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The Hypernormalisation of Awful Immigration Policy
Trump isn’t the only politician to ever encourage the mistreatment of immigrants but he puts the lies and policies encouraging their mistreatment into overdrive
Sorry for the three-dollar word: Hypernormalisation. I’m alluding to the provocative and somewhat depressing documentary of the same name, which Adam Curtis directed for the BBC in 2016. In HyperNormalisation, Curtis argues that we live in “a carefully constructed fake world.” And “as this fake world grew,” he says, “all of us went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring.”
As a result, we shouldn’t be surprised that someone like Donald Trump, a man whose own appearance of success itself was a facade, should become President. Now, we find ourselves enduring the man’s third campaign for the Presidency. Awaiting a profoundly important election that’s only a handful of days away. And still Trump capitalizes on our embrace of the fake, our tenuous relationship with the truth. “Many of the facts that Trump asserted were also completely untrue,” Curtis concluded in his documentary back in 2016. “But Trump didn’t care. He and his audience knew that much of what he said bore little relationship to reality. This meant that Trump defeated journalism — because the…
