{"id":20305,"date":"2025-10-02T07:37:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T05:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/02\/a-critique-of-pure-stupidity-understanding-trump-2-0\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T07:37:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T05:37:14","slug":"a-critique-of-pure-stupidity-understanding-trump-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/02\/a-critique-of-pure-stupidity-understanding-trump-2-0\/","title":{"rendered":"A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out?<\/p>\n

The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a\u00a0campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared \u201cpost-truth\u201d their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster\u2019s was \u201csurreal\u201d. The scourge of \u201cfake news\u201d, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And\u00a0when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase \u201calternative facts\u201d a few days after Trump\u2019s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of\u00a0the incoming administration appeared to be all but\u00a0official.<\/p>\n

The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of\u00a0emboldening those it sought to oppose. \u201cFake\u201d was one of Trump\u2019s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president\u2019s lies and denials. The\u00a0tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951\u00a0book The\u00a0Origins of Totalitarianism that \u201cthe ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the\u00a0dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction \u2026 no\u00a0longer\u00a0exists\u201d.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nIf the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out?
\nThe first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a\u00a0campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared \u201cpost-truth\u201d their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster\u2019s was \u201csurreal\u201d. The scourge of \u201cfake news\u201d, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And\u00a0when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase \u201calternative facts\u201d a few days after Trump\u2019s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of\u00a0the incoming administration appeared to be all but\u00a0official.
\nThe truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of\u00a0emboldening those it sought to oppose. \u201cFake\u201d was one of Trump\u2019s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president\u2019s lies and denials. The\u00a0tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951\u00a0book The\u00a0Origins of Totalitarianism that \u201cthe ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the\u00a0dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction \u2026 no\u00a0longer\u00a0exists\u201d. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out? The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of …<\/p>\n

A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":20306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20305"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}