No matter how much you hate it,

REALITY IS NOT OPTIONAL

I'm not a particularly ideological person. I tend to find that people who are end up sacrificing most of what actually matters about politics at the altar of ideological purity. I find values to be a fitting alternative to a strict ideology. Not only are values more closely tied to the world we live in than ideologies, they also provide a framework which allows one's beliefs to change, and I find flexibility to be key in effective politics. One of my values is that reality is not optional. I believe that, at the present moment (circa Nov. 2025), this value is being called into question by too many prominent media and political figures for me to be comfortable with. As such, I've decided to write about it.

What do I mean by "reality?" In this context, I use the word reality to mean the set of facts which make up our current understanding of the world. This goes from simple things like "Humans need water to survive" to more complicated concepts like "The U.S. constitution does not allow a president to serve more than two terms in that office." Spoiler alert: I'll touch on that second fact later. To disprove something about reality, one would require evidence which is trustworthy and compelling. Furthermore, there is a set of assumptions I think we should be able to make based on our reality, which also have a high burden of disproof. These include things like "Joe is alive and looks healthy, so he's had something to drink recently." Again, I would consider these part of reality.

Over the last few decades, we (as in: Americans) have seen an erosion of our collective trust in reality. In part, this is our own fault as normal people -- we have acted too much like undiscerning consumers of our mass media. However, there can be no denying that those in the media are also to blame. They have allowed a culture of blatant disregard for the truth emerge on their platforms, and those of them still interested in the truth have lost ground over and over and over again to those that aren't. This has created a political culture that is, in some ways, allergic seeing reality as it exists. Our desperate and confused citizenry has thus decided that there is in fact no such thing as reality, that everything is a metter of perspective, and that one shouldn't worry about what others consider true. This is undeniably harmful.

Now, I'd like to give some concrete examples, examples of ideas or so-called facts that have entered the media landscape and the public imagination, despite being completely unrelated to reality. First, the idea that Trump might serve a third term as President. This has been a subject of some fascination on the part of Trump's sycophants and enemies alike, and Trump himself had repeatedly stated that he'd like to run in 2028. I say "had" because, as of late October 2025, Trump appears to have let go of the idea. His realization of the obvious fact that a President cannot serve more than two terms should not be celebrated. Instead, we should be alarmed that it took him this long to publicly state this, despite getting questions on the topic since before the start of his term. Now, I did say that the media is to blame for the mess we're in too, and you might be wondering how the media plays into this story. In short, the media framed the discussion on this topic as though Trump had a choice of running for a third term or not. Reporters asked him ad nauseam about whether he wanted to run in 2028 or not, as though he had any choice in the matter. Without a doubt, this is the wrong way to go about things. Rather than normalizing Trump's delusions, members of me the media should have asked the President point-blank whether he understood that he cannot run for a third term.

We know why Trump is doing this. Even past his own fantasies of ruling for life, his administration seems to have no regard for the bounds of the truth, especially when it comes to the constitution. I won't go into this in depth, but another good example of this is Trump's illegal executive order regarding birthright citizenship, a right clearly enshrined in the constitution.

My second example of non-factual news doesn't come from the President, but rather it concerns the buildup of data centers in the US. Outlets such as the NYT and More Perfect Union (especially the latter) have claimed or implied that data centers used for generative AI models are a burden on the water supply of whatever community they are built near. Online, this idea has circulated, giving rise to a commonly-held theory that using AI will eventually suck the world dry of its water. This is provably false. At scale, the problem of Ai water consumption does not exist. Crop farming, for example, uses orders of magnitude more water than AI uses or is projected to use in the future. On a local level, these data centers use no more water (as a percentage of the relevant community's total supply) than other large facilities, be they manufacturing plants or golf courses, located in the community. It follows, then, that there is no relevant impact on the freshwater supply for locals as a result of these data centers. Yet the lie spreads. People feel free to spread it because they know that no one will call them out for it, much less hold them accountable. The media, as I hinted at previously, is in part responsible for this lie spreading.

I'm not so naive as to claim that we haven't been in this mess for a while. Studies show that the amount of people who believe in conspiracy theories has stayed roughly constant for a few decades. But the fact that this isn't new doesn't change my belief that reality isn't optional. In fact, the type of highly connected world we live in now only makes that belief more strident. Our democracy won't make it much further if we keep acting this way.

I'll conclude with my prescriptions for solving this problem. First, we need to have some sort of litmus test for political figures "worth listening to." In short, someone with delusions about how the world works should not be taken seriously as a political figure. They shouldn't get airtime on major media networks. They shouldn't get amplified by social media algorithms simply because they're provocative. They should be confronted on their lies and delusions, and they should be held accountable for spreading them. Second, we need to being back anti-misinformation tools on social media. Over the last few years, a relentless pressure campaign on the part of right-wing lunatics and extremists was successful in getting these tools removed, something which has allowed a veritable torrent of insanity to flood back into the brains of impressionable Americans. Said pressure campaign cannot be taken as evidence that fact-checking tools are bad or ineffective. Yes, they had flaws. Ever tool does. But without them, those on the side of truth are forced to fight an unwinnable war, forced to combat lies that come up in the millions and evade traditional forms of accountability. You can't confront an Instagram reel and ask it why it's lying. Deleting the reel, though, works to stop its spread, once again leveling the playing field. My final recommendation is more personal. As a society, we need to be more rigorous with reality. We can't let falsehoods slip by as a "matter of perspective." Facts might be perceived differently based on perspective, but they do not change on that basis. We need to be more willing to tell those who fail to understand or accept reality that they are wrong, that how they think the world works is not how it actually works. Reasonable minds can differ on many things, but we must be clear, firm and strident in our defense of the fact that reality is not optional.