#MentalNote

The Mob and the Mirror: You Are the Worst Fan in the World

1 day ago Author By cumeadi

The final buzzer hadn’t even finished its jarring cry when the court became a chaotic sea of bodies. Watch the footage. In February 2024, after Wake Forest upset Duke, thousands of students swarmed the floor. In that crush was Duke’s seven-foot center, Kyle Filipowski. As he tried to escape, fans, celebrating students, just like you or your kids, collided with him, shoved him, and left him with an injured knee. “I feel like it was personal,” he said later. Of course, it was personal. We’ve made it that way.

I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that hostility. I’ve been booed at away games, had objects thrown in my direction, and heard the creative ways opposing fans can turn your name into a slur. Playing football, running track, rugby, soccer…across every sport, every level, the script was the same. Before away games, coaches would warn us: “Not everyone is going to like you out there. In fact, right now, you’re their enemy.” They weren’t wrong. What they didn’t prepare us for was how that enmity would metastasize beyond the game itself.

My family and friends who made it to the Olympics, who played professionally here and abroad, they all have stories; the fan who followed a sprinter to the hotel, the death threats sent to a rugby player’s family after a controversial call. The racial slurs screamed at a soccer player from the stands, then amplified on social media for days. These aren’t war stories from some bygone era of barbaric sports culture. These are text messages from last month.

Filipowski’s experience is the modern crisis in miniature. This isn’t some shocking anomaly; it’s the logical conclusion of the culture we have built, click by click, bet by bet. We’ve become the architects of the very toxicity we claim to lament. From the phone hurled at artist Bebe Rexha, who needed stitches after being struck at a concert, to the racist harassment that forced WNBA rookie Angel Reese to limit her social media presence, these are not isolated incidents performed by some alien “other.” They are the predictable tantrums of a culture that has replaced admiration with ownership, and support with a transaction. This isn’t a problem out there; the call is coming from inside the house.

Look at what we did to Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Two phenomenal athletes who elevated women’s basketball to unprecedented heights, and we weaponized their rivalry. We couldn’t just celebrate their talent; we had to pick sides, create narratives, and then unleash our digital armies when they didn’t perform to our fantasy expectations. When Clark struggled in her first WNBA games, the death threats poured in. When Reese celebrated too enthusiastically, she was labeled “classless” by people who had never stepped foot on a competitive court. We took two young women at the pinnacle of their sport and made them symbols in our culture war.

Let’s be honest about the psychological loophole we so eagerly exploit. We call it deindividuation, a clinical term for the moment we gladly surrender our conscience to the mob. In the anonymous roar of the stadium or the digital echo chamber of a message board, we find a perverse freedom; the freedom from accountability. I’ve felt it myself…that moment when you’re screaming at an opponent and the crowd carries you further than you’d ever go alone. We let the group’s roar drown out our own better judgment. Online, we take it a step further, embracing the online disinhibition effect as a license to be our worst selves. Behind the shield of a screen, we say what we’d never dare say to a person’s face, forgetting that there is, in fact, a person on the other side. We have weaponized our anonymity.

And then there’s the money. We have transformed ourselves from supporters into petty, entitled investors. The explosion of legalized sports betting has rotted the fan experience from the inside out. A missed free throw is no longer a moment of shared disappointment; it’s a direct financial assault. When North Carolina’s Armando Bacot gets over 100 messages from gamblers furious that he didn’t grab enough rebounds for their parlay to hit, that isn’t fandom. That’s the rage of an addict, and the athlete is nothing more than the slot machine that failed to pay out.

This toxic transactionalism has poisoned everything. Look at Noah Lyles winning the 100m at the 2024 World Championships, then collapsing after his 200m bronze with COVID. Instead of concern for his health, social media erupted with accusations that he was “making excuses” and “letting down bettors.” A man literally struggling to breathe became a villain because he didn’t perform to gambling expectations.

In the NBA, we’ve normalized fans screaming personal attacks at players’ families. When Russell Westbrook’s family was repeatedly targeted by fans in Utah, the league’s response was essentially a shrug. When Kyrie Irving was pelted with a water bottle in Boston, we debated whether he “deserved it” for his past comments. We’ve created a culture where athletes are expected to endure psychological warfare as part of their job description.

Don’t think for a second this is limited to the sports arena. We’ve found other, more insidious ways to turn entertainers into our personal stock portfolio. We crowdfund their albums, subscribe to their Patreons, and pay exorbitant fees for concert tickets, creating a direct financial link that breeds a toxic sense of ownership. The artist becomes an employee, and the fan, a disgruntled manager. When a musician changes their sound, or an actor takes a role we dislike, we feel betrayed. The phone thrown at Bebe Rexha isn’t a random act of violence; it’s the fury of a “shareholder” whose investment has gone sour.

