Facts are irrelevant

McIntyre, L. (2018) Pomerantsev, P. (2019)
 * „The „other side” of the post-truth debate does not consist of people who defend it [truth] – or think that post-truth is a good thing – but those who deny that a problem even exists.”
 * “In its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie.”
 * [Ideologues] “routinely embrace an obscenely high standard of doubt toward facts they don’t want to believe, alongside complete credulity toward any facts that fit with their agenda. Their main criterion is what favors their agenda.”
 * ”... post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not. And this is a recipe for political domination.”
 * “Who needs censorship if the truth can be buried under a pile of bullshit? And isn’t this precisely what the issue of post-truth is all about: That truth doesn’t matter as much as feelings? That we can’t even tell anymore what is true and what is not?”
 * “It could not be clearer that postmodernist thought had an influence on ID [intelligent design] theory.”
 * “Thus is postmodernism the godfather of post-truth.”
 * "if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? ... And so the politician makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive.”
 * “Facts become secondary in this logic. After all, you are not trying to win an evidence-driven debate about ideological concepts in the public sphere; your aim is to seal in your audience behind a verbal wall. It’s the opposite of ‘centrism’, where you have to bring everyone together in one big tent, smooth out differences. Here the different groups don’t even need to meet each other. Actually, it might be better if they don’t: what if one perceives the other as their enemy? To seal this improvised identity one needs an enemy: ‘the non-people’. Best to keep it too as abstract as possible so anyone can invent their own version of what it means ...”