“Zombies Are Real”: Fantasies, Conspiracies, and the Post-truth Wars

This article asserts that post-truth is the name we have assigned to a powerful repetitive mode of discourse that legitimizes conspiracies and anxieties regarding how blackened biothreat bodies will be unleashed upon society. Post-truth signifies a kind of excess and excessiveness wherein grammars of common sense making are overrun. Post-truth indexes a desire for gratuitous violence against norms of civil society—indeed, against civil society itself. Post-truth is not a set of lies. It is a precondition for tribal war. The article sets forth post-truth as a disorienting and frightening “dissemblage” that is driven by fantasies of sovereignty, rituals of militarization, and the colonization of expertise. I outline the formal features of post-truth by examining a docudrama produced by the Discovery Channel called Zombie Preppers. In the end I speculate about how post-truth metastasizes in the social body as “brain damage.”