We’ve formalized this with college athletes through Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals, but this is just the officially sanctioned version of the unspoken contract we’ve already imposed upon every creator and celebrity. We don’t just consume their art; we consume their lives. And when they deviate from the brand we paid for by setting a boundary, expressing a political opinion, or simply being human; we react with the fury of a consumer who has received a defective product.

All of this plays out on the stage of the attention economy, where we gorge ourselves on a diet of outrage served up by algorithms we know are manipulating us. We are not passive victims of this system; we are its engine. We click. We share. We amplify the poison. Thoughtful analysis is boring; a vicious takedown of a movie or a personal attack on an actor generates engagement. We reward venom with our attention, ensuring that the most toxic voices are the loudest. We have become willing consumers of hate.

Having competed at various levels, I understand the raw emotion of sports. I know what it feels like to have your heart broken by a loss, to feel genuinely angry at an opponent’s tactics, to want to will your team to victory through sheer vocal force. But somewhere along the way, we lost the plot. We forgot that the person wearing the other jersey, the person who just missed the shot, the person who celebrated a little too long; they’re human beings with families, fears, and feelings just like us.

So, how do we fix a problem we are so actively creating? It requires more than just complaining. It requires a collective admission of guilt and a radical assumption of responsibility.

1. A Reckoning for Venues, Leagues, and Promoters:

  • Enforce Zero-Tolerance, Period: Stop issuing tepid warnings. Eject, ban for life, and press charges. Make the consequences for assault, because that’s what it is: real and severe. Anything less is cowardly complicity.
  • Acknowledge the Money Problem: Leagues, teams, and promoters who profit from these transactional relationships must be held accountable. A portion of every betting partnership or VIP package should be taxed to fund programs combating online abuse and promoting mental health for performers.

2. An Ultimatum for Platforms:

  • Break the Outrage Machine: Social media and betting platforms must be forced to take responsibility for the fire they pour gasoline on. Their algorithms are not neutral; they are engines of radicalization. De-amplify inflammatory content. Build in “cool-down” periods for gamblers. Stop hiding behind “freedom of speech” as an excuse for profiting from abuse.
  • End Anonymous Abuse: The idea that you have a right to anonymously threaten or harass someone without consequence is a perversion of free expression. Link identity to accounts. Make people own their words.

3. A Moral Inventory for Ourselves:

  • Stop Commodifying Human Beings: Athletes and artists are not your fantasy team avatars. They are not entries on your betting slip or your content creators. They are people. Every time you scream at your TV, fire off an angry tweet, or justify your rage because an album disappointed you, you are part of the problem. You are contributing to the dehumanization that allows the mob to form.
  • Demand Better from Yourself: Look at your own media diet. Are you feeding the outrage machine? Are you passively scrolling past abuse? Silence is complicity. It’s time to stop pointing fingers at the fan who threw the bottle and start asking what role we played in creating the anger that propelled their arm.

The swarm that injured Kyle Filipowski is the physical manifestation of the digital mobs we create to tear down Caitlin Clark for missing shots, Angel Reese for celebrating, Noah Lyles for getting sick, or any artist who dares to be human. It’s easy to blame the troll or the screaming fan, but they are just the final, ugly expression of a system we all feed. It’s time to stop consuming the spectacle of outrage and start dismantling the machine. Look in the mirror. The worst fan in the world might be staring back at you.

Big Ideas · Politics

An Ugly, Contradictory Choice

6 days ago Author By cumeadi

Before the United States had a constitution, it had a warning. The nation’s architects, fresh from a revolution against a distant, monolithic power, looked to the future and saw a new tyranny waiting to be born not on a battlefield, but in their own halls of government. John Adams, with grim foresight, called a “division of the republic into two great parties” the “greatest political evil under our Constitution.” George Washington, in his farewell, was even more explicit, cautioning that the “alternate domination of one faction over another” would inevitably become a “frightful despotism.”

They predicted a future where loyalty to party would supplant duty to country, where public debate would be enfeebled, and where the system would serve itself, not the people. Two and a half centuries later, their fears have been fully realized. The recent political clash between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump is not an anomaly. It is the endgame of the very system the founders warned us against. Musk’s threat to launch the “America Party,” a third-party challenge funded by his own immense wealth, forces a deeply uncomfortable question: Is the necessary cure for this frightful despotism as messy and dangerous as the disease itself?

