As a kid, my favorite part of grocery shopping wasn’t the snacks or the cereal aisle; it was the tabloids at the checkout.
I’d devour headlines about Batboy sightings, Bigfoot vacations, royal scandals and the occasional presidential summit with extraterrestrials. These were absurdities printed with a straight face, and the comedy was half the fun.
I didn’t expect that, decades later, those supermarket fever dreams would feel less like parody and more like prophecy. The fantasies that once lived on cheap newsprint now pulse through mainstream culture. In the social media age, anything can be “true” if it flatters one’s bias or fuels their outrage. And with AI dissolving the already thin boundary between fact and fiction, we’ve entered an era where reality feels optional, truth feels negotiable and the most sensational lie travels at the speed of an algorithm.
In this environment, “common sense,” emotion and personal anecdote have muscled into spaces once reserved for evidence and expertise. But there’s nothing “common sense” about medicine, climate science, gender identity or any other complex system that shapes human life. Yet this appeal to “what feels right” has become the jet fuel of America’s culture war. It declares: If the issue seems simple to me, it should be simple to you. And if one disagrees, they’re elitist or part of a hidden agenda. This flattening of complexity has turned ignorance into authenticity and expertise into betrayal.
Through it all, a large portion of the country will deny what is right in front of them. Facts bounce off the force field of tribal loyalty. Experts are dismissed as elitists. Journalists are branded enemies. Anyone who insists on reality is accused of being part of a cabal determined to destroy America. It is the exact moment George Orwell warned about, when truth becomes whatever the powerful declares it to be. Once that line dissolves, democracy becomes fragile, fleeting and eventually non-existent.
Jared O. Bell is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice.
