Walter Lippmann on Objective Reality as a Defense against Demagoguery

"The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective information. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity. And a society which lives at second-hand will commit incredible follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if that contact is intermittent and untrustworthy. Demagoguery is a parasite that flourishes where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips with things themselves are impervious to it. For, in the last analysis, the demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is consciously or unconsciously an undetected liar."

Walter Lippmann. Liberty and the News. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920, pp. 57-58. Available at https://ia600705.us.archive.org/12/items/libertynews00lippuoft/libertynews00lippuoft.pdf.