“Post-truth is pre-Fascism,” Michael V. Hayden told Jamil Jaffer, quoting from his new book, “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies.”
The occasion for the conversation between two of the country’s most often-quoted national security experts, founding directors of academic intelligence centers, and George Mason University professors—Hayden is at Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government; Jaffer is at the University’s Antonin Scalia Law School—was an appearance last week at the Hoover Institution in Washington, D.C., to discuss the book and the state of the nation’s intelligence industry in an age of what Hayden calls “post-truth.”
Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, is director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at the Schar School. Jaffer’s center, the National Security Institute, is next door at the law school on Mason’s Arlington Campus.
During the conversation Hayden described his research methods (for one, spending time with pro-Trump supporters in his native Pittsburgh to learn how they got their news and formed their opinions), how Russia exploited the nation’s social media to intensify riffs in the social fabric, and how the president creates his own reality by means of fabricating “departure points” that eventually become believed.
“What do truth-tellers do when confronted by obvious falsehoods?” Jaffer wondered.
“It’s hard,” Hayden replied, drawing the first blank of the afternoon. “It’s very, very hard.”