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Has America Lost Its Mind?

The book "Fantasyland" lays out the long history that has led to fringe political conspiracy theories like birtherism, seen on display in the billboard pictured here, in Colorado. In this 2009 photo, Obama supporter Mary Schaeffer argues with Obama critic Gary Henderson in front of the controversial sign.
John Moore/Getty Images
The book "Fantasyland" lays out the long history that has led to fringe political conspiracy theories like birtherism, seen on display in the billboard pictured here, in Colorado. In this 2009 photo, Obama supporter Mary Schaeffer argues with Obama critic Gary Henderson in front of the controversial sign.

Journalist, author and radio host Kurt Andersen had an epiphany when he saw the first episode of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, more than ten years ago.

“Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly,” he writes.

America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.

Now, in an age of “alternative facts” and #fakenews, conspiracy theories and vaccination panics, Anderson asks how it all began. His new book “Fantasyland,” tracks what he see’s as “a 500-year history” of “how America went haywire.”

GUESTS

Kurt Andersen, Host and co-creator of Studio 360, a public radio show and podcast; author of “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire”,”Heydey”, and “Turn of the Century”; former cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker

For more, visit http://the1a.org.

© 2017 WAMU 88.5 – American University Radio.

Copyright 2017 WAMU 88.5

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