The End of Reality

If we all have our own factual universes, then what's the truth?

Apologies for the Candace Owens-Charlie Kirk jump scare (respectfully). [Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

First: it’s been a minute since I’ve posted on Substack— In my defense, my kids are needy as hell. But now that my younger one is listening to me approximately 25% of the time when I tell her to stop doing things that endanger her life (rather than her previous 0% of the time) I’ve got some mental real estate to devote to doomscrolling through my own thoughts.

Second, to those of you who are new subscribers since my recent appearance on The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller, welcome. Hope you like it here.

Reality has been unraveling for awhile now, but the moment that really drove home the fact that we were cooked was when I found myself watching Candace Owens’ YouTube live yesterday. Nearly 300,000 people joined me. The video currently has 6.2 million views

I am not a fan of Candace Owens. Before I started watching, what I knew about her was as follows: she is currently being sued by the President and First Lady of France for claiming in an 8-part podcast series that the First Lady of France is trans. She is married to some rich guy. She says problematic things about Jewish people. Despite being a very popular podcaster, I previously found her neither compelling nor interesting.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Owens has acted like a bereaved bestie, determined to get to the bottom of the true identity and motivation of the guy who killed her friend and fellow right wing provocateur. Her reaction was a glimmer of authenticity in a MAGA grifter free-for-all that was last Wednesday onward– people hyping their meme coins, calling for Civil War against “them” before we even knew who “them” was, and using Kirk’s death as a way to boost their own social media clout.

Every Fox News hit was a WWE monologue about Revenge. Every public appearance played like a bad audition. FBI director Kash Patel went out to eat at Rao’s literally hours after Kirk was killed, and after pretending like he was rushing to Utah to help the next day, gave a weird speech where he said he’d meet Kirk in the mythical place that Viking warriors go after Valkyries deem their battlefield death appropriately metal. Dude, what? Respectfully, there are no podcasters in Valhalla.

By Friday, President Trump BUT ANYWAY’d Kirk’s death, redirecting a reporter who asked how he was doing in light of the tragedy by pointing out that there was construction equipment on the White House grounds, ready to build his new ballroom.

Even Utah Governor Spencer Cox– who did genuinely seem disturbed by the crime– admitted that he was praying that the guy who had killed Kirk would have turned out to be brown, or an immigrant.

Most of the emotional responses from public figures sound like they were crowdsourced, or performances meant to vibrate at a very specific frequency. What should be private has been made obscenely public. But amid all this, Candace Owens seemed like she genuinely missed her friend and wanted to learn what happened to him. And so I watched.

She was in top form yesterday, confident, collected— honestly a great speaking voice, coming from another podcaster. Right away, she started teasing the red meat her audience was there for: Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by some guy from Utah. It was much bigger than that. Certain people were upset that his views on a certain Middle Eastern Country that starts with the letter I were evolving in the light of televised atrocities. She insinuated. She implied that she was in the possession of receipts. She goaded those in the know to release full transcripts, full letters, full recordings. Her friend was changing, and certain people didn’t like it. Owens pointed fingers at Zionists like billionaire Bill Ackman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She kinda mocked the way Bibi talked about the Holocaust. She broke down what she viewed as inconsistencies in the official law enforcement story, and I thought: sure she’s a rabid anti-Semite but what if she’s right about this??! I mean, maybe? Israel HAS done some pretty bad things! Why not this?

“I mean, maybe!” has become the default response to information on this case from just about anybody. FBI officials? Might be telling the truth! Might be lying! Utah officials? I mean, maybe. The suspect’s classmates, as told by Fox News reporters? How trustworthy are they? Depends on if they’re telling a story I want to hear, or if they’re crafting a narrative that they want to hear. Smug centrists waxing poetic about reaching across the aisle to hold hands with people who think black people are stupid and want trans people dead? Could be real, or some effort to turn the heat down on them personally. Those text messages could be faked. Maybe! It could be anything, it could be nothing. Reliable sources are an endangered species.

Donald Trump has created an information environment where reality can be bent by sheer force of will. Lying has no consequences. In fact, more interesting lies will pay bigger dividends.

Tell a sexy enough lie, eventually, people who want the lie to be real will join you to enforce the lie. The lie becomes mass delusion. Challenge the delusion at your own risk.

And that’s how we get to millions of people believing that the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 election was a hoax. The 2020 presidential election was rigged. January 6th was a peaceful Kum Bah Yah and Ashlee Babbitt is the Virgin Mary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics was using anti-Trump math to make Trump look bad. Vaccines– not genes– cause autism. Diseases are caused by miasma, not germs. Food dyes are an urgent public health crisis. The Epstein files are a hoax made up by Democrats. Pete Hegseth is cool and tough. Posting actual quotes that highlight problematic beliefs are grounds for being fired, because Charlie Kirk was a perfect and peaceful man with perfect and peaceful opinions, and anybody who implies anything short of that is going to get it.

If you repeat it enough times, it becomes true. Who’s the crazy one now?

Three hundred thousand people tuned in to watch Candace Owens pitch a version of reality where Charlie Kirk was assassinated by the state of Israel because he was becoming uncomfortable with the atrocities in Gaza. There’s no evidence to suggest that this is the case, beyond the fact that some people think it makes sense, given what we know.

In the comments section under a TikTok video of Charlie Kirk’s widow crying by his casket, commenters suggest with the glee of a person watching a particularly compelling episode of dramatic television that she might be pregnant. On another side of TikTok, her body language and vocal tone mean that she’s faking it, she never loved him, she was in on it. Dueling fanfiction about somebody whose small children no longer have a dad.

Fox News viewers are getting a mishmash of “this is because of trans” and “leftists do more violence than right-wing extremists.” The federal government just deleted a study that claimed otherwise. If you want to live in a world where the weak-wristed femme blue-haired baristas of the Fox News imagination are also comfortable handling high-powered weapons, the media environment is rotten with people who will help you weave those contradictions into a cozy custom reality.

If you want Charlie Kirk to be a martyr then, yes, you can find a person telling you that this is what happened. If you want Charlie Kirk to be just another political guy with opinions, harmless and kind like Paul Krugman or Sam Seder, the New York Times has you covered. If you want Charlie Kirk to be an edgelord punch line, well, you can find that, too.

When there are no consequences for lying but there are consequences for telling the truth, nothing is real. Not government studies. Not statistics. Not official statements. Not witnesses or loved ones or investigators with their own agendas. Not evidence. Not emotions. Not lived experiences. This is why politics should not play a role in things like math and science. The search for truth cannot survive an agenda.

Why not lie? You’ll not only get away with it, it’ll feel much better than confronting a truth that doesn’t always algorithmically match your preferences!

Something has shifted in the last 10 years– but most markedly in the last five years– that has led to a dissolution of reality itself. Much of the sum total of human knowledge was at one time searchable, but now it’s been manipulated past the point of trustworthiness. This is what happens when the truth is bent so far that it breaks.

Maybe that’s why I tuned into Candace Owens’ livestream. After watching a close-up video of Kirk’s death– one of the most viscerally real and horrible things I’ve ever seen– I wanted the conversation around it to feel real, rather than pushing some kind of fanfiction. At least Candace actually seems like she believes what she’s saying.

Judging from the wall-to-wall coverage that Kirk’s death has been getting, I assumed when I was at a gathering this weekend that other people in attendance would be swimming in the same waters I was. “How was your week?” one woman I had met a few times before asked. “It was weird,” I said, trying to sidestep talking about murder at a three-year-old’s birthday party. The woman looked at me, quizzical, and asked why.