I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or fac… - 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.

Social media would further accelerate the ascendance of what the Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu described as “the preening self” and the urge to “capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one’s self.

Deconstruction, in fact, is deeply nihilistic, implying that the efforts of journalists and historians — to ascertain the best available truths through the careful gathering and weighing of evidence — are futile.