Levka"Hoaxes Keep Escaping Containment
A delusional U.S. president is helping thin the line between fiction and reality.
Donald Trump seems fixated on the notion of the hoax. He has repeatedly sought to dismiss the unfolding Epstein scandal as a 'Democrat hoax that never ends,' designed to distract from his triumphs. Since returning to the White House, he has dismissed green energy as a 'scam,' climate change as 'the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,' and the concept of a carbon footprint as 'a hoax made up by people with evil intentions'—all in one speech to the United Nations. At the same time, however, the president frequently posts fake content as if it were real, such as AI-generated images and false claims about his political opponents.
But in his conviction that anything that favors the other side is a fake, and anything that supports his worldview is real, Trump may not be that far from the average American. Hoaxes have been part of U.S. political life since the Founding Fathers, from the forgeries concocted by Benjamin Franklin to smear the British during the Revolutionary War to a series of bogus academic articles intended to undermine so-called grievance studies in 2017 and 2018. But they also have a life of their own, and tend to outrun their creators, as one particularly enduring example shows: a hoax concocted in the late 1960s by satirists intent on forcing Americans to confront the insanity of the Vietnam War.
When it was published in 1967, Report from Iron Mountain purported to be a secret government-commissioned study leaked by one of its authors. It warned that if permanent global peace broke out, the U.S. economy and society would collapse. To replace the stabilizing effects of war, young men would need to be forced into 'a sophisticated form of slavery' and made to compete in 'blood games.' It might be necessary to revive eugenics. To cow the population, new threats would have to be created, such as alien scares or the destruction of the environment.
The 'leaked' 'report' made the front page of the New York Times, and provoked internal investigations in the White House, the Defense Department, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. U.S. embassies were warned to disavow the report, for fear of adverse international reaction."
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