fake news

is not worth fact checking (and in fact that is playing into the game) because fake news is never intended as a statement of fact but as a declaration of intent... that is, it does not describe what is true, but rather, it describes what would have to be true to justify what they plan to do next.

'Hannah Arendt, in her book the Origin of Totalitarianism, provides a helpful guide for interpreting the language of fascists. She noted how decent liberals of 1930s Germany would 'fact check' the Nazis' bizarre claims about Jews like they were meant to be factual. What they failed to understand, Arendt suggests, is that the Nazi Jew hating was not a statement of fact but a declaration of intent. So when someone would blame the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, naive people would counter by saying there's no evidence of that. What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next.

Elliot LustzigThinkers

Elliot Lustzig