You Can't Handle The Post-Truth!

Legendary (now-defunct) NZ sensationalist tabloid 'The Truth'

It is well-established that the Trump administration is steeped in conspiracism. For example, during the Obama administration Trump was one of the leading proponents of the right-wing ‘birther’ conspiracy theory, which claimed that Obama was born in Kenya, rather than the state of Hawaii, and had forged his birth certificate accordingly in order to adhere to legal rulings that the POTUS has to be a natural-born American citizen. Similarly, chief adviser Steven Bannon was one of the founders of the nationalist/far-right Breitbart news network, which peddles all manner of far-right conspiracist discourses.  In this respect it therefore seems apt that Trump and his coterie (hereafter referred to as the ‘Trumpets’, in the manner of collective noun groupings such as ‘the Muppets’) should already have generated two socio-political concepts that are highly relevant to understandings of contemporary conspiracy culture: ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’. 

The phrase ‘post-truth’ has recently entered the cultural lexicon (being added to the 2016 edition of the OED) as the standard term for describing the approaches and tactics that Donald Trump used to win the 2016 presidential campaign, and through which it appears he will be running his administration (based on evidence on date): “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (OED). The main quality that political commentators are suggesting marks Trump’s brand of populism and demagoguery as something different from the standard ‘factual manipulations’ of dissemblage, obfuscation, and subterfuge, is the brazen and unashamed manner in which the Trumpets have been using and abusing notions of ‘truth’ to establish their power. 

Kelly-Anne Conway vs the dictionary...you don't dick with the dic, lady...

One of the main techniques of post-truth politics adopted by the Trumpets has been the marshalling of ‘alternative facts’, a Trump-related dictum sure to make 2017’s OED. Originated by Trump’s political adviser Kelly-Anne Conway during a TV interview on the subject of photographs that appeared to prove that the crowds attending Trump’s inauguration paled by comparison with those of previous presidents (Conway seeking to provide ‘alternative facts’ to what appeared to be incontrovertible photographic proof), the phrase implies that the Trumpets have developed their own alt-right/nativist version of post-structuralist philosophy. Facts are not proofs set in scientific and logically positivist stone, but social constructs that are agreed upon by cultural consensus. In his case, the Trumpets had an interpretation of the inauguration that, from their perspective, was ‘factual’; it just happened to diverge from the interpretations of the same event that the mainstream media, liberals, and (hopefully) the majority of the American public agreed constituted the facticity of the event.

The temporal/historical contexts implicit in the phrase ‘post-truth’ (‘pre’, ‘present’ and ‘post’ being the three main categories that shape Western concepts of time) are revealing in relation to the distinct epistemologies of conspiracy thought.  In terms of their approach to historical time, most conspiracy theories are largely ‘pre-truth’. They accept that events have happened, but take the position that the official explanations and interpretations for these - that constitute the historical ‘truth’ - are the work of the conspiratorial power structures involved, and therefore actually false. The present time is therefore a state of ‘pre-truth’, in that most people (outside of the conspiracy theorists and their adherents) are unaware of the real conspiratorial truth behind past and present events. This understanding of the ‘real truth’ will be achieved in the future…once the heroic and selfless efforts of conspiracy theorists have successfully woken the ‘sheeple’ from their collective brainwashing, of course. 

This pre-truth approach to the future also endows conspiracy culture with revelatory and prophetic dimensions. The future promises ongoing, micro-revelations in the forms of new pieces of information that come to light  - e.g. declassified government files, whistleblowers, archival research - which will provide further evidence towards the grand, history-changing revelations as to the real conspiratorial truths behind whatever events might be involved (the ‘disclosure’ movement in ufology is a very good example of this principle in action). This future-oriented, ‘pre-truth’ mentality thereby enables conspiracy theorists to imbue themselves with a prophetic aura in terms of offering predictions on possible events to come (David Icke comes to mind as a leading contemporary conspiracy theorists who regularly plays this card). The implicit operation of conspiracy theory as a revelatory form of historical understanding in this way may also be regarded as one of the reasons why so much conspiracy theorising, especially in the USA, is deeply entwined with Christian fundamentalist worldviews, and why it seems to function as a quasi-religious form of thinking for contemporary Westerners on more general levels.

The phrase ‘alternative facts’ is basically a synonym for the act of conspiracy theorising in general. Take any event of political and historical import; argue that the official explanation(s) of these events is the result of a conspiracy, and therefore false; and then present an alternative explanation that you believe to be factually true (in accordance with your specific ideological and spiritual belief systems), and which can be backed up with various forms of (specious, cherry-picked) evidence. In order for this logic to work, there has to be a high degree of public suspicion as to the integrity of those social institutions that function as the arbiters of factual knowledge, such as science and the media. The Trumpets are already engaging in ideological warfare to stake a claim for their alt-right worldview as being ‘the new factual’ by demonising the mainstream US media as an institution that is irrevocably biased against the Trump regime – this impartiality casting doubt on the media’s claims to facticity. 

 How many journalists does it take to tell a Trump joke...?

However, a politically positive take on this is that the culturally crude manner in which this strategy is being implemented, such as Trump explicitly blustering about the ‘evil media’ in tweets and speeches, means that it lacks the depth, nuance and – shall we say – sophistication to really challenge the ‘knowledge authority’ that the mainstream media have accrued in democratic nations over the course of the last century or so (while acknowledging the myriad critiques of the media as a knowledge system formulated by figures such as Noam Chomsky). To wit, to most of the world’s population it is obvious that the Trumpets are predominantly talking shit (if we loosely define this as discourse that is best understood as subjective expressions of the speaker’s ego/self-opinionated worldview/desire for attention).

Perhaps the real problem is the extent to which the 21^st century is being reshaped around media that, despite their good intentions, have become the biggest vehicles for talking shit in the history of humanity – the internet, or to be more precise, social media.  In which context it makes perfect sense that Trump’s preferred means of communicating with the American citizenry is Twitter.