There was once a time when the truth of a situation mattered more than anything else. There was a time when knowing was more important than feeling. When facts were incomplete or unclear, people did not rush to judgment. They asked questions. They sought additional information. They waited. Opinions were something you arrived at through effort, not something handed to you by a headline or a television personality.
Those days are largely gone.
Today, we live in a culture where opinions are framed as news, emotion is treated as evidence, and context is seen as optional. Many people no longer care whether something is true. They care only whether it aligns with what they already believe. As long as the conclusion feels right, the process does not matter. This is not ignorance in the traditional sense. It is willful ignorance. And it is one of the most dangerous forces shaping modern society.
When News Stopped Being News
News once operated on a clear principle. Facts first. Interpretation later. The role of the reporter was to convey what happened, not to guide how the audience should feel about it. Citizens were expected to apply their own logic, common sense, and moral reasoning. That separation has collapsed.
Modern reporting often begins with a desired emotional response and works backward to justify it. Stories are framed with loaded language, selective emphasis, and carefully chosen descriptions designed to provoke outrage, fear, or sympathy. Once emotion enters the equation, critical thinking fades. People stop asking whether something is accurate and start reacting to how it makes them feel.
When a reporter uses adjectives to characterize a person or an event, that is not reporting. That is opinion. When viewers are told not only what happened but how they should feel about it and what they should do with those feelings, that is narrative construction. This shift matters because emotion is far easier to manipulate than reason.
The Rise of “Laziness of Thought”
At the same time, the public has grown increasingly comfortable outsourcing thought, something I refer to as “laziness of thought”. Many people no longer feel any obligation to verify claims, examine opposing viewpoints, or understand the full scope of an argument. If a story reinforces their political identity, it is accepted without scrutiny or any question. If it challenges that identity, it is dismissed outright. This laziness of thought is encouraged.
When media outlets reward emotional reactions instead of careful reasoning, they condition audiences to respond instinctively rather than intellectually. Over time, skepticism disappears. Basic questions go unasked. Who benefits from this framing? What information is missing? What incentive exists to tell this story this way? The result is a population that is confident in its emotional opinions and shallow in its factual understanding.
How Context Is Removed and Reality Is Rewritten
Few practices illustrate the collapse of common sense more clearly than selective quoting. In modern media, a person can speak for several minutes, carefully explaining their position, qualifying their words, and laying out their reasoning. Yet only a single line or fragment is extracted and presented as definitive proof of something entirely different. Once context is removed, meaning can be reversed.
This was clearly demonstrated in the controversy surrounding Charlie Kirk and a discussion about airline pilots and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hiring practices. A single line was circulated widely and framed as evidence of racism. That line was stripped of the conversation around it, including clarifications that directly contradicted the narrative being promoted. In the spirit of transparency and the pursuit of truth, below is the exact conversation, word for word, as it occurred on the podcast.
Verbatim Transcript of the Exchange
KOLVET: We’ve all been in the back of a plane when the turbulence hits or when you’re flying through a storm and you’re like, “I’m so glad I saw the guy with the right stuff and the square jaw get into the cockpit before we took off. And I feel better now thinking about that.”
KIRK: You wanna go thought crime? I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
KOLVET: But you wouldn’t have done that before.
KIRK: That’s not an immediate. That’s not who I am. That’s not what I believe.
NEFF: It is the reality the left has created.
KIRK: I want to be as blunt as possible because now I’m connecting two dots. Wait a second, this CEO just said that he’s forcing that a white qualified guy is not gonna get the job. So I see this guy, he might be a nice person, and I say, “Boy, I hope he’s not a Harvard style affirmative action student that landed half of his flight simulator trials.”
KOLVET: Such a good point. That’s so fair.
KIRK: It also creates unhealthy thinking patterns. I don’t wanna think that way. And no one should, right. And by the way, then you couple it with the FAA, air traffic control, they got a bunch of morons and affirmative action people.
What Was Ignored?
When the full exchange is presented honestly, several things are obvious.
First, Kirk explicitly states that the reaction he describes is not who he is and not what he believes. That clarification alone dismantles the way the quote was framed.
Second, the discussion is about policy, not people. It centers on hiring systems that elevate demographic considerations above qualifications in professions where mistakes cost lives.
Third, Kirk openly criticizes the unhealthy thinking patterns such systems create and states clearly that he does not want to think that way and that no one should.
