I begin with the screen in my hand.The blue glow of the phone, that sacred object of our age, delivers me the “world.” It offers me the New York Times, with its polished veneers of credibility, the Financial Times with its cold calculus of markets, and YouTube, the endless sewer dressed up as a mirror. Three portals, three stages of a theater, and yet the play is always the same: lies, lies, lies.
To live in America today is to live in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is a deception. The respectable lie of institutions, the vulgar lie of Fox News, the masturbatory lie of algorithms, the pornographic lie of Gaza’s corpses served for our consumption. And between them all, the American citizen, not as sovereign thinker but as audience — loud, resentful, narcotized by spectacle.
The question I return to is simple: was there ever truth here? Or has this nation, from its founding in slavery to its Hollywood fantasies, always been nothing but the most sophisticated pornography of lies ever devised by human hands?
Chapter 1: The Architecture of Deception
On power’s eternal obsession with preserving itself.
Every society lies. But America perfected the lie into an industry, a design, an architecture. Lies here are not accidents, nor the private vices of a few cynical men. They are the very scaffolding of power, erected brick by brick to ensure survival, domination, and profit.
The architecture of deception always begins with the same principle: power must never explain itself. It must seduce, distract, obscure. It must build facades so polished, so believable, that people mistake the mask for the face. And so it surrounds itself with newspapers, think tanks, corporate media, Hollywood sets, academic jargon, and government statements. Each one is a column, a wall, a mirror in the cathedral of lies.
Take the so-called “respectable” press. They present themselves as arbiters of truth, voices of reason, guardians of democracy. But peel back the curtain and you find the same arrangement repeated throughout history: the intimate dance between those who write and those who rule. The New York Times, for instance, is not simply a paper. It is a palace guard dressed in ink and paper, a stenographer to the State Department, a smooth-tongued operator whose task is not to enlighten but to anesthetize. The language of “objectivity” is simply the perfume sprayed over the stench of obedience.
On the other side, the vulgar carnival of Fox News, with its endless shrieks and slogans, is not a contradiction to the Times but its complement. They serve the same master. One whispers to the educated, the other screams to the resentful. One lulls you into believing in the order of the world, the other excites you into hating those designated as the enemy. Together they form the twin wings of the architecture: the whisper and the shout, the wine glass and the fist, deception in polite dress and deception in vulgar drag.
This structure is not static. Like any cathedral, it must be maintained. The walls must be repainted, the cracks concealed, the foundations reinforced. Technology plays the role of new marble and stained glass. Today, Google and YouTube do not merely report on the world; they decide which world we are allowed to see. Algorithms have replaced priests. The pulpit is your screen. The sermon is endless, infinite, inexhaustible.
And yet, at the core, nothing changes. The design is eternal: power must hide itself, must reproduce itself, must sanctify itself in lies. The ordinary citizen is not invited into the temple as a participant but as a believer, a kneeling audience. They receive not truth but spectacle. Not knowledge but noise.
The architecture of deception, therefore, is not a conspiracy in the shadows but the entire edifice in the light. It is the world itself as we see it through our glowing screens. It is the dinner table of op-ed writers, the shriek of cable hosts, the carefully curated search results of Google. It is everywhere, and because it is everywhere, it becomes invisible.
To live in America is to live inside this building without walls, a cathedral without exits. To wake up each day inside a deception so complete that truth is no longer absent — it is unimaginable.
Chapter 2: The Audience of the Lie
The spiritually empty crowd and its appetite for direction, resentment, and spectacle.
If the lie is architecture, then the people are its tenants. They do not merely live inside it; they furnish it, defend it, and call it home. The audience of the lie is not a passive spectator dragged unwillingly into deception. No — they crave it. They demand it. They hunger for it like a starving dog gnawing at a bone.
The American audience, especially, is defined not by curiosity or by intellect but by resentment. Their eyes glow not with wonder but with bitterness. They are poor, yet they dream of villas. They are lonely, yet they masturbate to community through screens. They are powerless, yet they crave the intoxicating illusion of superiority over someone, anyone, as long as it isn’t the rich who rule them.
