Overview

From the buried body of the Cardiff Giant to the digital ghosts of deepfake technology, The Republic of Hoaxes reveals the hidden history of how America learned to turn deception into culture. This sweeping literary nonfiction work blends history, psychology, and media analysis to expose the anatomy of belief in a nation that mistakes spectacle for truth. Readers of cultural history, American studies, and true accounts of hoaxes will find in Bill Johns's narrative a rare combination of moral clarity and narrative depth-a study of how illusion became the republic's favorite art form. It begins in 1869, when farmers unearthed a ten-foot ""giant"" in the soil of upstate New York, igniting a national sensation. That same instinct-to believe in what we wish were true-would drive every great American deception to follow. Johns traces the lineage from the spiritualist séances of the nineteenth century to the forged fossils of Piltdown Man, from Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast to the Sokal Affair's academic irony, from the fraudulent glamour of the Fyre Festival to the invisible manipulations of algorithmic deepfakes. Each case reveals a civilization not merely fooled, but fascinated by its own power to invent meaning. Johns examines how deception evolved from spectacle to structure: religion learned to perform revelation, science learned to stage discovery, politics learned to script sincerity, and technology learned to simulate identity. The result is a republic where exposure has replaced revelation, and disbelief has become the new faith. We are no longer shocked by lies-we are organized by them. Written with the precision of a historian and the insight of a moral philosopher, The Republic of Hoaxes explores how the modern age of media transformed illusion into infrastructure. It asks what happens when every image is curated, every claim contested, and every truth indistinguishable from performance. Johns argues that the hoax is not the failure of truth but its reflection-a mirror through which a restless nation recognizes its own imagination. Drawing from rare archives, cultural artifacts, and contemporary digital research, Johns reveals how each age perfects its own form of belief. The Cardiff Giant, the séance, the radio broadcast, the viral video-all belong to the same emotional lineage. Deception, in his account, is not pathology but confession: the way a culture tells the truth about what it most desires. A major work of literary nonfiction, The Republic of Hoaxes stands alongside Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Susan Sontag's On Photography as a profound meditation on media, morality, and the machinery of attention. It is a book for readers who sense that the story of truth in America is also the story of performance-how a people built on imagination learned to live inside their own inventions. In the end, Johns offers both warning and grace: that belief and deceit, wonder and irony, will always coexist in a world that measures reality by what it can stage. He leaves the reader with a quiet challenge-to remember that the ethics of truth begin not in certainty, but in care. In a republic of hoaxes, sincerity is the last illusion that still works.

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