It’s becoming increasingly difficult in recent years for both sides of the US political realm to simply agree on facts. Blame the internet. It used to be, in the olden days (think Woodward and Bernstein in print and Cronkite on TV), that all sides agreed on the basics of a situation: what happened, who said what, relevant actual data. We agreed on the facts, and then each side would spin those facts, highlighting stuff that was favorable to their position and downplaying stuff that wasn’t. Since we all had the common ground of agreement on facts, we mostly saw the spin for what it was, and that sort of stuff was on the editorial page anyway, so no one confused the spin with reality.

Today, by contrast, it’s the digital wild west. Anyone with a computer connection can make up a crazy story without having to bother with any ridiculous nonsense like facts. Toss it out there to one side or the other to an electorate with precious little in the way of critical thinking skills or the ability to evaluate the quality of a source and we get utter chaos and a collective disconnect from reality.

This election cycle has seen some really good investigative journalism done by Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, but it’s getting drowned out by a sea of conspiracy theories, far-fringe spin, and the elevation of unsubstantiated fluff alongside attempts at serious analysis.

Trump has fed this beast by simply overwhelming us all with a barrage of lies and contradictions that arguably border on him gas-lighting the entire electorate. Non-partisan fact checking organizations struggle to keep up with the sheer volume from Trump, but the most tragic thing of all is that no one seems to care. If the facts disagree with our opinions, we just ignore them. We are officially in a post-factual era.

We are also beset with false equivalence. Yes, Clinton has lied, but Trump as liar-in-chief far exceeds her both in the sheer volume and the magnitude of his falsehoods. And yet, we see the media, in an attempt at “fairness” giving equal time to Clinton and Trump, with the result being that Trump looks like less of a liar than he actually is.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that it will get any better any time soon. This is the dark side of freedom of speech. I don’t see any sort of self-correcting or self-regulating mechanism that could possibly bring civilization to our online anarchy. If our representative republic (not a democracy-look it up) is to survive and thrive, we will have to find some way to get back to a fact and reality based world. How to do that and still maintain freedom of speech?? That is one very serious question for the 21st century.