We’re under assault in every direction without a safe space in sight. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m referring to street crime or border crossings, both of which have been plummeting. I’m talking about our ability to believe what we see or hear. I’m talking about our ability to absorb what we read and believe that we are dealing with fact-based truths that are objective, nonpartisan, and, even real. The evidence is overwhelming and the intent is pervasive.

No small part of this lies with the White House. Trump is transparent about his interests in this regard:

• He doesn’t like the job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so he cans the nonpartisan, longtime director. He nominates the chief economist of the far-right Heritage Foundation with the intent to deliver numbers he likes, true or false.
• He announces a review of eight of the fifteen museums of the independent, nonpartisan Smithsonian Institute based on conservative imposed litmus test on whether exhibits align with “American ideals,” as he and his team see them.
• The State Department’s political appointees delayed release of their human rights report so they could edit out criticisms of El Salvador and heighten criticism of European countries and Brazil, while eliminating any sections that discussed LGBTQ rights.

All that is just in recent days and doesn’t even touch the chaos at Health and Human Services under Robert Kennedy, Jr. where one group of science advisors after another have been canned and replaced with vaccine and other health skeptics. We can’t buy a clue anymore about what is good or bad for our personal health or the public’s, if the source is any part of the government infected by Kennedy’s biases.

It goes past that though, and it’s worse than we could have imagined. Our nightmares are now our reality. Professor Tufekci, now having left North Carolina for Princeton, in her usually astute warning column in the Times, documents the horrors. She begins by noting a TV guy’s wrongheaded tweet about a speech that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) had given on the floor of the House about one of these daily meaningless cultural flashpoints. Only problem was that AOC had never given the speech. End stop. She had called on the commentator to use his “critical thinking skills,” and Tufekci essentially said, “good luck with that.”

She goes on to put the nails in all of our coffins when it comes to divining the facts and truth, saying,

…deliberate fakers presumably can apply “critical thinking skills” too, to weed out low quality fakes. If not, there are A.I. programs that can help do it for them. It’s so fast and cheap to generate video or audio mimicking anyone in any context, saying whatever you want them to say or doing whatever you want them to do…

We had long ago lost photos as definite proof, given how easily they could be manipulated. Audio, too, is increasingly easy to fake. Video was among the last bastions of verification…. Now that that’s gone, the real, and increasingly the only, way to be confident of something that one did not witness is to find a reputable source and verify. Ah, what’s a reputable source, you ask? And therein lies what’s left of our society.

Trust the authorities? Well, good luck with that. Authorities aren’t always truthful or correct; making them the final and sole arbiter isn’t going to end well.

            Duck and cover. We are in so much trouble now!