When media outlets remove those clarifications and present only the most inflammatory fragment, they are not informing the public. They are manufacturing outrage. They are crafting a narrative. This is not accidental. It is intentional. And they hope we are all too stupid to notice.
Venezuela and the Convenience of Narrative
The same pattern emerges on a much larger scale in foreign policy reporting of the most recent situation concerning Venezuela. For years, Nicolás Maduro was widely described as an authoritarian figure presiding over fraudulent elections, suppressing dissent, and overseeing the collapse of his country. This framing did not exist only on one side of the political aisle. It was broadly accepted. That reality did not suddenly change. What changed was who took action to resolve it.
When the United States captured Maduro under the Trump administration, media focus quickly shifted away from Maduro’s record and toward political outrage towards the administration. The story became less about the suffering of the Venezuelan people and more about optics, process, and partisan reaction. Figures who had previously condemned Maduro emphasized concerns about legality and international norms. Actions that had once been described as necessary were suddenly portrayed as reckless and authoritarian.
Meanwhile, many Venezuelans, both in Venezuela and around the world, openly celebrated the removal of a man they viewed as a dictator. That reaction received comparatively little attention. The villain did not change. The narrator did.
Emotion as a Tool of Control
Modern media understands a simple truth. Emotional people are easier to influence than informed people. Fear, outrage, and moral indignation shut down logic. Once people are emotionally invested, disagreement becomes hostility. Skepticism becomes suspicion. Critical thinking is replaced by tribal defense. This is why so many news stories now tell audiences not only what happened, but how they should feel and what they should do. Viewers are encouraged to protest, resist, or panic rather than analyze. Once emotion replaces reason, common sense becomes optional or nonexistent.
The Crafting of Optics and the Illusion of Reality
Another critical factor in the decline of common sense is the deliberate crafting of optics. Modern news is no longer primarily about revealing truth. It is about creating an image. An impression. A version of reality that supports a specific narrative. Most people do not experience the world directly. They experience it through screens, headlines, and curated stories. Control what people see and emphasize, and you control how they think. This is not difficult to do, nor should it be difficult to understand, if you’re willing to look at things objectively.
The process is simple, if you want a person to view someone as dangerous, you show moments of conflict and frame them with ominous language. If you want someone to appear compassionate, you highlight emotional imagery and sympathetic phrasing. The underlying facts may be identical, but the perception created is entirely different. If you want people to think a certain way, all you have to do is present information in a sequence that leads them there. You do not need outright lies. You simply decide what to include, what to exclude, and how to frame what remains. This works best when viewers are willing participants.
When people want a narrative to be true, they stop questioning it. They accept incomplete information. They dismiss inconvenient facts. In that environment, truth becomes a problem. Intelligent people become mindless drones, regurgitating talking points that they feel prove their point, but that are often lacking any real, credible evidence.
Truth complicates narratives. It introduces nuance. It forces reconsideration. And in a media system driven by speed, outrage, and ideological alignment, truth becomes a bother. A thorn in the side of messaging. Corrections are buried. Context is minimized. Headlines exaggerate. Images are chosen for emotional impact, not accuracy. The goal is persuasion, not understanding. Over time, viewers are trained to see what they are supposed to see and believe what they are told to believe; maybe that’s why it’s called television programming. Perhaps it’s not referring to the “programs” they are watching, but the fact that the people watching are actually being “programed” to think and act a specific way.
The World We Are Creating
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is that many people do not realize they are helping create the world they claim to fear. Every time someone accepts a narrative without questioning it, manipulation is rewarded. Every time optics are mistaken for truth, dishonesty gains power. Every time facts are omitted to support the narrative, truth loses value. Every time context is ignored in favor of emotional satisfaction, reality loses ground. If this continues, the consequences will not be subtle. A society that abandons truth cannot correct its mistakes. A culture that elevates narrative above reality cannot govern itself. A population that refuses to think critically will inevitably be led by those most skilled at illusion.
There was once a time when truth mattered more than agenda. When knowing was more important than feeling. When people understood that belief carried responsibility.
That time did not vanish on its own. It was traded away for comfort, convenience, and emotional validation. If common sense is to survive, it will not be saved by institutions or media outlets. It will return only when individuals reclaim responsibility for what they think, why they think it, and whether what they are being told is actually true.
Truth used to matter. Today it is treated as an obstacle. As something optional.
Unless this changes, the decline will continue and may very well be the thing that leads to the collapse of American society.
