"The assault on truth and reason that reached fever pitch during the first year of the Trump presidency had been incubating for years on the fringe right. Clinton haters... and Tea Party paranoids who claimed that environmentalists wanted to control the temperature of your home and the color of your cars... hooked up, during the 2016 campaign, with Breitbart bloggers and alt-right trolls. And with Trump's winning of the Republican nomination and the presidency, the extremist views of his most radical supporters—their racial and religious intolerance, their detestation of the government, and their embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation—went mainstream."

“Alongside optimistic vision of America as a nation that could become a shining "city upon a hill," there's also been a dark, irrational counter-theme in U.S. history, which has now reasserted itself with a vengeance—to the point where reason not only is being undermined but seems to have been tossed out of the window, along with facts, informed debate, and deliberative policy making. Science is under attack, and so is expertise of every sort—be it expertise in foreign policy, national security, economics, or education.”

“t's not just fake news either: it's also fake science , fake history , fake Americans on Facebook , and fake followers and "likes" on social media .”

“Some absurd details are unnerving rather than merely comical... Trump's proclivity for chaos has not been contained by those around him but has instead infected his entire administration. ...given his disdain for institutional knowledge he frequently ignores the advice of his cabinet members and agencies, when he isn't cutting them out of the loop entirely.”

“Michiko Kakutani: By the Book, The New York Times.”

“The Washington Post calculated that made 2,140 false or misleading claims during the first year in office—an average of 5.9 a day. His lies... are only the brightest blinking light of many warnings of his assault on democratic institutions and norms. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, and the civil servants who make our government tick.”

“elativism has been ascendant since thes began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the, eager to expose the biases of Western, bourgeois, male dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism... Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist Right, including creationists and climate change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside "science-based" theories.”