Fake News in Contemporary Science and Politics A Requiem for the Real?

This transdisciplinary book investigates the profound repercussions of living in a post-truth world in which 'alternative facts' and post-truth knowledge claims, often bordering on the absurd, have replaced the real in the collective imagination of millions of people around the planet. Through discussions on climate change denial, the anti-vaccination movement, the January 6th Insurrection and the Russia-Ukraine War, this study explores the gravity of the current 'infodemic,' or the increasing inability of a large segment of the population to distinguish between reality and misrepresentation, and the destabilizing impact this infodemic has on democratic models of governance around the globe, coinciding with the rise of autocratic forms of populism.

1. Introduction.- 2. Climate Change Denial: An Ecocidal, Parallel Universe of Simulation.- 3. COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: The Ongoing, Hyperreal Saga of a Deadly Epidemic and Infodemic.- 4. Alternative Facts Trump Reality: The Spectacular Anatomy of an Insurrection.- 5. The Baudrillardian “Discourse of the Good:” Putin’s False Flag Operation to Denazify Ukraine .- 6. Conclusions. 

Keith Moser is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mississippi State University. He has more than one-hundred major publications including nine books and eighty-five articles. Moser’s research examines many issues linked to social-ecological justice, including Environmental Ethics (Environmental Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Ecocriticism, Ecolinguistics, and Biosemiotics) and postmodern French thought as it relates to literature, Popular Culture, and society in general.