A Lot of People Are Saying
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9. Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein, Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 113, 108–9.
10. Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Aides Address His Wiretap Claims: ‘That’s above My Pay Grade,’ ” New York Times, March 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/trump-wiretap-claim-obama.html.
11. Jon Cohen, “Poll: Number of ‘Birthers’ Plummets,” Washington Post, May 5, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/behind-the-numbers/post/number-of-birthers-plummets/2011/05/04/AF3GAZxF_blog.html?utm_term=.02b5fdeab3bd.
12. Eugene Kiely, “Trump Surrogates Spin ‘Birther’ Narrative,” FactCheck.org, September 19, 2016, https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-surrogates-spin-birther-narrative/.
13. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, December 12, 2013, 1:32 p.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/411247268763676673?lang=en.
14. Tim Murphy, “How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” Mother Jones, November–December 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-infowars-alex-jones-clinton-conspiracy-theories/; Maggie Haberman and Alan Rappeport, “Trump Drops False ‘Birther’ Theory but Starts a New One: Clinton Started It,” New York Times, September 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/donald-trump-birther-obama.html.
15. Jeffrey Kluger, “Senator Throws Snowball! Climate Change Disproven,” Time, February 27, 2015, http://time.com/3725994/inhofe-snowball-climate/.
16. Tashman, “58 Donald Trump Conspiracy Theories.”
17. Austin Ramzy, “Does Praise for China Make Group a ‘Foreign Agent’? Republicans Say It Might,” June 7, 2018, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/world/asia/natural-resources-defense-council-china.html.
18. Donald Trump, “President Trump on Christine Blasey Ford, His Relationships with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and More,” interview by Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, October 14, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-full-interview-60-minutes-transcript-lesley-stahl-2018-10-14.
19. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 6–7.
20. David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, “The Rockefeller Family Fund Vs Exxon,” New York Review of Books, December 8, 2016, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/the-rockefeller-family-fund-vs-exxon/. See also Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, “How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science,” New York Times, June 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html.
21. Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques, “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 6 (June 2013): 699–731; Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “What Exxon Mobil Didn’t Say about Climate Change,” New York Times, August 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/exxon-climate-change-.html; Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran, “Yes, ExxonMobil Misled the Public,” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-oreskes-supran-exxonmobil-20170901-story.html.
22. Quoted in Bill McKibben, “The Koch Brothers’ New Brand,” review of Dark Money: The History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer, New York Review of Books, March 10, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/10/koch-brothers-new-brand/.
23. Davenport and Lipton, “How G.O.P. Leaders.”
24. Nick Buxton, “The Military Is Resisting Trump’s Denialism, but It’s Still Not a Force for Climate Justice,” Truthout, April 4, 2017, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40082-the-military-is-resisting-trumps-denialism-but-its-still-not-a-force-for-climate-justice.
25. John Schwartz, “A Leading Climate Agency May Lose Its Climate Focus,” New York Times, June 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/climate/noaa-climate-mission.html.
26. Bill McKibben, “A March for the Future,” Nation, May 8–15, 2017, 13.
27. Anthony Gaughan, “Illiberal Democracy: The Toxic Mix of Fake News, Hyperpolarization, and Partisan Election Administration,” Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy 12, no. 3 (2017): 59–139.
28. David M. J. Lazer et al., “The Science of Fake News,” Science 369, no. 6380 (March 2018): 1094–96.
29. Aaron Blake, “InfoWars Is behind President Trump’s Idea That the Media Is Covering Up Terrorist Attacks,” Washington Post, February 6, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/06/trumps-suggestion-that-the-media-is-ignoring-terrorist-attacks-has-a-familiar-source-infowars/?utm_term=.f43a20952410; Jeremy W. Peters, “The Right Builds an Alternative Narrative about the Crises around Trump,” New York Times, May 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/trump-scandal-conservatives-media.html.
30. Calculated from the “Trump Twitter Archive,” accessed September 18, 2018, http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/archive/fake news || fakenews || fake media /ttff/1-19-2017.
31. David A. Bell, “Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing,” Nation, December 22, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/fake-news-is-not-the-real-media-threat-were-facing/.
32. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, February 24, 2017, 10:09 p.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/835325771858251776?lang=en.
33. Nolan D. McCaskill, “Trump Backs Bannon: ‘The Media Is the Opposition Party,’ ” Politico, January 27, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/donald-trump-steve-bannon-media-opposition-party-234280.
34. Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, You’re Fake News! Findings from the Poynter Media Trust Survey (Saint Petersburg, FL: Poynter Institute, November 29, 2017), https://poyntercdn.blob.core.windows.net/files/PoynterMediaTrustSurvey2017.pdf.
35. Colleen Shalby, “Trump Calls ‘Fake News’ Media an Enemy of the People,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-donald-trump-called-fake-news-media-1487377442-htmlstory.html.
