Media distortion and its consequences
The power of words in public life is rarely neutral. In the hands of the press, it can either clarify truth or distort it, either calm passions or inflame them. In our present climate, the mainstream media too often chooses the latter. By stripping quotes from context, amplifying the most incendiary phrasing, and presenting caricatured narratives of political opponents, it has become not a mediator of truth but an accelerant of division.

The controversy following the Charlottesville rally in 2017 illustrates this point. Donald Trump’s remarks — which explicitly condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists — were reported as though he had praised them as “very fine people.”¹ In 2020, his clumsy speculation about disinfectants in a coronavirus press briefing was re-presented as a directive to “inject bleach.”² In 2024, his warning of a potential economic “bloodbath” in the automobile industry if tariffs were not applied was presented as a threat of political violence.³ These are not incidental errors but repeated patterns of misquotation, misdirection, and misframing.

Truth and unreality
At the root of this crisis lies a deeper philosophical shift. Once truth shifted from objective standards to “my truth,” society began living in unreality — where feelings override facts and reality itself is denied. What was once measured against the natural law or the order of creation is now measured against private perception. Hence, truth becomes less about what is, and more about what is felt. The consequences are visible everywhere: claims that contradict biology are treated as self-evident, moral absolutes are dismissed as oppressive, and even legal definitions are rewritten according to ideological preference. This disconnection from reality, compounded by sin, has produced what many Catholic thinkers, such as Fr. Chad Ripperger, describe as a pervasive psychological fragility, for the mind cannot remain healthy when it is constantly required to falsify its judgments.⁴ ⁵

The unwarranted invective against Trump
It is important to underline that much of the invective directed against Trump has been unnecessary, unwarranted, and profoundly damaging to society. Whatever one thinks of his policies or personality, the relentless caricature — presenting him as a sympathiser with neo-Nazis, a reckless promoter of drinking bleach, or a would-be dictator promising violence — has gone far beyond legitimate political critique. It has entrenched falsehoods in the public imagination, polarised citizens against one another, and eroded the basic presumption that political opponents are fellow citizens rather than existential threats. Such exaggerations do not merely wound the target; they corrode the civic fabric itself.

Conservative argument versus progressive invective
It remains an observable truth that, apart from occasional lapses into hyperbole, conservative commentators generally anchor their arguments in incidences of fact and evidence. Their discourse may be blunt, even combative, but it tends to rest on verifiable claims and concrete examples. By contrast, liberal and progressive rhetoric more often relies on twisting, exaggerating, or selectively framing events in order to create a sense of existential threat. In practice, this results in invective designed not to illuminate but to incite. Such language does not invite the citizen into reasoned judgment but instead pressures them into outrage. The difference is not merely stylistic: it marks the divide between speech that can be contested within the norms of democratic deliberation and speech that undermines those very norms by treating opponents as beyond the bounds of legitimate debate.

Progressive hypocrisy in moral judgment
Another example of progressivist hypocrisy is the habit of denigrating or impugning the character of an opponent for behaviours that liberals themselves have normalised and even celebrated in other contexts. Promiscuity, adultery, or the pursuit of sexual licence are often treated as badges of liberation when practised within the progressive milieu, but the same actions are held up as evidence of depravity when discovered in a conservative adversary. The result is not principled moral critique but opportunistic weaponisation. What is tolerated or excused for allies becomes grounds for public condemnation when committed by opponents. In this way, progressivism reveals itself not as a consistent ethic but as a strategy of partisan advantage, using moral language selectively to destroy reputations rather than to uphold virtue.

The Biden administration’s manipulative rhetoric
This pattern was not limited to the media. The Biden administration repeatedly relied on exaggerated or debunked framings that served to polarise rather than persuade. Biden invoked the claim that Trump praised white supremacists at Charlottesville, despite transcripts proving otherwise.⁶ He described Trump-supporting Republicans as “semi-fascist” and a threat to democracy,⁷ labelled Georgia’s election law “Jim Crow 2.0,”⁸ and condemned border patrol agents as guilty of “whipping” migrants before investigations showed otherwise.⁹ Even on issues such as COVID-19 vaccination, categorical overstatements — “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations”¹⁰ — created expectations that quickly eroded public trust. Such rhetoric may have energised supporters, but it delegitimised dissent and trained citizens to see opponents as enemies rather than as fellow participants in civic life.

