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Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us… - Michiko Kakutani
" "Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.
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About Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American literary critic and former chief book critic for The New York Times. Her awards include a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
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Additional quotes by Michiko Kakutani
The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks” — including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán — who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.”
Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.
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