The unchecked proliferation of lies doesn’t just mislead people into making bad decisions, this school of thought goes; it leads to cynicism and disengagement by undermining the idea that there is even such a thing as truth. The public sphere becomes a maze of fun-house mirrors. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” This is the topsy-turvy epistemology that accepts that the Clintons were running a child sex-slave ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor.