Post-Truth, Lies and Bullshit

My question is whether the concepts of post-truth and bullshit are useful tools of political analysis in relation to political events in the US and UK since the election of Donald Trump as President and the 2016 Brexit vote. Bullshitters are knowingly ignorant individuals who conceal their ignorance by pretending to know what they do not know, or to understand what they do not understand. This account is compared to other accounts of bullshit, including Harry Frankfurt’s in his famous essay On Bullshit. Three notions of post-truth are distinguished. My claim is that the concepts of post-truth and bullshit do not provide for an adequate conceptualization of the political tactics that have come to the fore in recent years. I argue that commentators who interpret recent events as evidence of the power of bullshit and or the rise of post-truth trivialize and misdescribe these tactics. These tactics are more adequately conceptualized in terms of notions such as propaganda and hate speech.