To answer that, one must first accept the premise that the two-party system is the illness. It has become an entrenched duopoly that rewards polarization, stifles authentic debate, and presents the electorate with a series of false choices. It is the fulfillment of Adams’s dread. From this perspective, any significant threat to the system’s stability must be considered. Enter Elon Musk, a figure who, unfortunately or fortunately, is very good at breaking things. His proposed third party is not a polite request for reform; it is a crowbar aimed at the rusted gears of the duopoly. It is a chaotic, unpredictable, and deeply flawed attempt to introduce a variable into a closed system. The question is no longer whether this is the ideal way to shatter the duopoly, but whether, after decades of inertia, it is the only way.

Yet, this is only half of the equation. While the founders feared the system of parties, they also feared the men who would exploit it. This is where the paradox deepens. Washington explicitly warned that parties become “potent engines” through which “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” This forces a direct and uncomfortable examination of Musk himself. Is he a concerned citizen attempting to break a corrupt system, or is he the very “cunning, ambitious” man Washington described, using the public’s legitimate frustration as a potent engine for his own power? He is a figure who simultaneously commands platforms for free expression (x or twitter…whichever one you want at this point) while demanding they bend to his commercial and political will. This is the central tension: the “America Party” can be seen as both a potential cure for the disease of duopoly and a symptom of the founders’ fear of powerful men hijacking the republic. It is both a solution and a threat.

This leads us to the heart of the modern dilemma. Are we, as a republic, at a point where we can afford to be choosy about who breaks the wheel? Perhaps the most damning indictment of our system is that only a figure with Musk’s immense wealth could even attempt such a fracture, a reality that would have horrified the founders. This forces us to ask: Is a democratized process for systemic change even possible anymore? Or have we reached a point of such institutional decay that our only option is to leverage one man’s ego to achieve a collective good? It is a deeply cynical proposition, a Machiavellian bargain that trades principle for pragmatism. We are left to wonder if we should ride the coattails of a billionaire’s gambit, hoping he breaks the right things on his way to satisfying his own ambitions.

We find ourselves in the precise position the founders dreaded, where the very structure of our politics is the poison. A billionaire proposes a disruptive, self-serving, and potentially dangerous solution. The most uncomfortable truth of all is that, after 250 years of ignoring their warnings, this may be the kind of ugly, contradictory choice we are left with. It is no longer a theoretical debate. The choice is between the slow, predictable decay of the current system and the chaotic, unpredictable disruption offered by a flawed savior. The question is no longer which option is good, but which poison is less lethal.

Uncategorized

Reclaiming Essence: A Blueprint for a 2026 Renaissance

1 week ago Author By cumeadi

For over three decades, the Essence Festival of Culture has been a pilgrimage, a necessary “family reunion” for Black America. But in the summer of 2025, the reunion felt strained. The crowds seemed thinner, the energy more fraught, and the online post-mortem was a brutal mix of economic grievances and cultural critiques. A narrative battle began before the last suitcase was even packed: Was this a simple down year, or a sign of a deeper sickness?

The truth is, a failing institution will always offer up a simple story to explain its decline. But the real story is never that simple. To understand what happened to Essence, you have to look past the surface-level debates and follow the money, the frustration, and the foundational cracks that made the whole structure vulnerable.

The Anatomy of a Crisis

An event like Essence doesn’t stumble because of one thing; it falters when underlying weaknesses are met with external force. The external force was a perfect storm of economic pressure. The internal weaknesses were a series of unforced operational errors.

First, the economic reality: the festival’s core demographic, Black women, is weathering a brutal financial season, with unemployment rising faster for them than for any other group. This isn’t an abstract data point; it’s the rent getting paid, or not. It’s the flight to New Orleans that never gets booked. Add to this the drying up of corporate DEI funds, the very pipeline that once supported the Black-owned brands in the vendor marketplace, and you have a crisis of both consumer and commercial confidence. People and businesses simply could not afford the pilgrimage.

Compounding this reality were the logistical slights. A clunky app, last-minute ticket sales, and poor sound quality in the Superdome are not minor inconveniences. They are signals of disrespect to an audience that has invested its time, trust, and dwindling disposable income. These weren’t just cracks in the foundation; they were the kindling, perfectly dried and waiting for a spark.

Diaspora Wars and Economic Truths

That spark, when it came, was the “Battle of Jollof vs. Jambalaya.” It was the perfect flashpoint because it allowed everyone to engage in a familiar, almost comfortable, conflict: the Diaspora Wars. It’s a debate that feels deeply resonant because it mimics the political realities of our time. We have learned to regurgitate identity politics tropes, to draw lines in the sand over heritage, and to expose or create divisiveness as a primary form of public discourse.

