PRAGMATIC ISSUES

Before the facts could even breathe, before the dust settled, before anyone had the decency to pause social media did what it now does best.

It fractured.

It blamed.

It performed outrage on cue.

And then, almost predictably, it did something worse:

It decided the whole thing wasn’t real.

Staged.

Scripted.

A political prop rolled out for effect.

An armed individual attempts to breach a high-security event, Secret Service engaged, people evacuated and the response from a not-insignificant number of Americans is “this didn’t happen.”

Not “what led to this?”
Not “how do we prevent this?”
Not even “this is unacceptable.”

Just: fake.

That reaction my friends is the story.

And it should terrify anyone paying attention.

Because once a society starts rejecting verified events as fiction not years later, not after investigations, but immediately, instinctively it isn’t just divided.

It’s unmoored.

We’ve moved past disagreement.

We’re now living in competing realities.

And no, this didn’t appear overnight.

You don’t wake up one day and decide that an attack is staged. That level of distrust is cultivated slowly, deliberately, through years of institutional erosion, media skepticism, political spin, and yes, rhetoric that constantly tells people someone, somewhere, is always lying.

So eventually, people believe it.

People believe it so deeply that even when something real happens, their first instinct isn’t to assess, it’s to dismiss.

That’s where we are now.

You can argue all day about rhetoric, who said what, who went too far, who crossed the line.

That conversation will fill panels, headlines, and comment sections for the next week.

Trump caused 1/6, with his lies and his angst, someone got killed.

Democrats lied to us all about Biden but to be fair, Biden was never seen sleeping through or soiling himself during cabinet meeting.

Biden did not kidnap world leaders to steal from them, or start wars that were not necessary. Biden is not all over the Epstein files.

Whose side said what is no longer the main story.

The point is that no matter how many lies Trump and his team have spread, what he has caused in our nation is perhaps the more important story, the one no one is paying attention to.

The main event is this that a growing number of Americans no longer trust anything outside their own curated worldview.

Not institutions.

Not media.

Not leadership.

Not even their own eyes if it conflicts with what they’ve already decided must be true.

And in that environment, truth doesn’t compete on evidence.

It competes on loyalty.

If the facts don’t fit the narrative, the facts are discarded.

If the event is inconvenient, the event is rewritten.

If reality challenges belief, reality loses.

That is a far bigger problem than any single act of violence.

Because violence, for all its horror, is finite. It happens, it’s investigated, it’s condemned.

But the collapse of shared reality?

That doesn’t end.

It spreads.

It seeps into everything, elections, policy, public health, national security, until nothing is agreed upon except that nothing can be trusted.

And once you get there, you don’t just lose civility.

You lose the ability to function as a country.

This is where we are edging closer and closer by day. The longer Trump remains in office destroying our country and the world, we edge closer and closer to this point in history.

We can’t solve problems if we can’t agree they exist. Trump should open his eyes to the truth instead of his own lies.

We can’t hold anyone accountable if we can’t agree on what happened. Trump and his administration must stop blaming Democrats, this was an individual choice carried out by someone who shares a sentiment about Trump and the administration and that sentiment was nothing Democrats pushed for.

We can’t move forward if we’re not even standing on the same ground. This falls to the GOP, Dems, Trump and the nation. Trump was never about bringing American’s together, his whole sales pitch is division so that he can destroy.

So yes, talk about rhetoric.

Debate it.

Argue it.

But don’t miss what just happened in front of you.

An attack occurred and a portion of the public shrugged and called it fiction.

That’s not apathy.

That’s not ignorance.

That’s a warning.

And if we keep ignoring it, the next crisis won’t just be about what happened.

What we don’t do is what the White House is doing, The White Houe is trying to frame it as more than it is, they are calling it a national emergency, it’s not.

Trump is getting nervous.

And if another shooting happens?

It’ll be about whether anything that happens can ever be believed again.