"You Can't Make This Stuff Up"

"It's a truism (but also true) that hoaxes, like any confidence game, succeed by promising us what we wish for, even when we can barely admit those wishes to ourselves. Young sees Donald Trump as the heir to P.T. Barnum not because he lies, but because he bullshits. Trump doesn't deceive his fans so much as he creates an environment in which whether something is true or not becomes irrelevant; all that matters is if it feels good. This perilous political situation is the logical extension of a certain defense of faked memoirs (particularly Frey's) that drives Young up the wall. 'It's the same words! some protest once a hoax is revealed,' he writes. But often those words, like Frey's memoir, which began its misbegotten life as a novel, would not have been published or read by their defenders in the first place without their claim to the status of fact. To pretend otherwise is to rewrite history on a small scale. Now the same process is being applied, wholesale, to the body politic. 'What if the truth,' Young writes at the end of this occasionally aggravating but more often enlightening book, 'is not an absolute or relative, but a skill—a muscle, like memory—that collectively we have neglected so much that we have grown measurably weaker at using it?' Does he even need to ask?"

Laura Miller at Slate reviews Kevin Young's Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.