"Looking back, she draws parallels between the regimes of Hitler in Germany and Lenin in Russia and Trump — particularly regarding their mass appeal, scapegoating and manipulation of language. She references books, such as those by... Anne Applebaum and... Hannah Arendt... In explaining how social media can both be manipulated and manipulate us, she quotes... Jaron Lanier and... . ...She includes novelists... George Orwell for , F. Scott Fitzgerald for greed, Thomas Pynchon for paranoia, David Foster Wallace for irony and insincerity, Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth... The passages she pulls from Zweig about life... during Hitler’s rise are striking. So too is what she takes from Victor Klemperer... on the decay of language in the Nazi era. ...Kakutani lays a surprising measure of the blame for fake news on postmodernism. ...Where she might have tracked money and right-wing think politics ([e.g.,] ’s Dark Money), the role of race and racism ([e.g.,] Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me) or the widening gap between rich and poor (using Capital by Thomas Piketty) — postmodernism is instead in her sights throughout. ...[S]he credits "recruiting a real American to hold a sign depicting Clinton and a phony... quotation attributed to her" to postmodern "Surkovian stagecraft," rather than recognizing... antecedents in Nixon’s dirty tricksters."