Media, technology, and the corrosion of discourse
This collapse of truth has been accelerated by media and technology. Sound-bites and social media have conditioned people to expect instant comprehension, reducing serious argument to slogans.¹¹ Complex truths — whether philosophical, theological, or political — require a sequence of logical steps. Yet the digital environment encourages impatience with reasoning and suspicion of anything that cannot be grasped in seconds. The effect is intellectual malformation: individuals increasingly lack the habits needed to follow an argument, test its coherence, and arrive at sound judgment. In place of reasoned persuasion comes emotional assertion, ad hominem attack, or withdrawal into curated echo chambers. Technology, which promised to connect, has instead isolated, producing a population that consumes information but rarely deliberates upon it.¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ What might once have fostered conversation has become a machinery of fragmentation.

Academia and activist rhetoric
This same dynamic is also evident in what now passes for “academic” debate in universities and activist circles. Students are often taught not the skills of critical analysis, but the slogans of ideology. In the case of progressive causes — from gender ideology to Black Lives Matter — the rhetoric itself is framed to foreclose discussion. Terms such as “attacking trans rights,” “deadnaming,” or “denying lived experience” are presented as self-evident indictments. Phrases like “your words cause suicidal ideation” function as conversation-ending weapons rather than contributions to reasoned argument. In the United Kingdom, several universities have codified such activist categories into official policies, listing “deadnaming” and “misgendering” as examples of “unacceptable behaviour,” with disciplinary consequences.¹⁵ At the same time, the regulator for higher education has fined institutions such as the University of Sussex for failing to uphold free speech protections in debates on sex and gender.¹⁶

The vulnerability of young people
The harm of such rhetoric is compounded by the audience to whom it is directed. Young people, often still forming their intellectual foundations and sense of identity, are especially vulnerable to absolutist framing. The NHS-commissioned Cass Review (2024) noted that social transition is not a neutral act but an intervention with potentially profound psychosocial consequences.¹⁷ This warning is particularly significant given the disproportionate number of autistic young people referred to gender clinics, whose suggestibility and comorbid conditions increase their vulnerability to ideological messaging.¹⁸ Similar findings in the United States show a measurable overrepresentation of autism-spectrum traits among those experiencing gender dysphoria.¹⁹

Moreover, research into the Werther effect demonstrates that sensationalist or alarmist media coverage of suicide can increase imitation, while the Papageno effect shows that constructive framing can be protective.²⁰ These findings are highly relevant to contemporary activist rhetoric: slogans equating disagreement with “causing suicide” or claiming that debate itself endangers lives are not neutral, but risk reinforcing harmful patterns among the most fragile. For young men suffering from isolation, depression, or identity struggles — including those in the so-called “incel” subculture — the danger is not hypothetical but real.

Institutional capture and the law
The same habits of overemphasis, obfuscation, and deliberate manipulative framing have also reshaped public institutions. When the UK Supreme Court recently clarified that “sex” in law means biological sex, it should have settled questions that had been ideologically clouded for years. Yet so extensive is the capture of public bodies that many local councils, agencies, and regulators have refused to correct policies which, by privileging gender ideology over statutory reality, were always unlawful.²¹ Here too, rhetoric has triumphed over reason: institutions behave as though law is plastic, policy a matter of ideological preference, and reality itself subject to redefinition. The consequences are profound, for they reveal a society in which even the most basic legal categories are subordinated to slogans.