This pattern inevitably seeks a human focal point, and in this case, it predictably landed on the festival’s leadership. The simmering concerns about its Kenyan-born CEO became a convenient stand-in for every frustration, allowing a complex business problem to be flattened into a simple narrative about cultural belonging.

And so, while digital warriors passionately litigated the culinary history of two continents and the national origins of festival leadership, they conveniently missed the far more urgent, and brutally unifying, truth.

To borrow a phrase from a famously blunt political strategist: It’s the economy, stupid.

People weren’t canceling flights to New Orleans because they were scrutinizing the CEO’s passport. They were staying home because they lost their jobs. The corporate pullback of DEI funding isn’t a symbolic slight; it’s the empty vendor stall. The need for “Buy Now, Pay Later” at other festivals isn’t a cultural debate; it’s a flashing red light on the dashboard of household finances.

Focusing on cultural purity contests and leadership lineage while the economic foundation crumbles is a luxury no one can afford. It’s a profound misreading of the real and present crisis. True diaspora unity, the very soul of a global homecoming, isn’t found in a shared consensus on recipes or birthplaces. It’s forged in the shared struggle against the economic forces that threaten to keep us all home.

The Blueprint for a Reality Check

A renaissance isn’t built on slogans; it’s built on an honest, painful, and necessary reset. The path forward for Essence requires less talk of “vibes” and more respect for the fundamentals.

  1. Stop Posturing, Start Listening: Disband the idea of a top-down cultural vision. Formally empower a “Community Council” of attendees, NOLA cultural leaders, and small business owners. Give them a real budget and a real say in programming. This isn’t a focus group; it’s a transfer of power back to the people who built the institution with their dollars and their loyalty.
  2. Respect the Audience’s Wallet: The current ticketing model is an insult to the economic reality of the audience. Unbundle the experience immediately. Offer a lower-cost “Homecoming Pass” for daytime events and the convention center, and sell the stadium concerts as a separate, premium add-on. Acknowledge that not everyone has Superdome money, but everyone deserves access to the family reunion.
  3. End Predatory Vendor Practices: Treat the Black-owned businesses that line the marketplace as partners, not ATMs. Overhaul the fee structure from a high-risk, upfront cost to a lower fee with a higher percentage of sales. Their success is the festival’s success. When they win, the entire ecosystem is richer and more authentic.
  4. Tell an Honest Story: The marketing for 2026 must begin with an apology, not a hype reel. Acknowledge the failures of 2025. Tell the audience you heard them. Then, spend the next year building a narrative around the changes being made. Market the renewed commitment to the community, not just the list of headliners.

Essence is at a crossroads. It can continue to be a legacy brand managing its own decline, distracted by internal debates while its audience votes with their wallets. Or, it can embrace this crisis as a mandate for radical change. It can choose to be the vital, indispensable homecoming its community needs it to be—not just in spirit, but in practice.

Holiday Weekend

Ghosts of the Fourth

2 weeks ago Author By cumeadi

Tomorrow, the sky will burst with light. The air will smell of barbecue and sulfur. We will celebrate our Independence Day with a familiar, comfortable rhythm. But this year, comfort feels like a luxury we cannot afford. The divisions are too deep, the anxieties too raw, the very ground of our democracy feels unsteady beneath our feet.

So, on the eve of this Fourth of July, I decided to seek counsel. Not from the talking heads on cable news or the endless scroll of social media, but from those who navigated the deepest crises of the nation’s soul. I convened a conversation in a room outside of time, inviting four figures whose struggles and sacrifices define the American experiment: George Washington, the founder; Harriet Tubman, the liberator; Martin Luther King Jr., the conscience; and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the architect.

I asked them to join me to discuss where we came from, where we are, and the uncertain path of where we are going. This is what they told me.

I first turned to the man who was there at the beginning, his posture still as straight as it was at the head of the Continental Army. I needed to understand the foundation on which we stand. “General Washington,” I began, “When you think of the ideals of 1776, how do you reconcile them with the country you see today?”

He spoke with the measured, formal cadence of a different century, his eyes carrying the weight of a nation’s birth. “The ideals of ’76 were simple on their face, yet profound in their implication: that a people could govern themselves… Yet, even in our time, a great and terrible contradiction lay at the heart of our new nation. We spoke of liberty while holding others in bondage. It was a moral failing that I, in my later years, came to see as a stain upon our founding.”

