You can listen to the whole segment here, but I direct your attention to the part starting at time 14:40. That is when Scottie Nell Hughes, Trump stalwart, joins the show to assert that “this is all a matter of opinion” and “there are no such things as facts.”
You can listen again starting at around time 18:30, when I point out one of the specific, small lies of the Trump campaign—that the NFL had joined him in complaining about debate dates, which the NFL immediately denied—and Hughes says: Well, this is also just a matter of opinion.
Corey Lewandowski’s very odd explanation of Donald Trump’s ‘facts’
Donald Trump’s old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, would like us to treat the president-elect’s facts with all the seriousness of a guy at a bar who is two PBRs deep, riffing on current events. And that’s not really that hyperbolic.
Here’s what Lewandowski, who is now a CNN contributor, said Thursday night at Harvard’s 2016 campaign postmortem forum:
This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar, you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.
So we should basically take nothing Trump says at face value. Or assume that his facts are, um, factual. Got it.
.. One thing that’s been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts — they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way — it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, of facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd — a large part of the population — are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts — amongst him and his supporters — and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and there’s no facts to back it up.
.. Whatever you think of just how literally Trump should be taken, this approach to the truth is an almost perfect cop-out for basically anything Trump says or does as president. His team is basically asking for a Get Out of Jail Free card that can be redeemed over and over again by the single most powerful person in the country.
This approach from the Trump campaign has created an adversarial relationship with the media, for sure. That’s because the media’s No. 1 obligation is to the truth, and when Trump says something that clearly isn’t true, our first impulse is to say, “That’s not true!” As it should be. Lewandowski and Hughes don’t like this, because their favored candidate’s grasp of the facts is not good.
I’ll even admit here that I agree with them that Trump probably doesn’t meanto be taken literally at all times. But if we’re to adopt this approach to the Trump presidency, there is absolutely no accountability. If Trump doesn’t follow through on something he promised to do over and over again — like putting Hillary Clinton in jail — he can just argue that this wasn’t supposed to be taken literally. If Trump doesn’t follow through on his promise to tax companies who move jobs overseas, he can just flash the Get Out of Jail Free card again. He didn’t mean to say that thing he said over and over again, somehow. But this other thing that he actually succeeded on? He meant that one.
Welcome to the post-truth presidency
Oxford Dictionaries last month selected post-truth — “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — as the international word of the year,
.. Hannah Arendt, writing in 1967, presciently explained the basis for this phenomenon: “Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller.”
.. Corey Lewandowski at Harvard University, making the astonishing assertion that the media’s failing during the campaign was not that it scorned Trump — it was that it believed him.
“You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” he said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people . . . you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
.. Trump said, he saw the Carrier worker say “‘No, we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise. Not with Carrier.”
.. Then, Trump said, “they played my statement, and I said, ‘Carrier will never leave.’ But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in.”
This was a telling moment, and not just because Trump doesn’t quite understand what euphemism means. The episode simultaneously shows Trump, confronted with Trump on tape, willing to recognize reality and Trump telling us straightforwardly that his promises are not to be taken seriously. They are truthphemisms.
..“If you tell the same story five times it’s true,” said White House press secretary Larry Speakes.
What happened with Deconstruction? And why is there so much bad writing in academia?
The shift happens for many reasons, and one is the invention of “research” universities; this may seem incidental to questions about Deconstruction, but it isn’t because Deconstruction wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t exist in the way it does without academia. Anyway, research universities get started in Germany, then spread to the U.S. through Johns Hopkins, which was founded in 1876. Professors of English start getting appointed. In research universities, professors need to produce “original research” to qualify for hiring, tenure, and promotion. This makes a lot of sense in the sciences, which have a very clear discover-and-build model in which new work is right and old work is wrong. This doesn’t work quite as well in the humanities and especially in fields like English.
.. The first people to really ratchet up the research-on-original-works game were the New Critics, starting in the 1930s. In the 1930s they are young whippersnappers who can ignore their elders in part because getting a job as a professor is a relatively easy, relatively genteel endeavor.
..In each generational change of method and ideology, from philology to New Criticism to Structuralism to Poststructuralism, newly-minted professors needed to get PhDs, get hired by departments (often though not always in English), and get tenure by producing “original research.” One way to produce original research is to denounce the methods and ideas of your predecessors as horse shit and then set up a new set of methods and ideas, which can also be less charitably called “assumptions.”
.. But a funny thing happens to the critical-industrial complex in universities starting around 1975: the baby boomers finish college. The absolute number of students stops growing and even shrinks for a number of years. Colleges have all these tenured professors who can’t be gotten rid of, because tenure prevents them from being fired. So colleges stop hiring
.. Consequently, the personnel churn that used to produce new dominant ideologies in academia stops around the 1970s. The relatively few new faculty slots from 1975 to the present go to people who already believed in Deconstructionist ideals, though those ideals tend to go by the term “Literary Theory,” or just “Theory,” by the 1980s. When hundreds of plausible applications arrive for each faculty position, it’s very easy to select for comfortable ideological conformity.
..Perhaps the most salient example of institutional change is the rise of the MFA program for both undergrads and grad students, since those who teach in MFA programs tend to believe that it is possible to write well and that it is possible and even desirable to write for people who aren’t themselves academics.
.. The problem, however, is that Deconstruction’s sillier adherents—who are all over universities—take a misreading of Saussure to argue that Deconstruction means that nothing means anything, except that everything means that men, white people, and Western imperialists oppress women, non-white people, and everyone else, and hell, as long as we’re at it capitalism is evil.
.. Almost no one in academia asks, “Is the work I’m doing actually important, for any reasonable value of ‘important?’” The ones who ask it tend to find something else to do.
.. The people who would normally produce intellectual churn have mostly been shut out of the job market, or have moved to the healthier world of ideas online or in journalism, or have been marginalized (Paglia).
.. So real critics tend to follow the “Exit, Voice, Loyalty” model described by Albert Hirschman in his eponymous book and exit.