There was a time, not all that long ago, when America had one reality. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was shared. We all tuned in to Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings or Dan Rather. The evening news would come on, everyone would collectively lower their voices, and for thirty blessed minutes the country had something resembling a common narrative. Sure, we argued about what to do with the facts, but at least we agreed they existed.
Now? We live in a multi-verse of mutually exclusive hallucinations, algorithmically tailored to flatter, enrage, and radicalize us in equal measure. The right doesn’t just interpret facts differently—they’ve built a parallel dimension where those facts never happened. The earth is flat, climate change is a hoax, vaccines are microchips, and every billionaire who ever smiled in a photograph with Bill Gates must be part of a pedophile cabal.
Welcome to the United States of Confabulation. Population: All of us.
The Last Time Reality Was a Group Project
Picture this: it’s 1991. You get home from work, the TV flickers to life, and there’s Tom Brokaw calmly explaining the Gulf War without yelling or using the word “woke.” He’s not telling you how to feel about it—just what happened. You might disagree with your neighbor about the war, taxes, or whether Ross Perot is an alien in disguise, but you’re working off the same ingredients.
We had a baseline truth. We could argue, compromise, maybe even change our minds. Debate was a national pastime, not a declaration of war.
Then came the plan.
The Birth of the Alternate Reality Industrial Complex
Conservatives, smarting from decades of being outnumbered in newsrooms and bored with facts that didn’t flatter them, came up with a new idea: if you can’t beat reality, build your own.
Enter Rush Limbaugh. A man whose greatest contribution to American discourse was proving you could get rich by making your audience angrier than yesterday. Limbaugh didn’t report the news; he performed grievance. His genius was realizing that outrage was more addictive than information. You didn’t have to understand policy if you could yell about “feminazis” for three hours a day.
Then Fox News arrived in 1996, wrapped in the soft, patriotic glow of waving flags and orchestral jingles. Roger Ailes understood television better than anyone alive—and he understood that truth was optional if you had a graphics package dramatic enough to hypnotize the viewer.
Fox marketed itself as “fair and balanced,” which was corporate code for “we’ll tell you what you want to hear.” They called it news, but it was really mood management. The goal wasn’t to inform; it was to affirm.
Within a decade, the right-wing media ecosystem had gone full Ouroboros—self-consuming, self-reinforcing, and allergic to anything outside its ideological stomach.
When the Fox Guards the Facts
In 2021, Fox News was sued for lying about election fraud, and their lawyers defended them by saying (and this is real) that no reasonable viewer would believe what Tucker Carlson says because he’s “entertainment.”
You might think that would have been a national scandal—that the most-watched cable network admitted under oath that its entire primetime lineup was a circus act. But instead, half the country just shrugged and kept watching.
It was the final confirmation that truth had been privatized. Fox isn’t a news outlet; it’s an emotional support animal for people who find reality too upsetting.
We now live in a country where one half believes in empirical evidence, and the other half believes in vibes.
The Algorithm That Ate the Brain
Then came social media—the digital narcotic that turned propaganda into personality.
Facebook learned that anger drives engagement. Twitter learned that lies spread six times faster than truth. Instagram learned that politics look better with filters. And somewhere along the line, we stopped consuming information and started performing it.
The right saw an opportunity. Why bother building a political party when you can just build a content farm?
They flooded the zone with memes, conspiracies, and influencer pundits who deliver outrage like DoorDash delivers fries—fast, cheap, and always lukewarm.
By the time Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, it was less a platform and more a propaganda refinery. Suddenly, verified users weren’t journalists—they were whoever had $8 and an avatar of an eagle clutching a Bible.
Algorithms don’t care about truth. They care about engagement. And engagement thrives on extremism. So your feed becomes a hall of mirrors, each reflection slightly more distorted than the last, until you can’t remember what the original face looked like.
Welcome to the New Reality Franchise
You can now pick your own truth like you pick a streaming service.
Reality+ (Right-Wing Edition): The border is overrun, the deep state is omnipotent, Trump is the second coming of Jesus, and climate change is a psy-op by Bill Gates to sell you solar panels.
Reality++ (Left-Wing Echo Chamber): Every red hat is a Klansman, every Supreme Court decision is the Handmaid’s Tale, and if you don’t use the exact right pronoun, you’re basically the patriarchy in a cardigan.
Reality Lite (Centrist Edition): You’re exhausted, vaguely aware that everything is broken, and just want someone to fix the Wi-Fi and stop emailing you fundraising links.
There’s no common foundation anymore. No shared chronology. We can’t even agree on what year it is in America’s moral calendar. For the left, it’s 1933. For the right, it’s 1776. For the rest of us, it’s whatever day DoorDash delivers something that still tastes like food.
The Great Fact Massacre
Once upon a time, journalists were gatekeepers of information. Now, the gates have been bulldozed and replaced with a content algorithm that confuses velocity for veracity.
In this new ecosystem, the truth isn’t fact-checked—it’s focus-grouped.
You can watch it happen in real time. Someone posts a lie—say, “immigrants are replacing you.” Within hours, it has been quote-tweeted, monetized, and turned into a merch drop. A day later, Fox runs a segment “just asking questions,” and by the weekend, a congressman is citing it as evidence during a hearing.
Lies don’t die in this environment; they metastasize.