The General spoke with the weight of a founder, his words etched in history. He acknowledged the ‘moral failing,’ the ‘stain’ upon the republic. But a stain is something seen from a distance. For Harriet Tubman, seated across from him, this was no mere abstraction; it was the blood and soil of her existence. Her voice, though low, carried the undeniable power of lived truth. “General, with all due respect,” she said, her gaze steady, “your ‘contradiction’ was my people’s bondage. My Fourth of July was a day that the lash felt heavier, the sun hotter, the chains tighter. The sound of your liberty bells was drowned out by the cries of my brothers and sisters.” She looked at me then, her eyes seeming to pierce through time. “The fight for true liberty, the kind that lives not just on paper but in the hearts of men, is a long and arduous one.”

It was on this very point, the gap between paper promises and lived reality, that the conversation turned to the great work of the 20th century. Dr. King picked up the thread, his tone one of reasoned passion. “And that is the very essence of the American story, is it not? A journey. General Washington, your generation penned the promissory note… But it was a check that, for too long, came back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ My work, our work, was to compel America to make good on that promise.” While Dr. King fought to cash that check in the streets and from the pulpit, Justice Ginsburg fought for it in the courtroom, meticulously working to stitch the promise of equality into the very fabric of the law. “From a legal perspective, the arc has bent, and significantly so,” she added, her voice precise and analytical. “But laws are only as strong as the will to uphold them… I worry that in your time, the very notion of a shared set of facts, of a common understanding of our own laws and history, is under threat. And when that foundation cracks, the entire structure is at risk.”

Justice Ginsburg’s words hung in the air, a perfect pivot from the past to the precipice of our present. Reflecting on history wasn’t enough; the anxieties of now were pressing in on me. I felt I had to be direct. I laid out the fears that keep my generation awake: a level of political polarization that feels like a cold civil war, a media landscape where truth itself is a partisan battlefield, and a President whose administration has enacted policies, like mass deportations funded by cuts to social programs, that feel to many like a betrayal of the nation’s highest ideals.

As I spoke, I saw a flicker of grim recognition in General Washington’s eyes. His fears of factionalism were no longer a historical warning, but a terrifyingly accurate diagnosis of our time. “Faction,” he stated, his voice tight with disappointment. “I warned of this very spirit. It serves to ‘distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.’ To hear that this spirit now threatens the very concept of truth is to hear that the foundation of the Republic is cracking.”

While Washington diagnosed the political sickness, Harriet Tubman went straight to the moral heart of the matter, cutting through the jargon of policy and politics. She shook her head slowly. “You are worried about your ‘democracy.’ I was worried about my people. When the law says you can tear a family from the home they’ve built because they were born on the other side of a line on a map, what kind of law is that? The danger is not your President. The danger is that good people will stand by and do nothing.”

Dr. King, ever the strategist, connected the moral outrage to a systemic framework, seeing the modern incarnations of old evils. “Let us look at the policies you describe through the lens of what I called the ‘three giant triplets’ of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. A policy that enacts mass deportations often has its roots in racial prejudice. A policy that cuts aid to the poor to fund tax cuts for the wealthy is the very definition of extreme materialism… The danger to democracy is that the government ceases to be an instrument for the well-being of all its citizens.”

And finally, Justice Ginsburg, with the precision of a surgeon, identified the ultimate danger—not a single policy or politician, but the decay of the system itself. “The phrase that gives me pause is ‘rule of law,’” she began, her quiet voice commanding the room. “That concept is the bedrock of a constitutional democracy. It means that law, not the arbitrary will of a leader, is supreme… When you describe policies that target specific groups, when you speak of a chief executive who challenges the judiciary or disregards established norms, you are describing a direct assault on the rule of law. A constitutional crisis occurs not when a president acts, but when the other branches of government fail to check his overreach.”

Le Fin? 

As their voices faded, the room outside of time dissolved, leaving only the quiet hum of the present. The séance was over. I was left not with a simple set of answers, but with a complex and profound set of instructions. A charge.

It is the charge to be a virtuous citizen, as Washington demanded, but to know that virtue without Harriet Tubman’s raw courage in the face of injustice is merely polite silence. It is the charge to remain vigilant in the pursuit of Dr. King’s “Beloved Community,” but to do so with a fierce respect for the very institutions and rule of law that Justice Ginsburg dedicated her life to upholding. Their wisdom does not compete; it complements. It forms a roadmap for a functioning, moral democracy.

