I’ve spent the last several months writing about the pressures facing American agriculture, but beneath those stories is a deeper problem: a country that has lost its shared sense of truth. This essay is about that problem.
Every day in American politics, people yell “fire” in the public square. We punish it in a crowded movie theater, but we reward it in our democracy. The alarms are constant, deliberate and profitable, and the country lives in a state of manufactured panic.
The First Amendment wasn’t designed to protect this behavior. It protects protest, dissent and the unruly noise of a free society. It was written to keep government from silencing unpopular ideas, not to shield the intentional manufacture of unreality that now dominates so much of our public life.
When we ban shouting “fire” in a theater, the issue isn’t the word itself. It’s the predictable harm. People panic. People get hurt. The danger is obvious and immediate.
The same logic applies to modern political dishonesty. We already limit speech when it becomes a weapon — incitement, fraud, defamation, true threats. But the biggest threat today isn’t captured in those categories. It’s the coordinated, bad-faith distortion of reality that fractures communities, undermines elections and makes shared understanding almost impossible.
This isn’t the occasional exaggeration of political debate. It’s industrialized dishonesty. It’s falsehood at scale — engineered to provoke fear, anger and confusion. Fox built an entire business model on this, but even mainstream outlets feel the gravitational pull. The incentives favor immediacy over accuracy, spectacle over clarity and emotional reaction over informed judgment. That isn’t malevolent, but it is dangerous. An information system built on speed and conflict becomes a perfect delivery mechanism for false alarms.
But the deeper problem isn’t legal. It’s cultural. We once lived in communities where reality pushed back. A farmer couldn’t fake a harvest. A carpenter couldn’t fake a straight wall. A reputation was earned in full view of neighbors who knew the difference between competence and bluster.
Dishonesty carried consequences. It was shameful.
Something changed. Today, the public square rewards whatever spreads fastest, not whatever’s true. Bad actors can pull the alarm from a distance, safe from the stampede they cause. Outrage is a business model. Deception is a strategy. There is no accountability and no expectation of shame.
And Americans are living in the smoke of a thousand false alarms.
The point here isn’t to argue for censorship. It’s to name the crisis for what it is: a democracy can’t function if its information environment is poisoned. When public discourse becomes saturated with deliberate falsehood, people lose the shared reality required to solve collective problems. Everything turns into a fight. Trust collapses. Institutions weaken. Fear fills the vacuum.
The First Amendment was written to protect freedom, but freedom depends on honesty. A society that cannot distinguish between alarm and arson is a society at risk.
We understand how to handle a false alarm in a theater. We don’t yet know how to handle the political equivalent — the constant, calculated cries of “fire” that keep the country on edge and unable to see what’s actually burning.
The danger isn’t that someone might yell “fire.” It’s that the country has heard it so often, from so many directions, that we can no longer tell whether or not the theater is actually burning.