36. Jonathan Easley, “Trump: Media Is ‘Scum,’ ” Hill, December 7, 2015, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/262400-trump-media-is-scum.
37. Theodore Schleifer, “Donald Trump on Reporters: I Would Never Kill Them,” CNN Politics, December 21, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/politics/trump-putin-killing-reporters/index.html.
38. Avi Selk and Kristine Phillips, “Watergate Reporter Carl Bernstein: Trump’s Attacks on the Press Are More Dangerous than Nixon’s,” Washington Post, February 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/19/watergate-reporter-carl-bernstein-trumps-attacks-on-the-press-are-more-dangerous-than-nixons.
39. Bret Stephens, “Don’t Dismiss President Trump’s Attack on the Media as Mere Stupidity,” Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, Time, last updated February 26, 2017, http://time.com/4675860/donald-trump-fake-news-attacks/?curator=MediaREDEF.
40. Sara Fischer, “92% of Republicans Think Media Intentionally Reports Fake News,” Axios, July 9, 2018, https://www.axios.com/trump-effect-92-percent-republicans-media-fake-news-9c1bbf70-0054-41dd-b506-0869bb10f08c.html.
41. Charles Sykes, “Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying,” New York Times, February 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html.
42. Hochschild and Einstein, Do Facts Matter?
43. Jodi Dean, “Theorizing Conspiracy Theory,” Theory and Event 4, no. 3 (2000) 1–10: 2, 6.
44. Kate Starbird, “Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media Ecosystem,” Medium, March 14, 2017, https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f.
45. Starbird; Danah Boyd, “You Think You Want Media Literacy … Do You?,” Medium, March 9, 2018, https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2.
46. Steve Kolowich, “The
Water Next Time: Professor Who Helped Expose Crisis in Flint Says Public Science Is Broken,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Water-Next-Time-Professor/235136.
47. Z. Pamuk, “Examining the Experts: Science, Values, and Democracy” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017).
48. Pamuk.
49. Quoted in Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (New York: New Press, 2015), 110.
50. David Leonhardt, “The Original Lie about Obama Care,” New York Times, March 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/opinion/the-original-lie-about-obamacare.html.
51. Steven Erlanger, “ ‘Fake News,’ Trump’s Obsession, Is Now a Cudgel for Strongmen,” New York Times, December 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/europe/trump-fake-news-dictators.html.
Chapter 6. Who Owns Reality?
1. George F. Will, “Trump Has a Dangerous Disability,” Washington Post, May 3, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html.
2. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 308, 310, 314. “The actual fight against totalitarianism needs no more than a steady flow of reliable information” (323n2).
3. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “common sense,” accessed September 28, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37255.
4. Thomas L. Friedman, “Get out of Facebook and into the NRA’s Face,” New York Times, February 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/opinion/get-out-of-facebook-and-into-the-nras-face.html.
5. Tim Murphy, “How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” Mother Jones, November–December 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-infowars-alex-jones-clinton-conspiracy-theories/.
6. Pierre Bourdieu quoted in Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 256.
7. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” 318
8. Arendt, 308, 310, 314.
9. Sabrina Tavernise and Katharine Q. Seelye, “Political Divide Splits Relationships—and Thanksgiving Too,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/political-divide-splits-relationships-and-thanksgiving-too.html.
10. Quotations from the “research” welcome page on the message board 8chan, where participants post and discuss their analysis. “Welcome to /QResearch/,” 8chan, accessed September 19, 2018, https://8ch.net/qresearch/welcome.html.
11. For instance, on August 3, 2018 the authors consulted the discussion of “clues” by QAnon researchers on the following Reddit.com message board: https://www.reddit.com/r/greatawakening/comments/84sam4/does_anyone_have_the_link_to_the_current_8chan/. A feature of this company of conspiracists is its avowed “masculinity.” Posting is anonymous, and any female participants are encouraged to disguise their gender. As of September 12, 2018, the QAnon boards have been taken down by Reddit.com; see Brian Feldman, “Reddit Bans QAnon Hive,” New York Magazine, September 12, 2018, accessed September 18, 2018 at http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/09/reddit-bans-major-qanon-message-board-r-greatawakening.html.
12. Justin Bank, Leon Stack, and Daniel Victor, “What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy That Showed Up at a Trump Rally,” New York Times, August 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/us/politics/what-is-qanon.html.
13. Bandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, “How Three Conspiracy Theorists Took ‘Q’ and Sparked Qanon,” NBC News, August 14, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531.
14. Tim Smith-Laing, “Following QAnon into the Age of Post-post Truth,” Economist, August 14, 2018, https://www.1843magazine.com/people/what-just-happened/following-qanon-into-the-age-of-postposttruth.
15. Robin Grey, “Enlightenment and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Laura Dassow Walls, and Joel Myerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
16. Rosenfeld, Common Sense, 2.
17. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93, 27.
18. Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, 23.
19. We owe this observation to a conversation with Corey Brettschneider.
20. Gordon Wood, “Creating the Revolution,” review of Bernard Bailyn’s work, New York Review of Books, February 13, 2003.
Chapter 7. Speaking Truth
1. As Pierre Rosanvallon argues, transparency means many things: it is a utopia in which citizens can see their officials’ motivations all the way through; it is an ideology that promises to cure all the discontents that come with being governed; and, in a very concrete way, it is a mode of accountability. Pierre Rosanvallon, Good Government: Democracy beyond Elections, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 246.
2. Scott Horton, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare (New York: Nation Books, 2015); Examining the Costs of Overclassification on Transparency and Security: Hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (December 7, 2016), https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/examining-costs-overclassification-transparency-security/.
3. For a nuanced discussion of transparency from which we draw, see Jonathan R. Bruno, “Democracy beyond Disclosure: Secrecy, Transparency, and the Logic of Self-Government” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017).
4. Onora O’Neill, “Ethics for Communication?,” European Journal of Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 167–80, 173.
5. Brendan Nyhan et al., “Classified or Coverup: The Effects of Redactions on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs,” Journal of Experimental Political Science 3, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 109–23.
6. Rosanvallon, Good Government, 161–70.
7. Complicating the straightforward analogy to partisan voting, the Jade Helm 15 map colored Arizona (which had voted Republican in 2008 and 2012) light blue for “uncertain leaning friendly,” and New Mexico (which had voted Democratic in 2008 and 2012) was colored brown for “uncertain leaning hostile.”
8. Heather Digby Parton, “Right-Wing Lunatics Think the Military Is Planning to Invade Texas: Here’s Why,” Salon, April 30, 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/04/30/right_wing_lunatics_think_the_military_is_planning_to_invade_texas_heres_why/.
9. Patrick Svitek, “Abbott’s Letter Elevates Jade Helm 15 Concerns,” Texas Tribune, April 30, 2015, http://www.texastribune.org/2015/04/30/abbotts-letter-puts-jade-helm-national-stage/.
10. See “Fear and Absent Danger,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, May 4, 2015, http://www.cc.com/video-clips/c54ewk/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-to-shoot-or-not-to-shoot—fear-and-absent-danger.
11. Louie Gohmert, “Gohmert Statement on Jade Helm Exercises,” official website of Louie Gohmert, May 5, 2015, http://gohmert.house.gov/news/email/show.aspx?ID=RARJ62LPUKCT7BNM7ZBA3QA2VM.
12. John Council, “Lawyer’s ‘Pandering to Idiots’ Letter Goes Viral,” Texas Lawyer, May 7, 2015, http://www.texaslawyer.com/id=1202725781705/Lawyers-Pandering-to-Idiots-Letter-to-Abbott-Goes-Viral.
13. “Full Transcript: Jeff Flake’s Speech on the Senate Floor,” New York Times, October 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/politics/jeff-flake-transcript-senate-speech.html.
14. Daniel Bice, “Senator Ron Johnson Says an Informant Told Congress There Are Secret Anti-Trump Meetings in FBI,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 23, 2018, https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2018/01/23/sen-johnson-says-informant-alleges-secret-anti-trump-meetings-fbi/1060586001/.
15. “GOP Senator: ‘Real Possibility’ That FBI ‘Secret Society’ Text Was a Joke,” Hill, January 25, 2018, http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/370707-ron-johnson-its-a-real-possibility
-that-ex-fbi-agents-secret-society-text-was.
16. Laura Meckler, “McCain Asks Supporters to Show Obama Respect,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2008, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122368132195924869.
17. “Full Transcript: Jeff Flake’s Speech.”
18. The phrase is from Robert Jay Lifton, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (New York: New Press, 2017), 93.
19. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), 189, 188.
20. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
21. Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 202–27, 219, 204, 221. Sunstein later reflected on some of the inadequacies of the Sunstein-Vermeule argument in Andrew Marantz, “How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory,” The New Yorker, December 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/how-a-liberal-scholar-of-conspiracy-theories-became-the-subject-of-a-right-wing-conspiracy-theory.
22. United States Senate, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, bk. 2, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, April 26, 1976), 10–13, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf.
23. Quoted in Jeremy W. Peters, “Wielding Claims of ‘Fake News,’ Conservatives Take Aim at Mainstream Media,” New York Times, December 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/us/politics/fake-news-claims-conservatives-mainstream-media-.html.
24. “Enforcing Our Community Standards,” Facebook Newsroom, August 6, 2018, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/enforcing-our-community-standards/.
25. “Enforcing Our Community Standards.”
26. Sam Leith, “Nothing like the Truth,” Times Literary Supplement, August 16, 2017, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/post-truth-sam-leith/.