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broadband brought millions of facts, the fantasy of perfect factuality and the satisfaction of fact-checking to everyone. Soon — and astonishingly — Google became much more than trusted; it became shorthand for everything that had been recorded in modern history. The Internet wasn’t the accurate or the inaccurate thing; it was the only thing. And fact-checking was no longer just a back-office affair. While it continued to take place in fact-checking departments, something calling itself “fact-checking” now happened out in the open, too.

Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking.

But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects.

Apparently, I’m still guilty of the “Millennial pause.” After hitting “Record,” I wait a split second before I start speaking, just to make sure that TikTok is actually recording.

Now that Gen Z has all the attention, the internet quirks that Millennials have called their own for years can feel a bit stale, if not downright cringey.

Once my eyes were opened to the Millennial pause, I started noticing my age in every part of my internet experience. I get confused whenever Instagram changes its layout. I use GIFs to make jokes in Slack. I have posted song lyrics on my Instagram Story.

There is no question of ethics, political philosophy or theology to which Trump is the answer. It is simply childish to trust this contemptible parody of a father figure.

As a conservative, I am not one to deny the challenges of modern, liberal societies — the fragility of families, the brittleness of institutions, the economic struggles that result from globalization, the pulverization of community in some sad and dangerous places.

But I am a traditionalist with a healthy respect for the achievements of modernity, because I can imagine myself in the position of a woman, a gay person or a minority 50 years ago. The lives of countless millions have been improved. For them, the nostalgia of conservative white men is not a rallying cry.

Rather than a pragmatic fixer-upper, Mr. Trump now seems likely to be the vehicle through which the ideological right achieves its decades-old dream of undoing the Great Society and the Warren and Burger courts. But the victory that made that possible was based explicitly on identity, not ideology.

One of the odd things about Mr. Trump is that he has brought back J.F.K.’s “trust me” mode in a kind of unhinged parody. His plans are neither detailed nor ideological: He will replace the Affordable Care Act with “great plans” and negotiate better deals.

What’s the alternative to ideological or identity politics? Before Reagan, politics had been largely technocratic, substituting expertise for ideology. “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy,” John F. Kennedy said in 1962. Experts would address “subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided.”

Recently, writers and pundits have been on a quest to find historical analogs for people, parties, and movements in our own times. Trump is like Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon; the imploding GOP getting rid of one ill-suited candidate after another is like Robespierre in the French Revolution, who stuck the executioner in the guillotine because there was no one left to behead. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was like Robert E. Lee.

Oh, and how Obama was like Hitler? But that's so 2015.

Really? Trump is like Hitler? The egotistical buffoon who sees himself as his own primary foreign adviser and changes his views on abortion three times in one day is like the despicable human being who oversaw the death of 6 million Jews? Hitler comparison has become so common over the years that it has its own probability factor known as Godwin's Law.

A senior White House official has been sacked after being unmasked as the man behind a widely read Twitter account that provided an abrasive commentary on his colleagues for more than two years.

Jofi Joseph, 40, was fired from his job on the National Security Council nuclear non-proliferation team.

He apologised for his "inappropriate and mean-spirited comments".

The gun lobby is flirting with self-parody as it exploits the issue of sexual assaults on college campuses by proposing a solution of — what else? — having students carry guns. Experts who study the complicated issue of predatory behavior and advise colleges point out that rapes often begin in social situations. “It would be nearly impossible to run for a gun,” said John Foubert, the national president of One in Four, a rape-prevention organization.

Such common sense, however, has never deterred statehouse politicians when it comes to obeying the gun lobby.

Lawmakers in 10 states are busy adapting the issue of campus sexual assaults to the campaign to arm college students.

The term “cultural appropriation,” which emerged from academia but has been applied more broadly — say, to refer to Washington Redskins fans wearing feather headdresses or white people in cornrows — has drawn ire from opponents of political correctness. But supporters say it captures a truth: that the melding of cultures is often about which group has the power to take symbols, styles or language from another.

The video issued by the University of Washington shows students from various ethnic groups and of various sexual orientations saying that almost any portrayal of them can cause a wound: For example, dressing in drag can denigrate the struggles of gay and transgender people.

At Duke University, the Center for Multicultural Affairs has filled its Facebook page with images of young people holding up pictures of offensive stereotypes, including white people in blackface and a man dressed as a suicide bomber, with the hashtag #OurCulturesAreNotCostumes.

Rick started life, deep in the germinal phases of Rick and Morty, as a scabrous parody of “Doc” Brown from Back to the Future. But he’s evolved into something much stranger: Doctor Who crossed with Doctor Faustus crossed with Larry David crossed with William Burroughs crossed with my therapist. His view of existence—of which he has seen a supernatural amount, having traversed many universes—is desolate and bracing. He builds himself a tiny robot whose sole purpose is to stand on the kitchen table and pass him the butter. “What is my purpose?” asks the robot. “You pass butter,” says Rick. A pause. “Oh my God,” says the robot, head dropped, tiny tin hands hanging. “Yeah,” says Rick in his rancid, sardonic way. “Welcome to the club, pal.” His grandson, Morty, meanwhile, is constantly, stammeringly overwhelmed: “What the hell, Rick? What the hell?!”

I have wept with laughter at Rick and Morty; I have flinched in repulsion. The humor oscillates between an ingrown bro-ness, a cackling in the man cave, and something so emancipated and post-everything that it is nearly transcendent. Nearly, but not. “Nobody exists on purpose,” says Morty to his sister. “Nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.” Rick, burping warlock of the spaceways, puts it differently: “When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.”

If you’ve been wondering why Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian professor, guru of modern masculinity, and author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has been selling so many books and filling so many theaters, this is why. Rick and Morty is why. It’s no surprise, really, that a small and well-documented subset of the Rick and Morty fan base exhibits terrible, snickering, alienated-white-male troll behavior

a judge appointed by Donald Trump issued a stunning injunction forbidding a lengthy list of White House officials from making contact with social media companies to report misinformation.

The order bars individuals including Xavier Becerra, the US health secretary, Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, and Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, among dozens more officials, from “urging, encouraging , pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms”.

it is a major victory for campaigners who have argued that democratic governments overstepped their power during the pandemic, including restrictions on free speech.

perhaps we could consider what this means about the larger moment. That is indeed what liberatory politics amount to, now: a joke. It’s a LARP, cosplay, kayfabe. Self-parody. The theater of the absurd. A pastime, a shared bit of gallows humor. Nobody believes in the capacity for actual liberation, in any meaningful sense. It resides entirely in the world of wistful humor. People are defensive about the orcas because they have no actual movement to be defensive about.

Though we still live in the same world of rabidly emotional politics, the notion that the unrest of 2020 might lead to lasting material change is now so quaint as to be actively embarrassing.

BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a font of petty corruption and chronic mismanagement of funds, while the organic energy it cultivated three years ago has been dispersed into a series of nonprofit jobs and elite college scholarships, into diversity statements and language codes, which obviously don’t threaten the edifice of racial inequality

if the point is simply pure destruction — building a chaos machine by removing a source of valuable information from our connected world, where groups of all stripes could communicate and organize, and replacing that with a place of parody that rewards insincerity, time-wasting and the worst forms of communication in order to degrade the better half — then he’s done a remarkable job in very short order. Truly it’s an amazing act of demolition. But, well, $44 billion can buy you a lot of wrecking balls.

That our system allows wealth to be turned into a weapon to nuke things of broad societal value is one hard lesson we should take away from the wreckage of downed turquoise feathers.

We should also consider how the ‘rules based order’ we’ve devised seems unable to stand up to a bully intent on replacing free access to information with paid disinformation — and how our democratic systems seem so incapable and frozen in the face of confident vandals running around spray-painting ‘freedom’ all over the walls as they burn the library down.

Preface

“No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20

A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21

Can anyone teach you how to think? Aren’t we all thinking all the time; isn’t the proof of our existence found in our think-think-thinking, one banal thought at a time?

The truth of the matter is that no one can teach you how to think; but what they can do is teach you how to think for yourself.

my father would say—gently, because there was zero need to say it any other way: “And what is the best argument of the other side?”

“The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

He adds other exhausted words, including democracy, freedom and patriotic — convenient terms for establishing righteousness, easily melting into self-righteousness.

The writer is George Orwell, in his celebrated 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless.