3
" The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks”—including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.”
Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted. "
― Michiko Kakutani , The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
4
" In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
“Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. "
― Michiko Kakutani , The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
5
" Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.
Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.”
Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts. "
― Michiko Kakutani , The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
7
" The most appalling racist, sexist, and perversely cruel remarks are served up on social media, often with a wink or a sneer, and when called out, practitioners frequently respond that they were simply joking—much the way that White House aides say Trump is simply joking or misunderstood when he makes offensive remarks. At a November 2016 alt-right conference, the white supremacist Richard Spencer ended his speech, shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” When asked about the Nazi salutes that greeted his exclamation, Spencer replied that they were “clearly done in a spirit of irony and exuberance. "
― Michiko Kakutani , The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
10
" 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. "
― Michiko Kakutani , The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
