Our Age of disbelief

      Upon hearing the news of the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, two people I know very well said the exact same thing, using almost the exact same language: I bet it was staged.

      They were not alone. According to The New York Times, across the political spectrum, on sites like the former Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, posters claimed the attack was staged. That it was likely an apparent plot to distract from the war in Iran or the Epstein files or bad polling numbers or the Mets’ losing streak. By midday Sunday, there had been more than 300,000 posts on the former Twitter using the word “staged.”

      The two people I know well who thought the attack was probably staged were not social media influencers nor inveterate posters nor AI bots nor wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. In fact, they were serious, progressive, well-informed, thoughtful people. But they, too, had succumbed to our pervasive culture of disbelief.

      And I thought: this is how far we’ve come; how cynical we all have become, how disbelieving, how reflexively skeptical that no one believes anything anymore.

      It’s our era’s new reality, and in a bizarre way, it makes sense. Because of the endless lies we’ve been living through, the continuous dissembling, the rampant AI slop, the ubiquitous AI deep fakes, the Photoshop manipulations, the alternative facts and all the rest, no one—not even well informed, educated people—believe what they hear and read and even what they see.

      While it’s completely understandable, it’s also extraordinarily sad how we have come to the point of not believing anything, particularly if that anything is coming from our government. As journalist Gene Weingarten put it, we have to now constantly suspect our government of lying and we “might wincingly accept the word of the ayatollahs of Iran over Donald Trump’s word.” 

      Of course, it didn’t all start with Trump and all this is not totally new. Our generation clearly remembers how we found out, through the Pentagon Papers, how we were constantly lied to about the Vietnam War. Remember all those false body counts?

      And we remember more recently how we were lied to about the Iraq War, and being told Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction although he did not in fact harbor weapons of mass destruction.

      Since then, we have elevated in this country the voices of people who suggest the moon landing was faked, 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook murderer and the murdered were paid actors. Then Trump, of course, and his administration have taken lying and faking to a wholly new level.

      And so, we live now in an era predicted by the Beatles nearly 60 years ago, where “nothing is real” and “living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.”

      It’s a great song but a terrible reality.