Who cares about facts anymore?

What is true, and what isn’t? That question is beginning to lose its relevance in American politics, says Leonard Pitts. For some years now, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and other members of the conservative infotainment complex have relentlessly poured scorn on everything reported by the “mainstream media”, and thereby successfully “wrecked the idea of objective, knowable fact”. Even the Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes, a conservative activist, has recently admitted that things have gone too far, an admission prompted by his frustration over the campaign tactics of Donald Trump. As Sykes points out, when Trump says something that’s blatantly racist or untrue, Sykes’s radio audience don’t expect him to retract it: no, they expect him to defend it, and if he doesn’t, brand him a sell-out. “We’ve created this monster,” as Sykes puts it. “We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers.” In the alternative reality of today’s conservative orthodoxy, science, polls, history and major media institutions have no credibility. Climate change is a hoax. President Obama was born in Kenya. If Trump loses, the election was rigged. Liberals and conservatives can no longer communicate across the ideological divide, or cooperate to solve problems, since they can’t agree on any objective set of facts. “The damage from that is profound, and will not be easily fixed.”