boss.” The message, he says, referencing Jason
Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works,^8 is “I am so
powerful that I can dominate your reality, and
there is nothing you can do about it.” To reinforce
the political nature of post-truth, McIntyre also
invokes Tim Snyder’s observation in his 2017 book
On Tyrannythat “post-truth is pre-fascism,”^9 along
with Hannah Arendt’s observation that “the ideal
subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced
Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for
whom the distinction between fact and fiction
(i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction
between true and false (i.e., the standards of
thought) no longer exist.”^10
Post-truth as political propaganda is certainly
one use (or misuse) of truth that neither Pinker nor
I discount, but McIntyre then accuses Pinker (and
others) of merely knocking down one or more of
four post-truth straw men: (1) that truth doesn’t
matter, (2) that no one really cares about truth any-
more, (3) that no one can find the truth, and (4)
that if we were actually living in a post-truth era,
we should just give up. Instead, to steel-man the
problem McIntye asserts that “the claim that we
live in a post-truth era is properly based on the idea
that truth today is under threat.”
Is it? There certainly are people who, pace
Hannah Arendt, cannot seem to distinguish be-
tween fact and fiction, true and false, and this
shortcoming can lead not only to fascism or
communism, but also to Holocaust denial, evolu-
tion denial, climate denial, vaccine denial, GMO
denial, and more. But is it really that people can-
not discern reality, or is it that they are motivated
to spin the facts to support some other agenda?
Holocaust deniers are anti-Semites. Evolution
deniers are religious fundamentalists. Climate
deniers mistrust big government. Vaccine deniers
distrust big Pharma. GMO deniers detest Mon-
santo. It isn’t the truth about the facts under dispute,
but an underlying motive. Consider an interview
reprinted in McIntyre’s book, which he presents
P O S T - T R U T H D E B AT E
volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 4 3
Illustration by Izhar Cohen
