Meaningful political discussion is now impossible because the biased media has left at least half the population with no idea of reality. By Hans Mahncke, who is focused on covid, but what he describes applies to every issue since about 2007 (the year JournoList was founded).

We are living through a massive information crisis in which at least half the population is being systematically misinformed, making any sane national debate increasingly difficult.

Without a shared factual foundation, there is nothing to discuss. People are not merely drawing different conclusions from the same evidence. They are living in entirely different realities.

That is what makes the Fauci story so tragic. He caused untold harm, yet millions of people know almost nothing about it. We can debate precisely how large a role Fauci played in the creation of Covid, but half the country does not even know that Covid came from a lab. We are therefore several steps removed from the basic conditions required to have an intelligent discussion.

Other facts are even more black and white. Fauci’s private diary contradicts what he told the public. His own words reveal a man of almost limitless narcissism. These are not matters of interpretation. They are documented facts. Yet we still cannot have a national conversation about them because the media either refuses to report them or actively lies about them. Anyone who is not on Twitter, which is most people, may never encounter the underlying evidence at all.

The result is that I increasingly find it almost impossible to discuss any of this with ordinary people, whether family members, acquaintances, or people at events or birthday parties. Unless someone has followed the evidence closely, there is no common starting point.

Before you can debate what happened, you first have to dismantle at least ten years of falsehoods and omissions.

I do not know how this ends, but it is not sustainable. A country cannot function indefinitely when its people are no longer capable of discussing almost anything beyond sports on the basis of shared factual knowledge.

Sightbringer says the system is doomed:

America’s shared reality was fractured by a legitimacy system that chose perception management over confession.

The public adapted to that betrayal.

Now the old machine cannot restore trust without admitting why trust disappeared, and it cannot admit why trust disappeared without indicting itself.

So it will keep conceding the minimum, years late, after the political consequences have expired.

That strategy preserves the institution for another day. It guarantees the eventual death of its authority.

Endless lying by omission has created a fantasy world for consumers of left/mainstream media. It’s pointless trying to discuss issues with them, because they are simply unaware of so much.

And on covid, now that Fauci’s diaries have come out and Fauci has pleaded the fifth (121 times)  rather than answer questions before Congress under oath:

It all cuts in one direction. Every last bit of it.

Not once have the private documents, emails, diaries, text messages, or internal discussions vindicated what these people were saying publicly.

They lied about the origin of Covid. They lied about lockdowns. They lied about masks, vaccines, contact tracing, and everything else.

The private record never supports their story. It destroys it.

But try explaining to my mother that covid came from a lab, that Fauci lied, or that the mRNA “vaccines” were dangerous. She’s been watching the ABC since 1968, so is totally clueless. “But surely,” she might say, “they would have told us if there was a problem. You’re just making stuff up.”

UPDATE on cognitive dissonance on the left as the truth is revealed (by Glenn Reynolds):

Fauci, and Faucism, represented the apotheosis of what the managerial/academic/journo class desires: An excuse for sweeping power, based on (alleged) expertise, in which they could ride roughshod over those stupid proles and flyover people while preening about the allegedly superior moral and intellectual qualities that justify their rule.

Then it turned out that they were wrong about nearly everything and — as Fauci’s diaries demonstrate — knew it at the time, at least at the top. And their overreach is one of the things that gave us Trump 47.

That this is out in public now produces cognitive dissonance. The easiest thing to do is to check out of the discussion.

Confronted with the truth, what does a leftie do? If they were so disastrously and immorally wrong about this, what about all those other issues? Some will be red-pilled, but most will dig in and defend the con.

Experiments show that (very roughly) a third of who people have been conned refuse to believe it even when the con is explained to them.