Anybody see the Barack Obama interview on my next guest needs no introduction with Letterman?

Anybody see that? So good if not, you know what you're doing tonight.

At one point Obama has this line, quote, one of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts.

He was referring, of course, to President Trump and the alt-right, but people across the aisle that is not a partisan statement at all, people across the aisle are all sounding the alarm.

Republican Senator Jeff Flake said recently, quote, 2017, was a year which saw the truth, objective empirical evidence-based truth, more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government.

The Washington Post, which is hardly an unbiased source, granted, calculated that President Trump made 2140 false or misleading claims his first year in office alone, in average of 5.9 per day.

The Rand Corporation coined the phrase truth decay to name our cultural moment. Fake news and alternative facts are now a part of the lexicon of America.

Machito Cucutani, the former chief book critic of The New York Times in her recent book, The Death of Truth, which again, if you've read it, is even more hopelessly biased, but still is a scary expose of the White House and politics in general right now, is at least honest enough to admit, as a progressive,

that this war on truth did not start on the right with a Breetbart or a Rush Limbaugh, but on the left, and did not start with the election of President Trump, but way back in the 1960s, with French philosophers like Foucault and Derrida, when they began to inject the ideas of postmodernism into the US.

This began the movement toward a post-truth society, a generation ago, and all because truth then became relative, which in turn began the cultural deconstructionism that we see in everything from an uvra app to the redefinition of gender or sexuality to a liturgist podcast.

And now we are living in the fallout of all of that deconstructionism, David Foster Wallace, again, anything but a conservative apprentice of Jesus, in an interview right before his death said this, what's been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, see if this like just rings true to our cultural moment.

Sarcasm, cynicism, a manic and we, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness, I have no idea what he means by that.

Anybody read Infinite Just?

Yep, I've been reading that book for two years, I'm on about page 50, it's amazing and wicked heart, right?

Instead of ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem, you've got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture, it's become our language.

We're so in it that we don't even see that it's one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing postmodern ironies become our environment.

We live in the middle of a war between truth and lies, that is millennia old but at least feels more acute to me than any time in my short life.

Deception is at the root of almost every single problem that we face in our society and in our soul.

And in this cultural moment of truth decay and pathological lies and the whole thing that is our new normal, I find Jesus teachings more compelling than ever before.

Jesus and the writers of the Bible and most church leaders down through history warn us constantly of the danger of deception, false doctrine, false teachers, denial of the truth lies, yet in the modern western world all too often,

all of those warnings fall on deaf ears, read the New Testament, a constant theme all the way through is the danger of false teaching and false teachers.

The only people who sound that allow alarm anymore are pretty much angry fundamentalists and we just filter them out.

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