And when someone finally points out that the original claim was false, the response isn’t embarrassment—it’s defiance. Because in this ecosystem, being factually wrong is less damaging than being ideologically inconsistent.
The Billionaire Broadcast Bloc
It’s not just Fox anymore. The right has colonized every major platform with surgical precision.
Elon Musk controls Twitter, sorry, X—a site now functioning as a global megaphone for far-right disinformation and digital brownshirts.
Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram, where right-wing “news” outlets use memes to launder talking points into dopamine.
And now TikTok, which once seemed like a Gen-Z playground, has quietly filled with MAGA micro-influencers, Christian nationalist dance routines, and “patriot prepper” content telling teenagers to store canned beans for the coming civil war.
The GOP doesn’t need a state-run media network. It already owns the algorithmic ones.
And while liberals are busy fact-checking with links and nuance, the right is flooding your feed with weaponized simplicity.
It’s not about winning arguments anymore. It’s about overwhelming the system until reason logs off.
The Age of Infinite Nonsense
This is how you get a society where millions believe the 2020 election was stolen but can’t name their own state senator. Where people hoard ivermectin because a YouTube video told them to. Where half the country thinks journalism is a conspiracy and the other half thinks journalism can save us.
We are no longer a nation debating how to solve problems. We are a nation debating whether the problems are even real.
The climate crisis? “A liberal hoax.”
The COVID death toll? “Inflated.”
The January 6th insurrection? “Tourism.”
We used to say everyone was entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts. But thanks to talk radio, cable news, and the attention economy, that quaint distinction has dissolved. Now everyone gets their own facts, their own history, and increasingly, their own physics.
The Fox Lawsuit Was the Punchline
When Fox was sued by Dominion Voting Systems for broadcasting election lies, they settled for nearly $800 million. It should’ve been a seismic event—the kind of reckoning that ends careers and reforms industries.
Instead, it barely registered. Fox called it a “business decision.” Tucker Carlson got fired, but not for lying—he just texted the wrong slurs to the wrong people.
The scandal faded. The viewers stayed. The advertisers came back.
Because the truth is, Fox doesn’t need credibility. It has community. It’s not a news network—it’s a church. And like any religion, it doesn’t need proof, only faith.
The people who watch Fox don’t want journalism. They want reassurance. They want the world to make sense according to the script they’ve already memorized.
The Great Fragmentation
So here we are, standing in the ruins of shared reality.
Liberals scroll MSNBC and think they’re informed. Conservatives mainline Fox and think they’re awake. Everyone else toggles between despair and distraction, just trying to survive the deluge.
We no longer debate ideas—we debate existence.
We no longer share a language—we share outrage.
We no longer have news—we have narrative.
And the worst part? The machine doesn’t care which side you’re on. It just wants your attention.
The algorithms that push far-right propaganda are the same ones pushing progressive rage bait. They don’t have ideology. They have math. They don’t crave justice. They crave engagement.
Nostalgia for Reality
Sometimes I miss the simplicity of the old media landscape. I miss the moment when the country collectively exhaled as the news began, when journalists wore bad suits and worse haircuts but still had a code.
I miss the idea that the facts came first and the arguments came after.
Now, facts are optional accessories. You pick the ones that match your worldview and ignore the rest. Reality has been chopped into content verticals.
We used to share a truth, flawed as it was. Now, every American lives in their own episode of The Truman Show, curated by an algorithm that knows what will make them click before they even know what they believe.
The End of the News, the Beginning of the Narrative
The right didn’t destroy truth alone. They just industrialized the process. They built a pipeline from grievance to monetization, from ideology to entertainment. And once it worked, everyone copied it.
The left has its own outrage factories, its own monetized moralism. The difference is, only one side openly admits that facts don’t matter—and their lawyers put it in writing.
Fox called themselves “entertainment.”
Rush Limbaugh called himself “a harmless blowhard.”
Elon Musk calls himself “a free speech absolutist,” which roughly translates to “I’ll boost any fascist as long as it trends.”
And the rest of us? We’re stuck in the feed, trying to distinguish satire from policy, parody from power.
The Moral of the Algorithm
If you’re looking for a neat conclusion, there isn’t one. That’s the problem with post-truth societies: they don’t end. They just scroll.
The death of shared reality isn’t a moment. It’s a process—slow, profitable, and bipartisan.
We used to have a floor made of facts. Now we have a trampoline made of narratives. And every time we jump, someone makes ad revenue.
The solution isn’t to ban Fox or delete Twitter or fact-check your uncle into submission. It’s to remember that truth isn’t supposed to entertain you. It’s supposed to ground you.
Because once facts become content, democracy becomes improv.
And as we’ve learned, the right is much better at improv than the rest of us.
Closing Transmission: Reality Optional
America didn’t lose its mind overnight. It outsourced it—first to talk radio, then to cable news, and finally to the infinite scroll.
The dream of democracy was that a free people could govern themselves through reason and debate. The nightmare is that a free people can no longer agree on what day it is, or whether the sun is hot.
We’re living in a civilization that’s gaslighting itself, one algorithmic hit at a time.
So when you hear someone say “everyone’s entitled to their own opinion,” remember the addendum that got deleted somewhere along the way: but not their own reality.
Because without a shared set of facts, there’s no democracy—only dueling cults, monetized division, and a trillion-dollar industry built on our collective psychosis.
And that’s not entertainment. That’s the end of the show.