Every day I wake up to people in my feed sharing very obviously GEN AI fake “news.”

What is worse is that many of them have advanced degrees, are educators, activists, artists, or self-appointed public intellectuals who believe they are fighting colonialism, gentrification, racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, capitalism, and an endless assortment of bigotries and social ills—some very real, others largely imaginary, exaggerated, or deliberately distorted.

There are the ones constantly sharing decontextualized pieces of history—or outright lies—political narratives manufactured to push emotional buttons and trigger visceral reactions.

Rage bait disguised as moral urgency and sprinkled with selective outrage.

And I understand the impulse. I get the same emotional reaction when I first see those headlines. But then I actually check what they are saying. I read beyond the headline. I look for any corroborating evidence, context, data, chronology, sources- of any type! Most of the time it turns out to be the same recycled clickbait headline repeated across social media by people who never bothered to verify any of it.

Sometimes (and in the best of cases) the “story” is almost technically true but stripped of all context. A policy from 40 or 400 years ago is presented as if it happened yesterday. A ten-second video clip circulates without what happened before or after. A statistic is repeated without baseline numbers. A historical quote is edited to completely reverse its meaning.

And worse—when people start pointing out that the “news” is false, misleading, manipulated, or entirely decontextualized, the people who fell for it usually DOUBLE DOWN. By then they are too emotionally invested.

They already sounded the alarm publicly.

They already performed outrage in front of their audience.

Admitting they were wrong would require humility and self-reflection, and social media punishes both. But social media didn’t invent this- it is only capitalizing in preexisting lack of self-awareness and humility.

But there is another issue. Too many people desperately want to believe they are under such a systemic, coordinated, almost omnipotent attack that it is a miracle they can even get out of bed in the morning—or afternoon. Thus, they deserve a prize just for existing.

They cling to this worldview even when a fourth grader could look at the claim and say, “That ain’t right.” Because believing they have no agency, no responsibility, and no power over their own lives regardless of what they do becomes a convenient excuse to wallow in self-inflicted despair and permanent grievance.

This first group gravitates toward the performers of public attrition. Sounds noble, right? No. Not really.

These performers of attrition rarely take meaningful responsibility for their own actions either. Their entire public performance revolves around denouncing systems of oppression—real and imaginary—and ritualistically “acknowledging” their privilege and complicity.

But it is not genuine self-criticism. It is theater.

Because in their narrative they are not really participants in oppression anymore. They have “seen the light.” They are now enlightened protagonists in the grand struggle to save the rest of us from ignorance, oppression, patriarchy, coloniality, whiteness, capitalism, or whatever abstract evil is trending that week.

What follows is often little more than protagonism, saviorism, and the caviar of self-indulgent self-flagellation.

They derive an almost intoxicating—perhaps even erotic—pleasure from “discovering” moral failings in every historical actor and finding corruption in every event, institution, or achievement. They have taken the old myth of “American exceptionalism” and flipped it into its bizarro inverse: America (and the West) as uniquely monstrous, uniquely evil, uniquely responsible for every suffering on earth.

From “the indispensable nation” to “the nation whose absence would redeem humanity.” Same mythology. Different polarity. Same protagonism. Different roles. The villain is still a protagonist.

History becomes less about understanding complexity and more about moral performance. Every historical figure must either be canonized or condemned according to how they fit in our shortsighted political view. Every institution becomes irredeemable. Every social interaction becomes evidence of hidden violence. Every disagreement becomes harm.

This auto-asphyxiation ritual is performed daily by too many activists, poets, academics, influencers, and scholars who seem unaware that their overwhelming pessimism and despair may not actually be caused by “the system” alone, but perhaps by a combination of algorithmic addiction, isolation, substance abuse, unresolved trauma, neurochemical imbalances, lack of purpose, and self-inflicted psychological wounds constantly reinforced online.

Meanwhile people in power—from politicians to academics to media personalities—feed off that despair to accumulate even more power, money, prestige, followers, grants, clicks, influence, and control.

The algorithm keeps fattening audiences up with outrage, fear, distortion, and catastrophe because panic is profitable. Calm people do not doomscroll for six hours a day.

And the irony is staggering.

Many of the very people who claim to be defending democracy, liberation, tolerance, equity, and social cohesion have become among the greatest contributors to the destruction of civil discourse itself.

They spread fear, distrust, paranoia, and mutual hatred so relentlessly that meaningful conversation becomes impossible. Every institution is illegitimate. Every opponent is evil. Every disagreement is violence. Every compromise is betrayal.

And in the process, they have helped create an almost unsurmountable divide in society while making the wealthy wealthier, the powerful stronger, and ordinary people more isolated, cynical, anxious, and politically paralyzed than ever before.

Will we ever wake up from this psychotic episode? Or would we keep ourselves willingly institutionalized and straightjacketed?

And no- Jamaicans didn’t burn down a “racist” Chinese hotel banning local from their beach (the fake news is itself racist and xenophobic) nor is Ozempic making your bones hollow.