On Disinformation is a pleasure to hold simply as an object. It’s a small book, the cover only about half the surface area of a regular paperback and less than 200 pages. Something about it feels like an old-style chapbook. It has something definitive to say, doesn’t employ any flourish to do it, just comes to tell its story.

The content is just as satisfying. McIntyre, an American academic well versed in his topic, thinks the confusion surrounding simple facts in modern politics isn’t an accident of history or a zeitgeist brought about by the politics of division and hate spearheaded by Trump.

He thinks the ‘post-truth’ political climate that’s given rise to climate change denial, QAnon-conspiracy theorists and the Capitol attack are the result of a concerted effort by powers with specific agendas.

MacIntyre begins by recounting the story about how the tobacco industry embarked on a carefully planned campaign to sow division and confusion to put off regulation and scrutiny and protect its profits for decades.

Since then, it’s been an accepted tool in the playbook of the rich and powerful to maintain their grip on the status quo. It’s just more blatant and frankly comical in the post-Trump era when it seemed like all bets were off.

It makes very considered arguments and draws logical conclusions from them. McIntyre considers democracy itself under threat, and On Disinformation is the literary equivalent of a sharp slap across the face, a voice asking if any of us can really be so dumb, and a challenge to see it all before it’s too late.

Reviewed by Drew Turney

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a recent Lecturer in

Photo Credit: Rick Bern

Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan.

Lee has taught philosophy at Colgate University (where he won the Fraternity and Sorority Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy), Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching).

Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.