Fox News understands this audience better than the audience understands itself. From morning to night, it does not simply report but conducts a liturgy of resentment. Each broadcast is a homily that tells the viewer who to hate, who to fear, who to fantasize about killing. The immigrant. The Black. The Palestinian. The stranger. The Other. An endless menu of scapegoats, tailored to the frustrations of the spiritually bankrupt. The network’s genius lies in protecting its true patrons — the wealthy, the owners of villas in Martha’s Vineyard and penthouses in Manhattan — by ensuring that resentment never flows upward. Resentment must always be lateral, downward, outward, never vertical.
But Fox is only the grotesque face of a broader truth. The audience of the lie is addicted to resentment because resentment is easier than reflection. To look inward would be unbearable. To admit complicity, cowardice, emptiness — impossible. And so the audience needs the lie to tell them: You are righteous. You are strong. You are victims, but you are also chosen. The lie is an anesthetic, an opiate, a daily fix against the nausea of reality.
This audience has a particular look — the twisted mouth, the outraged eyes, the swelling veins of moral panic. But beneath the expressions there is only vacancy. Narcissism replaces empathy. Ego replaces humility. The audience consumes tragedy as entertainment, death as pornography, outrage as masturbation. And like all addictions, it requires escalation. Today it is immigrants. Tomorrow it is Muslims. The day after, perhaps, it is neighbors. Always another scapegoat, always another dose of poison.
There is no America without this audience. The cathedral of lies requires its congregation. The priests of media cannot chant without listeners. The billionaires cannot plunder without obedient crowds cheering their scapegoats. The lie is mutual. Power lies to the people; the people lie to themselves. Together they maintain the architecture of deception with bricks of resentment and mortar of denial.
This audience is not innocent. They are collaborators. They do not resist the lie because they are the lie. Their rage, their boredom, their envy — all of it fertilizes the soil in which deception grows. If you look closely, you will see it: the most grotesque spectacle of all is not on television, not in headlines, not on YouTube. It is in the mirror, in the eyes of the audience, in their delighted participation in their own degradation.
Chapter 3: The False Prophets of Information
Newspapers, television, and the staged respectability of institutional voices.
If Fox News is grotesque in its naked sadism, then The New York Times and The Financial Times are grotesque in their elegance. They are not the screaming lunatic on the street corner but the well-dressed priest in the cathedral, solemnly blessing the very powers that desecrate the world. The role of these institutions is not to inform, but to disguise. Not to reveal, but to sanctify.
The Times, with its storied masthead, pretends to be the conscience of liberal America. It cultivates an image of seriousness, sophistication, cosmopolitan wisdom. Its journalists sip coffee in Brooklyn apartments and speak in soft tones about democracy and the republic. But beneath the polish lies the same essential function as Fox News: the preservation of power. Fox does it through blunt aggression; the Times does it through polite deception. Fox screams “Kill the immigrant”; the Times whispers “Trust the system.” Both lead to the same outcome: the audience is pacified, distracted, misled.
The Salzburger family, those invisible monarchs of the Times, present themselves as stewards of truth. But their truth is always convenient truth, safe truth, marketable truth. They speak of justice in editorials while profiting from injustice in silence. They speak of democracy while bowing to corporate advertisers. Their genius lies in their hypocrisy: they kiss you on the cheek while sliding the knife between your ribs. They mouth love while feeding you lies.
Television plays the same role. CNN, MSNBC, BBC — all the self-anointed “responsible” voices. Their screens glow with anchors who appear calm, rational, balanced. But their balance is false. Their moderation is complicity. Their respectability is a mask. They are there to ensure that outrage never touches the structures of wealth, that doubt never undermines the stability of empire. If Fox News channels resentment into hate, the Times channels dissent into paralysis. Both ensure obedience.
The tragedy is not that these institutions lie, but that people continue to pretend they don’t. The liberal reader folds their Times at breakfast, feeling morally superior to the Fox-watcher, but both are swallowing the same poison. One believes he is defending the republic from immigrants; the other believes she is defending the republic from Trump. Both are wrong. Both are deceived. Both are kept from seeing the deeper truth: that their lives, their labor, their hope are fuel for a machine that feeds the villas of the few.
The prophets of information are false because their god is money. Their god is access. Their god is survival within the halls of power. They tell us stories not to awaken us, but to keep us asleep. They are actors on a stage, carefully lit, reading from a script written by the very forces they claim to hold accountable. Their words are sermons, their platforms pulpits, their audiences congregations. But it is not truth they preach. It is obedience.
