Shocked and moved me far more than I anticipated: Hoaxed reviewed

I shied away from conspiracy stuff during the Trump era. Not the theories themselves, but the huge volume of content proclaiming that we lived in a post-truth age of misinformation and conspiracy. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the idea that something like this was happening, or the idea that it was bad. It was more a certain tone these podcasts, essays and articles shared – almost a shared idiom and turn of phrase. People talked about ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ with unwavering self-certainty. Buried in it somewhere was the assumption that if you expressed enough alarm and horror, and adopted a sufficiently serious voice, this would solve the problem of one in seven Americans believing whatever it was they turned out to believe that week.

It often felt as though no one was really attempting to change anyone’s mind, only to demarcate epistemic battlelines in a cultural war. Again, I don’t object to fighting that war. But I did object to the sense that an army deploying conventional weapons of social force – stigma, shame, exclusion and so on – believed that it was marching under the banner of persuasion, reason and evidence. Since, of course, the conspiracists do the same, it gave the two sides an unmerited symmetry. As Hoaxed demonstrates clearly, these malefactors think of themselves as righteous crusaders setting out to expose a lie. They can talk about facts in brave, trembling voices as well as anyone else can.

Hoaxed is three brilliantly researched and tightly told episodes – with a fourth to come, at the time of writing – that shocked and moved me far more than I anticipated. It’s the story of a lie, one that was born in malice and propagated by zealots to the righteously ignorant.