Voter Systems, Top U.S. Official Says,” NBC News, Feb. 8, 2018; Harris, “Russian Hackers Who Compromised DNC Are Targeting the Senate.”
Russia already tried to meddle: Shannon O’Neil, “Don’t Let Mexico’s Elections Become Putin’s Next Target,” Bloomberg View, Nov. 9, 2017; Jason Horowitz, “Italy, Bracing for Electoral Season of Fake News, Demands Facebook’s Help,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 2017; Yasmeen Serhan, “Italy Scrambles to Fight Misinformation Ahead of Its Elections,” Atlantic, Feb. 24, 2018; “Italy Warns of Election Threat as Rival Parties Court Russia,” ABC News, Feb. 21, 2018.
Technological developments are likely: Olivia Solon, “The Future of Fake News: Don’t Believe Everything You Read, See, or Hear,” Guardian, July 26, 2017; Cade Metz and Keith Collins, “How an A.I. ‘Cat-and-Mouse Game’ Generates Believable Fake Photos,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 2018; James Vincent, “New AI Research Makes It Easier to Create Fake Footage of Someone Speaking,” Verge, July 12, 2017; David Gershgorn, “AI Researchers Are Trying to Combat How AI Can Be Used to Lie and Deceive,” Quartz, Dec. 8, 2017; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Jean Baudrillard.”
“You can sway a thousand men”: Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On—,” in Revolt in 2100 (New York: Spectrum, 2013), Kindle.
the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov: Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin,” London Review of Books, Oct. 20, 2011.
“calculated to evoke hatred”: V. I. Lenin, “Report to the Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. on the St. Petersburg Split and the Institution of the Party Tribunal Ensuing Therefrom,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 12 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962).
“to an extraordinary degree”: Anne Applebaum, “100 Years Later, Bolshevism Is Back. And We Should Be Worried,” Washington Post, Nov. 6, 2017.
“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.
“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.
“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 Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900–1910), vol. 9.
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