Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that... — Timothy D. Snyder

Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions and emotions and myths.

Author: Timothy D. Snyder

Insight: We live in a time when it's genuinely hard to know what's true. Everyone has access to the same internet, yet we walk away with wildly different pictures of reality. What Snyder is pointing at goes deeper than just disagreement—it's about abandoning the very idea that facts matter at all. If a leader can make you feel something strongly enough, the actual details become noise. This shows up in smaller ways than authoritarian politics. It's in how we share news without reading it, how a story that confirms what we already believe gets spread regardless of its sourcing, how someone can dismiss inconvenient evidence by saying it "doesn't feel true." The fascist move isn't necessarily a big lie—it's making people stop caring whether things are true or false in the first place. Emotion becomes the only currency that counts. The unsettling part is recognizing how easy it is to slip into this. None of us thinks we're being manipulated by impressions rather than facts. But we all have moments where we believe something because it fits our narrative, not because we've actually verified it. Staying alert to that gap—between what we feel and what we can actually verify—isn't paranoia. It's maintenance work on the basic shared reality we need to function together.