That is kind of a long article to say what should be simple to say. Trump lies for the purpose of destroying the idea of truth. Last week I posted a video from Vox that discussed how both Putin and Trump use what is called a "firehose of lies" not to deceive but to assert power. Trump is attempting to "break truth" by continually asserting lies and either denying they are lies or not even caring whether people call them out. As the Vox video says, fact checking is useless against this tactic because Trump is trying to do away with the concept that there is truth or facts. There are only positions, and whoever's position is most powerful is what will be perceived to be the truth. It seems a perversion of postmodern thought. Postmodernists reacted against the modernist view that there was one single, completely objective truth (which happened to be very often, the view of the dominant social group. Something like the assertion that IQ tests, which were normed on the experience of White American and European Men, were predictive of the intelligence levels of all people without fault. Postmodernists would point out that IQ tests failure to take into consideration the very different experiences of women and people of color would taint the results and would not lead to reliable results therefore tests which account for those differences needed to be developed.
Trump is corrupting this idea, which he is want to do. He is trying to show that facts do not matter, even facts that postmodern thinkers would stipulate to like the idea that looking at an eclipse can damage your eyesight, are up for debate in Trump's world.
We need another tactic to dislodge this onslaught of lies. Debunking doesn't necessarily work. But perhaps point the strategy out may help somewhat.
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