ABSTRACT
Post-truth is the latest entanglement of politics and power with truth claims. Epitomized by a disregard for facts, post-truth undermines the very foundations of reality and rationality while altering how politics unfolds. Beginning with a theoretical elaboration of post-truth, this chapter outlines the trajectory of the politics of truth in the Turkish context and shows how post-truth drives politics in modern Turkey. While noting the continuities with the past, this chapter invests more in explaining how post-truth politics has operated in the 2000s. It illustrates how the ruling elite, by inundating the political landscape with rumors, fabricated content and conspiracy theories to neutralize facts. This milieu created a smokescreen that obstructed genuine public debate while fashioning a kind of commonsense knowledge immune to factual rebuttal.