Their collective counsel reframes the Fourth of July entirely. It can no longer be a holiday for passive celebration: a day for just fireworks and flags. It becomes, instead, a day of recommitment. A national performance review where we are both the employees and the shareholders. It’s a day to measure the distance between the ringing of the Liberty Bell and the reality of our lives, and to ask ourselves, with unflinching honesty, if we have done our part to close that gap.

The preservation of this Republic, it turns out, is not the work of ghosts. It is the solemn, urgent work of the living. It is the quiet, daily, often frustrating task of listening before we speak, of seeking truth over tribe, of protecting the rights of others with the same fervor we protect our own.

Tomorrow, the sky will burst with light, celebrating the birth of a promise made centuries ago. Let our actions, on the day after and every day that follows, be what keeps that promise alive.

I’d to thank Gemni and Claude for bringing these voices back to life. For the full discussion – check it out here.

#MentalNote · Big Ideas

The Liar’s Dividend: How AI Devalued Truth and What We Pay for It

3 weeks ago Author By cumeadi

I lost an argument at Thanksgiving last year. It wasn’t a debate I was unprepared for; I had my facts ready. The topic was a politician’s recent gaffe, and my uncle was insisting it never happened, a fiction invented by the media. I pulled out my phone and played the video from the Associated Press. The footage was clear. The source was impeccable. The words were undeniable. I looked up, expecting, if not an apology, at least a grudging concession.

He shook his head. “You can’t trust that,” he said, his voice layered with a kind of weary wisdom. “That’s probably one of those deepfakes. They can make anyone say anything now.”

In that moment, the argument was over. Not because I had lost, but because the foundation for a shared reality had crumbled beneath us. My evidence, my proof, was irrelevant. The mere possibility of a fake had become more powerful than the authenticated truth in my hands.

This quiet moment of conversational collapse is not unique to my family. It is a scene playing out in miniature across the country, in courtrooms, on campaign trails, and in newsrooms. The technologies of synthetic media have handed a devastatingly effective tool to those who wish to evade accountability, but the true danger is not the technology itself. It is the corrosive public skepticism the technology creates; something scholars have termed the “liar’s dividend.”

This is the profit reaped when truth becomes too difficult to verify and reality itself is cast as a matter of opinion. The proliferation of AI is merely the latest accelerant in a crisis of trust that began long before, with the decentralization of our media and the weaponization of “fake news.” To defend our democracy’s epistemic foundations, we must understand the behavioral mechanics of this dividend and build a robust, multi-layered defense in our companies, in our institutions, and in ourselves.

From Broadcast to Noise

The scene at the Thanksgiving table would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, not because deepfakes didn’t exist, but because the concept of a shared, verifiable reality was largely taken for granted. In 1976, a Gallup poll found that an astonishing 72% of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the mass media. In an era dominated by a few television networks and major newspapers, figures like Walter Cronkite of CBS News, often cited as “the most trusted man in America”, served as powerful institutional gatekeepers. They delivered the news, from the Vietnam War to the moon landing, to a mass audience that consumed the same set of core facts. While Americans certainly disagreed on politics and solutions, they were, for the most part, arguing from a common playbook of reality.

The launch of CNN in 1980 and, more pointedly, Fox News in 1996, began the great fragmentation of the American audience. The business model of news shifted. Instead of broadcasting to the widest possible center, cable channels discovered it was more profitable to “narrowcast” to dedicated, partisan niches. The news became a constant, flowing stream, increasingly supplemented with opinion-as-news to keep audiences engaged and loyal. We began sorting ourselves into different information silos, and for the first time, large segments of the population were no longer operating from the same playbook.

The rise of the blogosphere in the early 2000s was a revolution in disintermediation; suddenly, anyone with a keyboard could be a publisher, reaching a potential audience of millions without the filter of an editor or the need for a printing press. This digital democratization of voice challenged institutional authority and broke open vital stories, but it also flooded the ecosystem with conjecture, conspiracy, and unvetted claims. The professional journalist, once a clear gatekeeper, was now just one voice shouting in a crowded digital marketplace. Discerning signal from noise became a full-time job for the average citizen, a job few had the time or training to do.

The final, decisive blow came when social media became the primary arena for our information lives. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter (X I guess) did not just accelerate the spread of information; their core algorithms actively shaped what we saw. These systems are designed for one purpose: engagement. And nothing is more engaging than content that triggers strong emotions: outrage, validation, fear, and tribal identity. In this environment, the term “fake news,” which once described literal hoaxes, was brilliantly and cynically weaponized. Around 2016, it was transformed into a political cudgel, used to dismiss any reporting, no matter how credible, that was critical or inconvenient. It gave millions of people a simple, powerful phrase to delegitimize any fact they didn’t like.

