I read once that Trump isn’t just a liar; he’s a bullshitter. The nuance was that lying requires some consistency, some standard of a coherent story; lying requires knowing and caring about the truth and choosing a different story. Bullshitting doesn’t; bullshitting is just saying whatever you want whenever you want, regardless.

It helped me better understand their actions. And also somehow makes it worse that they believe the bullshit, since it doesn’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny or logical thought at all.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

Just a friendly reminder, in case you made yourself forget about the terrible truth of our world. The truly horrifying thing? Your own tribe is doing it too.