a government that believes that the truth is dangerous and that reality begins with a tweet that signals both the legitimation of endless lies and forms of power that infantilize and depoliticize because they leave no room for standards of language capable of holding power accountable. Even worse, Trump’s war on language and truth does more than limit freedom to competing fictions, it also erases the distinction between moral depravity and justice, good and evil. As I have said elsewhere, “Trump’s Ministry of Fake News works incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable, claiming that reason, evidence, consistency, and logic no longer serve the truth because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. ‘Thought crimes’ are now labeled as ‘fake news.’”152
Timothy Snyder is right in arguing that “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”153 More startling is the assumption that in an age of deep divisions, exploitation, and precarity what matters is not only whether something is true or false but also the willingness of people to identify with the seductive lure of a consistent fascist narrative in which people willingly suspend “their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.”154 Hannah Arendt rightly argued that “what was new and dangerous to the American republic was not lying, but a situation in which lies had become indistinguishable from the truth.”155 Needless to say, there is more at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified as the theatricalization of politics, there is also the threat to democracy itself.
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