I don't like to write about politics, but feel compelled to take up a topic that's close to my academic heart: Truth. In academia, we say undergraduate degrees are all about acquiring the skill of critical thinking: critical reading and writing; critical listening and speaking, and the thought processes involved in determining if what's being said is true. If not, one must ethically discard the information and not propagate it. If true, one can refer to and propagate the information, but only with sufficient critical citations. 

Critical thinking employing good reasoning and logic is one aspect of critical thinking; another is, when evaluating a work, always looking for logical fallacies (rejecting works that employ them) and avoiding logical fallacies when writing or speaking. There are three classical logical fallacies: non sequitur; post hoc ergo propter hoc and ad hominem. In the past, the first two were employed by professionals to misdirect. Today, increasing numbers of individuals, businesses, institutions and governments are employing the latter. Ad hominem is to ignore what the person is saying or writing and instead attack his or her character. Name calling is one of the meanest and pettiest forms. Today, name calling is rapidly replacing outright lying as a means to misinform or misdirect. 

Another approach is to deny the truth of something said by name calling it a "lie" or "fake" (e.g. "fake news") without sufficient justification and citation. 

An everyday example of the use of these two forms of this logical fallacy is USA President Donald Trump and his associates' use of name calling to disinform and misdirect the public. 

The problem is that the general public is highly susceptible to this fallacy when it is perpetrated by or under the name of an authority figure, especially one democratically elected. In the criminal world this would be called a "con" by a "con man(or woman)". While "short con's" are particularly powerful in the moment and can garner the perpetrator lots of publicity, it's the long term effects of one after another short con's, sometimes called the "long con" or "endgame" that are particular damaging, not so much to the perpetrator but those conned into believing him or her. 

In today's techie terms, academia used to be the crucible and firewall from which truth would eventually emerge. Nowadays, the "fire" in both seems to have been put out as part of the long con, and, as fewer people acquire and apply critical thinking, the truth is in danger of being overwhelmed by "real" fake news.