And so the ground was perfectly prepared. By 2024, that 72% trust in the media had collapsed to a historic low of 32%. Decades of fragmentation, decentralization, and deliberate weaponization had cultivated a deep, pervasive skepticism in the public. This is the depleted soil in which the liar’s dividend now grows so easily. The dismissal of a real video as a “deepfake” is not a sudden madness; it is the logical, tragic endpoint of this long decline.

Deconstructing the Devaluation of Truth

The depleted soil of public trust provides the perfect strategic opportunity for what scholars Josh A. Goldstein and Andrew Lohn, in their work for the Brennan Center for Justice, have termed the “liar’s dividend.” The concept is as brilliant as it is corrosive. The dividend is not the benefit a liar gets from a successful deepfake fooling the public; it is the benefit they get from the public’s awareness that deepfakes exist. It is the power to dismiss any real, inconvenient piece of evidence like an audio recording, a video, or a photograph, as a sophisticated fake, and to be believed, or at least to inject enough doubt to muddy the waters into inaction. It transforms the very technology meant to enhance reality capture into a tool for reality denial.

To understand how this dividend is collected, we have to analyze the strategic toolkit it offers to a bad actor. The first variable is the messenger: who delivers the lie? This choice exists on a spectrum of risk and reward. At one end, a political candidate can make a direct, high-impact denial themselves. This garners maximum attention but also carries the maximum risk of backlash if the lie is definitively proven. To mitigate this, the lie can be delegated to an official proxy, like a campaign manager, who offers a degree of separation. For even greater plausible deniability, the claim can be laundered through an unaffiliated proxy; a friendly pundit, a sympathetic media outlet, or an anonymous online account – sacrificing the impact of a personal denial for near-total insulation from accountability.

The second variable is the message itself: how direct is the lie? The most straightforward tactic is a direct claim: “That video of me is a deepfake.” It is a clear, falsifiable assertion. But a far more insidious and often more effective strategy is the indirect claim, which aims not to debunk a specific piece of evidence but to foster a general “informational uncertainty.” This is the world of vague dismissals (“You just can’t trust what you see these days”), oppositional rallying (“The media will do anything to make us look bad”), and whataboutism. This indirect approach poisons the entire well of information. It persuades citizens that discerning truth from fiction is a hopeless task, encouraging them to retreat into the safety of their pre-existing beliefs and partisan loyalties.

This two-axis framework, of messenger and message, provides a flexible and powerful toolkit for any individual or group seeking to escape accountability. They can tailor their strategy based on the severity of the incriminating evidence and their risk appetite. By understanding these mechanics, we can see the liar’s dividend for what it is: not just a simple lie, but a calculated, multifaceted assault on the very concept of verifiable evidence. The question then becomes, why are our own minds so susceptible to this assault?

Why We Are So Susceptible

The power of the liar’s dividend is not rooted in the sophistication of AI. It is rooted in the architecture of the human brain, which is not optimized for discerning objective truth, but for survival, social cohesion, and the conservation of mental energy. These ancient priorities make us profoundly vulnerable to modern informational warfare. The liar’s dividend is effective because it offers us an easy, comfortable, and psychologically satisfying escape from difficult realities.

The primary vulnerability it exploits is our intense aversion to cognitive dissonance, the mental stress we feel when holding two conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Imagine you believe your preferred candidate is a fundamentally decent person. Then, a video emerges showing them saying something cruel. This creates a painful dissonance. To resolve it, you can either engage in the difficult process of updating your entire view of the candidate or you can discard the offending piece of evidence. The liar’s dividend provides a perfect tool for the latter. The “deepfake” explanation allows you to resolve the dissonance instantly, not by changing your mind, but by invalidating the evidence. This isn’t just intellectual dishonesty; it’s a form of psychological self-preservation.

This is amplified by the powerful force of motivated reasoning. We do not process information like impartial judges; we process it like lawyers defending a client we are already committed to. Our client is our own set of pre-existing beliefs and tribal loyalties. When confronted with inconvenient evidence, we don’t ask, “Is this true?” We ask, “Must I believe this?” The deepfake defense allows the answer to be a resounding “no.” It feeds our confirmation bias, our natural tendency to embrace information that supports our team and reject information that challenges it. In an age where our social media feeds are algorithmically tuned to create personalized echo chambers, this effect is supercharged. Inconvenient truths feel like hostile intrusions into a reality that has been custom-built to comfort us.

