When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the assault hinted at the risks of politics unmoored from facts. That can threaten the very fabric of society.
That an incoming U.S. president devoted part of his inaugural address to insist that facts are, in fact, factual reveals just how much of a beating the truth has taken. Over the past five years, politics have motivated huge swaths of the American public to abandon not just facts, but also the system of logic and standards of evidence used to establish facts in the first place. This phenomenon is widely known as “post truth.”