On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

by Lee McIntyre

Overview

A powerful, pocket-sized citizen’s guide on how to fight back against the disinformation campaigns that are imperiling American democracy, from the bestselling author of Post-Truth and How to Talk to a Science Denier.

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.

McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today’s “reality denial” follows the same flawed blueprint of the “five steps of science denial” used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens—from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media—as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.

Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262546300
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	08/22/2023
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	67,999
Product dimensions:	4.00(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Lee McIntyre is Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Simmons University, Tufts Experimental College, and Harvard Extension School.

Read an Excerpt

The storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an American tragedy. It was also completely predictable. The “patriots” in face paint—who carried sharpened flagpoles, bats, and zip ties into the Senate chamber—were the inevitable result of seventy years of lies about tobacco, evolution, global warming, and vaccines. After the “truth killers” provided a blueprint for how to deny scientific facts that clashed with their financial or ideological interests, it was a small step for unscrupulous politicians to figure out how to use this strategy to lie about anything they wanted, such as the baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that the January 6 insurrectionists were actually “peaceful protestors” or Antifa in disguise.
 
Welcome to the world of reality denial, where truth is subordinate to ideology, feelings have more weight than evidence, and democracy hangs in the balance. Throughout history, autocratic leaders and their wannabes have understood that the quickest way to control a population is to control their information sources. But in a society that still has a free press, disinformation is the new censorship.  Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Harrison Ford has finally found the Holy Grail but can’t tell which one it is because it’s surrounded by a hundred fakes?  That’s the point of disinformation. If you can’t hide or destroy the truth, surround it with bullshit. You can always kill it later.
 
The post-truth playbook goes like this: attack the truth tellers, lie about anything and everything, manufacture disinformation, encourage distrust and polarization, create confusion and cynicism, then claim that the truth is available only from the leader himself. The goal is not merely to get people to believe any particular false claim, but to so demoralize them with a tsunami of falsehoods that they begin to give up on the idea that truth can be known at all, outside a political context.
 
In her landmark work on totalitarianism in the twentieth century, political philosopher and Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt said it best: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction[s] between fact and fiction . . . true and false . . . no longer exist.”1 More recently another Holocaust historian, Timothy Snyder, put it even more succinctly: “post-truth is pre-fascism.”2
 
We’ve got less than a year to figure this out.  Now that Kevin McCarthy and the Republican faithful have succeeded in retaking the House in the 2022 midterm elections—which means that the GOP was effectively rewarded for having embraced Trump’s “big lie” in 2021—they’re perfectly positioned to install Trump (or whomever they like) as president, no matter the vote count in 2024. After that, some wonder how close we’ll be to Orwell’s nightmare: 2 + 2 = 5 in the basement of the Ministry of Love.
 
Once truth dies, the end may come swiftly for American democracy. Like Russia and China, we’ll still have politicians in suits going about a charade of the people’s business in the halls of government, we may even have further elections, but it won’t really matter. If the truth killers succeed in using reality denial to undermine democracy, the next day we’ll wake up in an electoral dictatorship.
 
1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 474.
2. Timothy Snyder, “The American Abyss,” New York Times, January 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021 /01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html.

Table of Contents

1 Truth Killers — 1
2 The History of Strategic Denialism — 7
3 The Creators — 15
4 The Amplifiers — 45
5 The Believers — 91
6 How to Win the War on Truth — 103
Acknowledgments — 135
Notes — 137
Index — 161

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Lee McIntyre has emerged as our foremost scholar of science denial and an intellectual activist combatting the attempted assassination of truth. In the teeth of fake news, alternative facts, conspiracy theories, identity politics, postmodernism, and epistemological relativism, McIntyre’s On Disinformation expertly identifies who the enemies of truth are and how to counter their claims with reason,  science, and compassion. A tour de force of scholarship and advocacy."
—Michael Shermer, Publisher Skeptic magazine, Presidential Fellow Chapman University, author of Conspiracy, The Believing Brain, and Why People Believe Weird Things

“McIntyre’s latest book connects the sordid history of science denial and climate denial to today’s election denial, exposing how interests exploit disinformation and work fissures in our society to weaken citizens’ trust in our democracy and in one another.” 
—Sheldon Whitehouse, U.S. Senator, Rhode Island

“In post-truth America, reality isn't dying by accident or suicide; it's being poisoned on purpose. Lee McIntyre — a philosopher of knowledge as well as a student of disinformation — names the culprits and exposes their methods. Even more important, he shows how to foil the crime. On Disinformation is the brisk, bracing primer that everyone should read on how to make America truthful again.”
— Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, and author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“McIntyre returns to deliver one of the most important books of the year. If you’re going to buy one book, buy this pocket-sized guide and help save our democracy from disinformation.”
—Sander van der Linden, Professor of Social Psychology in Society, University of Cambridge; author of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects our Minds and How to Build Immunity

