"The result is that Americans are disoriented and frustrated, fearful of and often enraged at one another. Trump didn’t invent misinformation and disinformation; they have been around for much of human history. But by virtue of his considerable skills in this area, haided by social media and capitalizing on “truth decay” and diminishing trust in sources of factual information— he exploited them more effectively than anyone else has in American history. “It was unthinkable before Trump for anyone to run this kind of disinformation campaign from the White House against the American public.” As a result, we live in an era defined by epistemic chaos and noetic disarray, one in which a large portion of the population embraces falsehoods and fairy tales and thinks of them as “alternative facts.”
At www.theatlantic.com
