Fractured Realities

By Jesse Singal

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

“Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently. She was giving a speech in Ithaca, New York, and the subject, naturally, was the scandal at Cornell University centering on the alleged sexual assaults of a woman named “Jane Doe.” (Her name has been made public but she, like the men she has accused, has received death threats, so I’m not going to use it.)

 

Ocasio-Cortez’s description of what happened was as lurid as it was terrifying. “They lured her into a fraternity house,” she said. “They drugged her with ketamine. They then posted to a group chat that she was incapacitated, and seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours.”

 

As Fox News and others subsequently pointed out, Ocasio-Cortez’s description of what happened isn’t true—at least not if you believe Doe herself. The legal complaint she filed, thrusting her case into the national spotlight, paints an extremely disturbing picture, but one that’s significantly more complex than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Doe does accuse some of the men of rape, and multiple institutions of not properly investigating it or disciplining her alleged rapists, but she also acknowledges a complicated series of events that began with consensual (albeit inebriated) group sex, and that devolved from there. The hourslong episode was significantly fuzzed up by heavy drinking and ketamine use. That’s important to note not because it excuses any immoral or illegal behavior that occurred, but because it makes it difficult to know exactly what did occur—especially in light of points of disagreement between Doe and the men she has accused.

 

But if you get your news and analysis from certain sources—including a sitting U.S. representative—you might come to believe otherwise, that this is quite straightforward. “Even if Doe was willingly wasted beyond belief, that doesn’t make it okay for seven men to spend hours raping her,” wrote Jessica Valenti, a widely read feminist commentator.

 

In these communities, the “facts” of the Jane Doe case are closely linked to beliefs about the case: Seven frat bros raped her, and then both the university and police callously disregarded her. As the lefty outlet Common Dreams summed things up in an article covering Ocasio-Cortez’s statement, this all points to “a culture in which students accused of sexual assault are ‘protected’ while survivors like the woman in the Cornell case, identified as Jane Doe, are often forced out of their campus communities.”

 

If this isn’t exactly what happened—shouldn’t that matter? Shouldn’t we at least be able to get on the same page when it comes to the basic facts of what the accusations are?

 

***

 

Icame of age politically in a much, much simpler world. There was CNN, and there was Fox News. CNN was basically right about everything, and Fox News was basically wrong about everything.

 

We didn’t view the landscape as simple at the time; we thought a disastrous degree of balkanization was underway, with people breaking into their own ideological camps and getting skewed versions of the world as a result. The basic storyline was that once we’d had ABC, NBC, and CBS, and the nation was relatively united on the receiving end of the authoritative, fatherly gaze of Walter Cronkite. Then came the rise of AM radio and cable news, and these new, vitriolic forms of political communication split the nation in two.  

 

Of course this is and was an oversimplification. Our supposedly more united, more reality-based era of postwar mass media coincided, at times, with levels of discord and in-the-streets violence that dwarf what we’ve seen lately. From the late 1960s into the early 1970s, bombings and political assassinations were a routine part of American life. So we shouldn’t exaggerate or romanticize.

 

But we also shouldn’t downplay the extent of the fracturing that has taken place since then. If someone had told me in 2004 that “Going forward, this is the best American political discourse will ever be,” I would have screamed. At the time, vitriolic and pernicious figures like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage were at or near the peaks of their powers. They were interested only in division, not understanding. Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, Savage’s 2005 book, became a New York Times bestseller.

 

And yet it did get much, much worse. The Fox News-ification of the right was met with an MSNBC-ization on the left. More and more Americans began relying on partisan outlets for news. But that was nothing compared to what happened next thanks to smartphones and social media. Most important here is Eli Pariser’s idea of a “filter bubble,” first coined in 2011, which found its way into the dictionary: “an online environment in which people are exposed only to opinions and information that conform to their existing beliefs.” If you had only two words to understand where we’re at, those are the words: filter bubbles.

 

Since the mid-2010s or so, hyperpartisan online media has made the debates at MSNBC and Fox News look like calm political discussions at a picnic. The right was first to develop online fever swamps of hyperpartisan misinformation—or effective ones, at least—probably because it had such a head start in mastering partisan media. And by 2016, the online right was becoming an increasingly deranged Wild West. This is indisputable, and it likely played some role in the rise of Donald Trump (albeit a role that is sometimes overstated, in my opinion).

