Journalist sounds alarm on dangers of propaganda, calling it ‘one of the worst crises for American democracy this century’

Anne Applebaum is sounding the alarm.

Anne Applebaum is sounding the alarm. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian published an 8,000-word piece in The Atlantic this week, warning about “the new propaganda war” and the dangers disinformation poses to the free world. The cover piece — excerpted from her forthcoming book, “Autocracy Inc.” — spotlighted how autocratic forces across the globe, including Donald Trump in the U.S., are waging sophisticated information wars “to discredit liberalism and freedom.” The efforts, Applebaum stressed, are having the intended corrosive impact on the public discourse, warping the way in which people view democratic governments and the principles in which they stand for. In Applebaum’s eyes, the deployment of propaganda by authoritarians — and authoritarian wannabes such as Trump — is one of the most profound issues of our time. “I think it is at the center of one of the worst crises for American democracy this century, certainly in recent decades,” Applebaum told me by phone Tuesday. “If we can’t agree on what happened yesterday, then how do we write legislation about it? If we don’t share the same reality in the democracy, then how do we debate how we should organize our world?” “It’s incredibly undermining to democracy,” she added. “Democracies rely on people having a shared perception of the world.” Which is why, Applebaum said, those who hunger for power seek to destroy the very notion of truth. Applebaum explained that Vladimir Putin’s Russia “pioneered” the “firehose of falsehoods,” a tactic that Trump has employed in the U.S. and others have used across the world to seize and maintain power.