After the Fact: The Erosion of Truth and the Inevitable Rise of Donald Trump

Perhaps my favorite part of this book was the one that summed it up nicely in the first line of the acknowledgments, in which the author thanks his parents for saying it’s okay not to have an opinion, that it’s okay to say “I don’t know.” In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Bomey proceeds to open up the psychological tendencies of today’s America. I found his writing to be a refreshing analysis on the subjects of social media, vaccinations, common core math, the digital information arena, and, of course, politics. To be honest, I fully expected this book to be biased in one way or the other politically, but I read it with an open mind, and to my surprise, there were pluses and minuses for both sides. Bomey explains in After The Fact that humans tend to like the same things or agree with the same things that other people they have in common with. For example, if a liberal has an opinion about something, it is more likely that another liberal will agree. Same for conservatives and other parties. I found this interesting, and from a real-life perspective, I agree very much with this. Another subject I found interesting was about fact-checking. The study in which Stanford University students had a hard time distinguishing valid articles from invalid ones was scary. This was a group of highly intelligent students who couldn’t tell if something was real or not. If they couldn’t tell, how is the average layperson supposed to? With the fast-paced world and its technological advances, the false news and real news get tangled. This book was a fantastic analysis of the world we live in today.