 

Less attention has been paid to the collapse of epistemological standards in left-of-center spaces, and that’s been the focus of much of my media criticism in recent years. That’s because I live there and think (likely delusionally) I can play a small part in nudging things back on course, not because I think the left is “worse” on this front. I do think we are catching up to the right, though. “Highbrow misinformation”—misinformation afflicting highly educated types who tend to skew left—is an increasingly dire problem.

 

But the problem isn’t just two main factions constantly at war with one another over conflicting conceptions of reality. Even within our primary American political factions, there’s now micro-balkanization. That is, Americans who broadly agree on the big political questions are cordoning themselves into not just ideological but even factual foxholes, unable to understand not just their political adversaries on the other side of our ideological divide, but even their nearby neighbors.

 

I voted for Obama twice and against Trump thrice (please clap). Rough math suggests there are about 30 million Americans in this particular tribe—we are just 10 percent of Americans, give or take. A small slice. It worries me, then, that I so often find myself aghast at how others in this camp have completely different views from me, not on political questions, but on basic matters of factual reality (and they feel the same way about me). That’s what I mean by micro-balkanization.

 

Perhaps the first national controversy that got me worried about this occurred in 2019, when kids from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky were filmed on the National Mall engaged in some sort of rowdy cheer—and what appeared to be some sort of showdown between Nick Sandmann, one of the high schoolers, and a drum-toting Native American activist named Nathan Phillips. The initial snippets of video were interpreted by some as evidence that the kids had harassed the activist in question. Soon, though, longer videos came out that provided much more context, making it considerably more difficult to accuse the Covington kids of any wrongdoing. They showed that the kids were already in a tight cluster, riled up and doing a school-spirit cheer, when Phillips began marching in while beating his drum. The kids, confused or amused or both, began dancing and cheering in time with his drumming; there was no clear evidence, anywhere, of mockery or animus. It was a confusing situation that demanded discretion by journalists, and many failed. Grown adults, some with advanced degrees, claimed that you could tell by the awkward smile on Sandmann’s face that he had evil in his heart. CNN, the Washington Post, and NBCUniversal ended up settling with Nick Sandmann’s family (the terms are undisclosed).

 

Things only got worse, though. It was the significantly higher-stakes events of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that convinced me there was a real crisis of micro-balkanization on the left.

 

First, Jacob Blake was shot by police in August 2020, a shooting that was immediately and widely understood, in left-of-center spaces, as being unjustified. That quickly became the truth of the matter in some circles, with then-candidates Kamala Harris and Joe Biden soon contacting Blake’s family and speaking with Blake himself over the phone. Harris, according to Blake’s lawyer, told Blake she was proud of him.

 

In fact, police arrived on the scene to arrest Blake for an outstanding sexual-assault warrant. He violently resisted arrest, withstood multiple tasing efforts, and attempted to get into a car with children in the back seat to flee the scene. All of this was on video. The officer who shot him claimed that Blake was swinging a knife toward him at that moment, and the available evidence supports this claim. This appears to have been much closer to a textbook example of a justified shooting than an unjustified one. To this day, though, left-of-center America is divided over the basic facts of the case—over objective matters, many caught on video. (For more information on this, see my podcast episode going into the details of the incident, which relies largely on an independent review that led to the decision not to press charges against the officers involved in the incident, and which doesn’t leave much room for doubt in my opinion.)

 

Blake’s shooting led to both peaceful protests and some genuinely destructive rioting. Of course I can’t say with certainty that the rush to judgment caused the rioting, but it certainly didn’t help that so many politicians immediately claimed that the shooting was unjustified.

 

One consequence of all of this was Kyle Rittenhouse. After the rioting kicked off, the then-17-year-old traveled from his nearby hometown in Illinois to (as he saw it) offer his assistance, patrolling the area to try to keep the peace. He had a rifle with him, one of many people who were open-carrying in Kenosha that day. Video shows he was confronted and then chased by a man who had just been released from a psychiatric hospital. Backed into a corner, Rittenhouse shot and killed the man. Bystanders (who in the moment couldn’t have known that the initial shooting appeared to have been justified) then began chasing Rittenhouse, eventually catching up to him and attacking him, at which point he killed one and maimed another. Rittenhouse was eventually arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including homicide.

