Science is changing in the age of populism, which is booming in politics and society. Populism draws on untruth and lies; it is based on alternative facts and fake news. A member of parliament for the AfD, a right-wing extremist party in Germany, expressed this in almost aphoristic terms, stating "It's not just about pure statistics, but about how citizens perceive it", after he was caught lying blatantly. Arendt writes that lying is one of the fundamental conditions of totalitarianism, declaring: "The essential negative quality of the totalitarian elite is never to accept the world as it is, as given, and never even to compare lies with reality."