Introduction

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a surge in populist rhetoric, as politicians around the world have challenged the factual basis of reality. They have proclaimed that reality is not real, that news reports based upon evidence is fake and generally relied upon a partisan belief that party subsumes truth.

At the same time, there has been resistance to this wave of unreality. Sometimes it has been on the part of purveyors of factual data (such as most news organizations), other times from politicians challenged by the forces of unreality, and sadly, yet even other times by those who would just as eagerly embrace their own unreality as long as it opposed those with whom they battle in factional or partisan disputes.

The forces tied to the present president, Donald Trump, seem to have been the source of much of this rancour, with the constant stream of outrageous claims made by Mr Trump and his administration. According to Allen Abel writing in the 11 December 2018 issue of the Canadian magazine, Macleans: ‘As the president's hallucinatory world heaves and crumbles, Americans ponder what kind of country they wish to live in—and what kind of people they want to be.’ It is noted, however, that the assertions of living in a post-truth world predate Mr Trump's presidential campaign (Manjoo, 2008, 1–7).

For example, in the 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning study of Anti- Intellectualism in America, Richard Hofstadter wrote that although much of his study derived from events in the remoter American past, the impetus to study anti-intellectualism was driven by his discomfort over the Red Scares of his immediate history, in particular the populist rants of MacCarthyism (Hofstadter, 1963, 1-5). We must therefore assume that there are other elements at play to challenge reality.

Yet, if we are to support reality, or at least evidence-based research, we must embrace the bastions of data, from which reality, or at least an image thereof, may be drawn. For the most part, these accumulations of data are divided between published and unpublished data. Since published material may be more easily available, the more intriguing repository to examine is the archive, the collected fonds of institutional information.