Violence as poisoned fruit
In this respect, activist discourse, media reporting, and political rhetoric converge. All replace truth with caricature, all substitute fear for reason, and all escalate rather than resolve tensions. The result is polarisation, alienation, and, at times, violence. Just as misleading headlines foster hostility in the political arena, so too do absolutist slogans corrode the very possibility of genuine learning and dialogue in academic life.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk must be read against this backdrop. Here was a young husband and father, gunned down in front of his family after speaking in defence of free debate. It is not enough to dismiss the act as an isolated crime. It is more plausibly seen as the poisoned fruit of years of rhetoric in which conservatives have been described not as fellow citizens but as enemies to be eradicated. When such distortions are normalised in newsrooms, classrooms, and even the White House itself, it is inevitable that some will take them literally and act accordingly.

The irony of hate speech laws
This does not excuse individual culpability for violence. But it does highlight the wider responsibility borne by institutions that shape public perception and formation. Journalism, at its best, is a vocation of truth-telling and civic moderation. Education, at its best, is a discipline of reasoning, dialogue, and intellectual charity. Politics, at its best, is the careful stewardship of civic trust. At their worst, all three become instruments of propaganda. In recent years, the mainstream media, much of the academy, and the Biden administration leaned too often toward the latter, subordinating truth to ideology and accuracy to effect.

There is a profound irony in contemporary debates about so-called “hate speech.” Laws and policies restricting expression are invariably justified as protections against incitement, intolerance, and harm. Yet in practice, it is often liberal and progressive voices that resort most readily to inciteful speech and increasingly hostile behaviour. The language of “semi-fascism,” “existential threat,” or “denying existence” is not neutral description but rhetorical weaponry. This weaponisation extends even to national symbols and traditions. A country’s flag, its history, or its expressions of patriotism can be denounced as “hate” or “racism” without any evidence at all of such intent in the interlocutors themselves.²² By such methods, ordinary attachment to heritage is redefined as malice, and love of country is transmuted into a moral crime.

Thus, under the banner of curbing “hate,” a culture of genuine hostility has been cultivated — one that narrows democratic discourse, corrodes trust, and exposes society to the very violence it professes to prevent.

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1. White House, “Remarks by President Trump on Infrastructure Executive Order,” Aug 15, 2017.
2. White House, COVID-19 Task Force Briefing Transcript, Apr 23, 2020.
3. Associated Press, “Trump warns of auto industry ‘bloodbath’,” Mar 16, 2024.
4. Fr. Chad Ripperger, Healing of the Person, interview, Catholic Men For Jesus Christ (July 2024).
5. Fr. Chad Ripperger, quoted in Mountain Werks blog, “Your Emotions Disconnect You from Reality,” Apr 2023.
6. Biden campaign launch speech, Apr 2019.
7. Biden remarks, Aug 25, 2022; White House transcript.
8. Biden, speech in Atlanta on voting rights, Jan 11, 2022.
9. DHS OIG, Investigation into the Treatment of Migrants by Border Patrol Agents in Del Rio, Texas, July 2022.
10. Biden, CNN Town Hall, July 21, 2021.
11. The Atlantic, “The Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite,” Feb 2013.
12. The Week, “TikTok brain may be coming for your kid’s attention span,” Nov 2024.
13. Chiossi et al., “Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions,” arXiv preprint, 2023.
14. Cardoso-Leite et al., “Media use, attention, mental health and academic outcomes,” Pediatrics, 2021.
15. Academic Freedom and Communications Monitoring, UCL Free Speech Report, Sept 2025.
16. Office for Students, Free Speech in Higher Education: Enforcement Action Report, Apr 2025.
17. Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (NHS England, 2024).
18. de Vries et al., “Autistic Features in Gender Dysphoric Adolescents,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2010.
19. Warrier et al., “Elevated Rates of Autism, Other Neurodevelopmental and Psychiatric Diagnoses in Transgender and Gender-Diverse Individuals,” Nature Communications, 2020.
20. Niederkrotenthaler et al., “Role of Media Reports in Completed and Prevented Suicide: Werther vs. Papageno Effects,” British Journal of Psychiatry, 2010.
21. Smith v Chief Constable of Northumbria Police [2025] UKSC (clarification of legal definition of sex).
22. Council and institutional policies reported in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment, refusing to amend guidance despite legal clarification, 2025.