Comment: White House will alter reality to fit its narrative

By Anita Chabria / Los Angeles Times

How do you know what you know?

Did you learn it in school, read it in a newspaper? Did you get your information on social media or though chatter with friends?

Even in an age of misinformation and disinformation — which we really need to start clearly calling propaganda — we continue to rely on old ways of knowing. We take it for granted that if we really need to get to the truth, there’s a way to do it, even if it means cracking the pages of one of those ancient conveyors of wisdom, a book.

But we are entering an era in America when knowledge is about to be hard to come by. It would be easy to shrug off this escalation of the war on truth as just more Trump nonsense, but it is much more than that. Authoritarians take power in the short term by fear and maybe force. In the long term, they rely on ignorance: an erasure of knowledge to leave people believing that there was ever anything different than what is.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-white-house-will-alter-reality-to-fit-its-narrative/