Jay Spring

We are living through a massive information crisis in which at least half the population is being systematically misinformed, making any sane national debate increasingly difficult. Without a shared factual foundation, there is nothing to discuss. People are not merely drawing different conclusions from the same evidence. They are living in entirely different realities. That is what makes the Fauci story so tragic. He caused untold harm, yet millions of people know almost nothing about it. We can debate precisely how large a role Fauci played in the creation of Covid, but half the country does not even know that Covid came from a lab. We are therefore several steps removed from the basic conditions required to have an intelligent discussion. Other facts are even more black and white. Fauci’s private diary contradicts what he told the public. His own words reveal a man of almost limitless narcissism. These are not matters of interpretation. They are documented facts. Yet we still cannot have a national conversation about them because the media either refuses to report them or actively lies about them. Anyone who is not on Twitter, which is most people, may never encounter the underlying evidence at all. The result is that I increasingly find it almost impossible to discuss any of this with ordinary people, whether family members, acquaintances, or people at events or birthday parties. Unless someone has followed the evidence closely, there is no common starting point. Before you can debate what happened, you first have to dismantle at least ten years of falsehoods and omissions. I do not know how this ends, but it is not sustainable. A country cannot function indefinitely when its people are no longer capable of discussing almost anything beyond sports on the basis of shared factual knowledge.