 

I was shocked by how quickly misinformation about these incidents spread in the left-of-center media ecosystem given—again—the presence of video that did at least answer certain objective questions, like what preceded Rittenhouse’s initial decision to open fire. Between the videos and the textual reality of Wisconsin law, it seemed clear he had a solid self-defense claim. None of this was a mystery, especially after the New York Times published an in-depth visual investigation making it clearer what happened when. But this didn’t matter—partisans and journalists who are too credulous of partisans developed a number of false beliefs about the Rittenhouse case. As I wrote in 2021, “I watched many influential media figures and politicians engage in this weird snowballing act of collective truthiness—they turned Rittenhouse into a monster, into someone who had committed obviously premeditated acts of murder, in a manner that ran dozens of laps ahead of the available evidence.” Through sheer repetition of false claims, these figures had convinced themselves and many others of a version of events that badly conflicted with reality. As a result they were surprised and outraged when, somewhat predictably, Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges. They shouldn’t have been.

 

***

 

In the days after the Cornell story went viral, another example of micro-balkanization popped off—a memorable one centered on the right.

 

Starting last Friday, a rumor metastasized in the MAGAsphere: Texas state representative and senatorial candidate James Talarico hadn’t been knocked off the campaign trail because of a nasty bout of the flu, as his team claimed, but because he had been spirited off to Ohio to be checked into a psychiatric hospital.

 

I’m not even going to try to sum up how the influencers spreading this claim came to this conclusion, because the underlying conspiracy theory is addled and confusing. But it broke into the mainstream after a MAGA hanger-on named Rhein Amacher posted audio in which he called the Ohio facility at the center of the conspiracy theory, posed as Talarico’s relative, and was told by the woman on the other end of the line that Talarico had checked out that day. Except none of this made much sense. Amacher’s own claims about the timing didn’t line up given when Talarico had been seen on the ground in Texas, a psychiatric hospital likely wouldn’t give out the info Amacher claimed to have received, and the tired-sounding woman said what she said only after repeatedly searching for a James Talarico and not finding anyone. The Talarico campaign issued an unambiguous statement calling this claim a “lie,” and the hospital has stated that Talarico has never been a patient there.

 

Sunday night I saw that Amacher had joined an X Space to promote and discuss his bombshell. I joined and found myself in a MAGA-dominated hangout with a couple of other journalists thrown in. I asked Amacher questions about the timing discrepancy and how he fact-checked his now-viral claim. Amacher’s answers didn’t pass muster but could be best explained by his repeated admissions that he is not a journalist and doesn’t see himself as held to the same quality-control standards (he said this explicitly). During the call, we found out that the hospital had issued a flat denial. It was a fascinating moment. I can’t say that every MAGA-affiliated type on the call was unmoved by this apparent debunking, but for the most part, at least among those dominating the conversation, the goalposts quickly shifted. It could still be true. Talarico had not provided sufficient debunking of the claim promoted by the guy who openly admitted he hadn’t done much vetting.

 

As of Monday, the most overheated MAGAheads are continuing to promote this very, very crazy story. Others, alongside most respectable conservatives, find the whole thing embarrassing (which it is). More fracturing. More micro-balkanization.

 

All of this misinformation is bad in its own right. It is bad when people strongly believe things that aren’t true or that haven’t yet been verified as such. But what is perhaps most pernicious here is the paranoia micro-balkanization breeds, the extent to which it digs people deeper into conspiracy-minded foxholes. If you think that Kyle Rittenhouse was obviously guilty, or that the shooting of Jacob Blake was obviously unjust, or that it’s obviously the case that the Jane Doe case was prosecutable, or that Donald Trump obviously won the 2020 election, or that the lamestream media is obviously covering for Crazy James Talarico, then you are likely to become increasingly disillusioned by the fact that reality isn’t conforming to your false beliefs, that certain people aren’t being prosecuted or hauled off to prison.

 

That’s exactly what I’m seeing now in the MAGAsphere—widespread outrage and incredulity, all of it feeding on itself, that Talarico is “getting away” with this. It is a Known Fact in these communities that he really did check into a psychiatric institution, despite all evidence to the contrary.

 

It would be terrible to live in a country without loud and ongoing disagreement. Most people don’t want that. But there are limits to the strain; we’re in the midst of an experiment, worsening by the day, of just how many different realities a single polity can withstand.