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"When Did We Start Just Making Shit Up": Origins Of U. S. Pseudocracy, Hans Ostrom, William Haltom

All Faculty Scholarship

Early in 2011, a colleague asked, “When did we start just making shit up?” By “we,” she meant Americans but also, more specifically, those involved in politics—directly or as in­terested parties.

We an­swer her question variously in this paper.[1] But our overarching answer is that poli­ti­cos started flatly concocting misin­for­ma­tion when our propaganda polity mutated into a pseudocracy.

We wend our way to that answer as follows. After reviewing an­swers we deem insuffi­cient, we provide two sorts of tentative, rough an­swers. Our first answer is that the stretch­ing of what counts as an untruth combined with the lengthening of …