Language, Disinformation, and the Rhetoric of Post-Truth Politics

Abstract

This article advances a linguistic and rhetorical account of the so-called post-truth condition, named word of the year by a major dictionary in 2016. Against the prevailing framing of post-truth as a deficit of facts to be remedied by correction, it argues that the condition is better understood as a crisis of the rhetorical commons: a migration of political language away from persuasion toward the strategic manufacture of doubt and affect. Synthesizing philosophical work on indifference to truth, the cognitive theory of framing and conceptual metaphor, critical discourse analysis, and longstanding claims about debased political language, the article isolates a recurring rhetorical architecture in which form displaces reference. It then examines how repetition exploits the illusory-truth effect, how emotional saturation substitutes for evidentiary adjudication, and how computational propaganda, bots, and astroturfing industrialize these mechanisms at scale. The central claim is that post-truth speech differs categorically from the ordinary political lie: where the liar still honors the authority of truth by concealing it, post-truth discourse erodes the audience's very appetite for adjudication. The article concludes that media literacy must be reconceived as rhetorical literacy, teaching citizens to read frames rather than merely verify facts, if democratic discourse is to be repaired.