“We hear and read a lot about disinformation but too often this phenomenon is presented as something random or chaotic when it is in fact organized and deliberate. Professor McIntyre brilliantly dissects the strategies and mechanisms fueling disinformation, as well as its major actors and perpetrators. This information is essential if we ever hope to topple disinformation in America and maintain our democratic values.”
—Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine and Director, Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development

“Some people carry around a pocket Constitution. In today’s post-truth era, Lee McIntyre’s On Disinformation is another pocket guide Americans would be wise to keep close at hand. Understanding how to identify and respond to the erosion of our shared reality is an indispensable prerequisite for restoring democratic norms and guardrails laid out in our founding document.”
—Asha Rangappa, Senior Lecturer, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and former FBI Special Agent

Editorial Reviews

Included in The Next Big Idea Club’s August 2023 Must-Read Books list

"This brief but impactful book offers trenchant commentary on the current war on truth and workable solutions to protect democracy in an increasingly chaotic world...thoughtful and illuminating."
—Kirkus Reviews

“On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy, a new book by Lee McIntyre, captures some of the current alarm. His book is a pocket-size polemic warning of ‘truth killers’ running ‘a coordinated campaign’ intended ‘to spread disinformation out to the masses—in order to foment doubt, division and distrust—and create an army of deniers.’ McIntyre, a philosopher and research fellow at Boston University, points to conspiratorial falsehoods about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election. It’s not that accurate information about the vaccines and the election was unavailable — it’s that it was competing against a fire hose of falsehoods made infinitely easier to disseminate on social media and the internet.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Most scientists have an enduring belief that even if scientific truth is not embraced in the short term, it will be eventually. Lee McIntyre’s new manifesto, On Disinformation, packaged—like Mao’s—in a little red book, urges those who care about scientific truth and democracy to make a stand now rather than wait for society to come around.”
—Science

“The philosopher Lee McIntyre, author of several books about disinformation and the scientific method, has written a short prescriptive polemic...The subject of On Disinformation is not QAnon as such but the related phenomenon of “denialism”. The two are linked for the obvious reason that denying the realities of man-made climate change, Covid-19 or the Biden election are essential if you are to posit a conspiracy by the deep state or the Clintons to foist these “false” ideas on an accepting, sheeplike citizenry.”
—The Financial Times

"On Disinformation follows hot on the heels of McIntyre’s How to Talk to a Science Denier, in which the professional philosopher illustrated how difficult it is to argue with your enemy unless you understand how they think; in which he recommended taking even the most bizarre of opposing viewpoints seriously, if only to level the playing field.In what feels very much like the next logical instalment of his discourse on living in a post-truth world, On Disinformation builds on McIntyre’s earlier work by examining how ‘strategic denialism’ is created, amplified and accepted into fringe orthodoxy."
—E&T, Engineering and Technology

From the Publisher

2023-05-17
The author of How To Talk to a Science Denier explores the nature of disinformation in modern American culture.

In a society that “still has a free press,” writes philosopher McIntyre, “disinformation is the new censorship.” For the author, this idea is crucial to understanding why American democracy is in peril. Unlike misinformation, which is accidental, disinformation is deliberate and intended to “foment doubt, division, and distrust—and create an army of deniers.” McIntyre traces the history of modern disinformation to 1950s media campaigns that created “alternative narrative[s]” about smoking that forced the public to question the validity of scientific evidence regarding the dangers of tobacco. Politicians later used the same tactics to deny other scientific facts, including “acid rain, the ozone hole, and—most notoriously—global warming”—until reality itself became a target during the Trump era. Using examples like Trump’s big lie campaign, McIntyre demonstrates how the real corrosiveness in denialism lies in the way it does not simply subvert the truth, but kills it: “The post-truth playbook goes like this: attack the truth tellers, lie about anything and everything, manufacture disinformation, encourage distrust and polarization, create confusion and cynicism, then claim that the truth is available only from the leader himself.” McIntyre suggests that one of the ways such individuals find success is by calculated use of mainstream news and social media outlets that refuse to take a stand in the name of objectivity. “Rather than promote truth,” he writes, “they are engineered for profit.” In order to fight back, we must not only revise existing laws to force media into greater mindfulness of the information they disseminate, but also engage in face-to-face debates that respectfully challenge the disinformed perspectives of believers. This brief but impactful book offers trenchant commentary on the current war on truth and workable solutions to protect democracy in an increasingly chaotic world.

Thoughtful and illuminating.

Kirkus Reviews