Many people have called what we’re living through an epistemological crisis, and the most famous of them is probably Barack Obama, who told the Atlantic in 2020, “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”

Maybe Obama is overstating things a tad when it comes to the implied centrality of the truth to American democracy in the past. Still, if you were to do something wrong and you wanted to get away with it, at one time you might have needed creativity and attention to detail to come up with a counter-narrative, along with the manufacture of enough exonerating evidence to convince people of that narrative. But what if there were an information environment where the truth value of statements simply didn’t matter?

I’m asking because an account in the Wall Street Journal makes it sound as if former U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle was kinda hoping we were all the way down in that nothing-matters epistemological abyss. We may not be quite there, but we’re hanging on by a thread.

Guilfoyle, you’ll recall, allegedly texted a rich Trump donor on Signal , asking him to pay off her $100,000 American Express bill ahead of her confirmation hearing last year. It was the most damning of several reports that came out around the same time. She resigned as Ambassador on Tuesday .

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