by Jared O. Bell
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 your bias or fuels your 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 you disagree, you’re elitist or part of a hidden agenda. This flattening of complexity has turned ignorance into authenticity and expertise into betrayal.
This is anti-intellectualism, and though accelerating, it isn’t new. Richard Hofstadter warned in the 1960s of a growing American suspicion of expertise, a belief that intelligence itself was untrustworthy. What was once a cultural tendency has hardened into a political identity and, increasingly, a governing philosophy.
It’s also tied to a literacy crisis hiding in plain sight. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 21% of U.S. adults struggle with “Level 1” literacy, basic decoding with limited comprehension, and 34% of adults perform at “Below Level 2,” meaning they cannot reliably compare or integrate information across texts. The more recent NCES update shows low literacy rates increasing, with “Below Level 2” rising from 29% to 34% as of 2024.
When millions of adults struggle to process dense or complex information, it creates a vacuum easily filled by conspiracies, oversimplifications, and the comforting illusion of “common sense.”
Demagoguery is nothing new. America has always had its fire-breathers, Father Charles Coughlin, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Governor George Wallace, each exploiting fear and resentment to build a following. But today’s demagogues operate at a scale those predecessors could never imagine. They don’t need studios or rallies; they have livestreams, podcasts, and algorithmic megaphones engineered to reward outrage. They arrive faster, louder, and more frequently, wrapped in hashtags and monetized resentment.
And the consequences are here.
During the COVID-19 pandemic , conspiracy theories cost lives, and respected public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci required armed protection because lies about him were politically profitable. Now, in 2025, with an anti-vaccine activist running the nation’s top health agency, the results are already visible: the cases, the highest in decades. And public health experts warn of substantial future outbreaks if vaccination rates continue to slide. Diseases we once defeated are back, thriving in the cracks created by disinformation.
Meanwhile, democratic institutions are being bent to the breaking point. Corruption has become so blatant it barely registers, swallowed by a public numb to the abuses that should set off alarms. The Constitution is increasingly treated not as a guardrail but as a stage prop in a political theater of grievance. Hostility toward judges is encouraged. Nationwide injunctions blocking unconstitutional actions are framed as sabotage. The Justice Department is cheered when used to intimidate or punish critics. It is retribution and creeping autocracy thinly disguised as leadership.
And 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 declare it to be. Once that line dissolves, democracy becomes fragile, fleeting, and eventually non-existent.
Abraham Lincoln’s warning has never felt more urgent, a house divided against itself cannot stand. And America will not stand if we split into two realities, one grounded in evidence, the other built on delusions. Without shared truth, there can be no shared purpose, no shared future. Division doesn’t just weaken the house, it rots the foundation. Anti-intellectualism and demagoguery are the rot.
Still, America has never survived on perfection. It has survived because enough people chose to repair what was broken, a truth reflected in every movement that challenged the status quo, from women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement to the long fight for LGBTQ rights. The rot is real. The danger is real. But so is the possibility of renewal, if we choose it. America’s collapse is not inevitable. It becomes inevitable only if we surrender to silence, cynicism, or the seductive pull of simple lies.
Part of that renewal requires speaking truth to power. And the truth is dangerous, dangerous enough that elements of the current political establishment are working overtime to curb it. We see this in legislative attempts to abolish the Department of Education; in state-level campaigns attacking universities and academic freedom; in coordinated pushes to remove books from classrooms and libraries; in efforts to suppress votes through restrictive election laws; and in the deliberate sidelining of politicians who refuse to bow to party orthodoxy.
These are not the actions of leaders confident in the strength of their ideas. They reflect a deeper fear of an informed public, of citizens who question, analyze, and think critically enough to see through political performance.
Their fear, their terror of an educated public, is proof of how powerful the truth still is. And a reminder that defending it is not only an act of courage. It is an act of national survival.
Jared O. Bell, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