Finally, the liar’s dividend preys on our brain’s fundamental laziness. Our minds operate on a principle of cognitive ease, constantly seeking the simplest possible path to a conclusion to conserve energy. It is metabolically expensive to question our own beliefs, fact-check a dubious claim, or live with uncertainty. It is cheap and easy to accept a simple, all-purpose dismissal. The claim that “you can’t trust anything” is appealing not just because it’s cynical, but because it’s simple. It relieves us of the burdensome responsibility of critical thought. In an era of crushing information overload, offering people a simple way out is the most powerful persuasion tactic of all.

An Arsenal of Imperfect Weapons

Diagnosing an illness is not the same as curing it. To combat the liar’s dividend requires a conscious and sustained counter-offensive, fought not with a single silver bullet, but with an arsenal of tools, habits, and responsibilities. The work belongs to everyone—the individual citizen, the corporations that shape our digital world, and the public institutions that form the bedrock of society.

What Individuals Must Do: The Practice of Discernment

The first line of defense is the individual mind. This requires moving beyond passive “media literacy” to a more active posture of intellectual self-defense. The most crucial habit is to practice emotional skepticism: when a piece of content makes you feel a strong surge of outrage, validation, or fear, pause. That emotional spike is a biological alarm bell, signaling that you are being targeted for manipulation. Before you share, practice lateral reading: open a new browser tab and spend two minutes searching for the claim or the source. See what other, independent outlets are saying. This simple act of “informational hygiene” is the single most powerful thing a citizen can do to stop the spread of lies. Resisting the urge to instantly share unvetted information is no longer just a matter of personal etiquette; it is a fundamental civic duty.

What Companies Must Do: The Responsibility of the Platform

The corporations that host our digital public square have a profound responsibility to architect for trust. For social media platforms, this means deliberately engineering “friction.” Instead of optimizing for seamless, instantaneous sharing, they should introduce pop-ups that ask, “Are you sure you want to share this article you haven’t opened?” or flag content from unverified sources. They must also move beyond half-measures and universally adopt and enforce clear, consistent labels for synthetic media and known disinformation outlets. For the companies developing AI, the work must begin at creation. They must bake in robust, open-source watermarking and content provenance standards, like the C2PA standard, into their models from the ground up. Making these tools proprietary or paywalled is an abdication of responsibility.

What Institutions Must Do: Rebuilding the Foundation

Our foundational institutions must undertake the slow, generational work of rebuilding our collective defenses. In education, digital citizenship and critical source analysis cannot be a single lesson; they must be a core competency woven into every subject from middle school onward. Our government and civil society leaders must establish and enforce clear, cross-party norms that create real political costs for candidates who knowingly profit from the liar’s dividend. This could take the form of public pledges, withdrawal of funding, or formal censure. Finally, we must reinvest in the institutions designed to create shared knowledge: public media, libraries, and independent, local journalism. These entities provide a crucial, non-partisan baseline of reality that can serve as an anchor in a sea of digital noise. The liar’s dividend thrives in a vacuum of trusted authorities; we must work to refill that vacuum.

Paying the Dividend

We have traveled a long and troubling road: from the high-water mark of shared facts to the fragmented noise of today, from the cynical mechanics of the liar’s dividend to the deep-seated cognitive biases that make us such willing participants. We have seen that this crisis is not the fault of any single technology, but the result of a decades-long erosion of institutional trust, supercharged by platforms that reward emotion over evidence. And while we have laid out an arsenal of potential weapons for this fight, in our habits, our corporate architectures, and our civic institutions, the choice to wield them remains ours.

I think back to that Thanksgiving table. The stalemate was not about a specific fact, but about the very possibility of facts. My uncle’s casual dismissal of a verifiable video was the final payment of the liar’s dividend, the moment where the exhausting work of discernment is abandoned in favor of the simple comfort of disbelief. His argument was the culmination of a system that has taught us that the truth is too difficult to find, that all sources are equally biased, and that trusting our tribe is a safer bet than trusting our eyes.

That quiet, helpless moment is the future on a small scale. It is a world where accountability becomes impossible because evidence has lost its meaning. It is a democracy where deliberation decays into a shouting match between alternate realities, and power flows not to the most competent or principled, but to the most shameless. This is the ultimate price of the liar’s dividend.

Defending our shared reality is now the central, defining challenge of our era. It is exhausting, difficult, and often thankless work. But the alternative, a world where truth is merely a partisan opinion and every citizen is an island of their own belief, is no world at all. We must choose to pay the cost of discernment, because the cost of disbelief is one we can no longer afford.