Adam Serwer

Governments from both parties do that.

What's unusual here is lying about easily verifiable things in a way that you can see that it's not true.

And I think, you know, to some extent, it's very difficult within that culture to say the government is lying.

But you do have outlets like The New York Times doing sort of shot by shot analysis, proving that the various claims made by the federal government are false.

I think it's just a very, very difficult information environment, very toxic information environment.

I just think there's no easy answers other than verification.

But like, you know, most people are not journalists.

They're not going to verify.

And sometimes we don't even verify.

Sometimes we see something and we assume it's real and we don't check because we're people and we're just scrolling our phones like everybody else.

Yeah, no, I think that's true.

Distrust of yourself, distrust of what you're seeing, it creates an atmosphere of unreality in which you are not sure what's happening.

And I think it makes it easier for people to deal with cognitive dissonance in the sense of when someone that they like does something bad, they can dismiss it as somehow fake.

And obviously that cognitive tendency already existed as a natural part of human nature, but it's a little different

when the ability to just make your own reality is so widely available.

Coming up... The thing that has been most effective in standing up to Trump is ordinary people joining with other ordinary people to oppose what they're doing.

Look, these people come from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different walks of life.

But what they share is a commitment to protecting their neighbors.

And their neighbors are their neighbors, you know, no matter where they were born, whether they were born in Mogadishu or Minneapolis.

These people are my neighbors and I'm going to protect them.