Margaret Sullivan writes: You may think you are prepared for a post-truth world, in which political appeals to emotion count for more than statements of verifiable fact.
But now it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.
On live radio Wednesday morning, Scottie Nell Hughes sounded breezy as she drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality:
“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show” on Wednesday.
Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept on defending that assertion at length, though not with much clarity of expression. Rehm had pressed her about Trump’s recent evidence-free assertion on Twitter that he, not Hillary Clinton, would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted illegally. [Continue reading…]