And so, in the end, the reader of the Times and the viewer of Fox are not different species. They are brothers in deception, sisters in denial. Both are led by prophets who lie. Both take communion in falsehood. Both kneel before altars of spectacle. And both, when the curtain falls, will discover they were never citizens of a republic at all — only parishioners in the Church of the Lie.
Chapter 4: The Theater of Noise
Fox News, the loud mouth, and the cultivation of resentment as entertainment.
Noise is not the absence of silence. Noise is a weapon. It overwhelms, it disorients, it drowns thought. Fox News discovered long ago that in a nation already restless, addicted, and resentful, the surest way to control people was not through reason, not through persuasion, but through noise.
From sunrise to midnight, the screen vomits fury. The anchors perform as if in some grotesque carnival: raised voices, mocking laughter, exaggerated outrage. Each broadcast is less a report than a gladiatorial spectacle, staged for an audience that arrives thirsty for blood. Their resentments, their humiliations, their small despairs are given direction. The message is clear: We know you are angry. We will tell you who to hate.
The genius of Fox is not invention but channeling. It does not create resentment; resentment is already there, born of poverty, of dead-end jobs, of cultural decline, of loneliness. What Fox does is seize it, shape it, weaponize it. Like a sewage system, it takes the waste of despair and funnels it toward chosen targets: immigrants, Black Americans, Muslims, LGBTQ people, feminists, professors. A long menu of enemies, all carefully chosen, all safely distant from the actual architects of misery — the rich, the corporations, the political class.
The resentment becomes ritual. Each night, the viewers tune in not for knowledge but for permission — permission to hate, to sneer, to feel momentarily powerful in their weakness. The anger does not liberate them. It entertains them. It anesthetizes them. It transforms their impotence into a communal theater of revenge.
Fox News is pornography of resentment. It arouses the audience, excites their hate, makes them tremble with righteous fury — but it never allows them to climax in action against the powerful. Instead, they climax in words, in shouts, in fantasies of violence against scapegoats. It is all show. It is all theater. And when the credits roll, the audience is still poor, still sick, still powerless — but a little more addicted to the noise.
This is why Fox cannot ever afford silence. Silence might make the audience reflect. Silence might reveal the emptiness of their lives. Silence might allow the question to form: Who truly profits from my suffering? And that question must never be asked. The network survives by flooding every second with outrage, so that no such thought can surface.
It is a sadism performed with a smile. Behind every segment, behind every “debate,” there is the grinning face of Rupert Murdoch, the old puppeteer, knowing that his empire of noise protects his empire of wealth. He does not care what is said, so long as the resentment is never directed upwards.
And thus, the theater continues. The viewers tune in, night after night, to be entertained by their own misery. They are not citizens; they are audience. They are not liberated; they are seduced. They are not angry at power; they are angry at shadows.
Noise has triumphed.
Chapter 5: The Algorithm of Masturbation
YouTube, Google, and the reduction of news to pornographic consumption.
YouTube does not inform. It seduces. It does not reveal. It titillates. It does not connect. It isolates. What it offers is not a public square, not a library, not even a television channel. What it offers is a vast masturbation chamber, where the audience sits alone with glowing screens, scrolling, clicking, stroking the endless feed of outrage and spectacle.
And who decides what is shown? Google. The benevolent giant that claims to “organize the world’s information.” But what does it actually organize? The clicks. The addiction. The impulses of the hand. You type news and what appears? Fox, Fox, Fox. Why? Because people click it. Not because it is true. Not because it is meaningful. But because, like porn, it excites.
The algorithm is not neutral. It is not some blind mathematics. It is desire made code. It is masturbation rendered in machine logic. It studies what makes you linger, what makes your pulse quicken, what keeps your finger moving downward. And then it gives you more of it. The algorithm is your pimp, your dealer, your mirror. It shows you what you want, and then it shows you more, until you no longer know what you want at all.
This is why massacre videos spread so easily on YouTube. They are the perfect product. On the surface, they are journalism, moral outrage, documentation of crimes. In reality, they are pornography. Pornography of death. You click to see the child killed in Gaza, to feel outrage, to feel pity, to feel horror. But beneath those feelings is another: excitement. Excitement at the extremity, excitement at the forbidden, excitement at the shock. And so the algorithm delivers more.
Outrage is porn. Sadism is porn. News is porn. Google is the brothel, YouTube the room, the influencers the w****s, the massacres the moans. And the audience? The audience is jerking itself into exhaustion, convinced it is becoming informed while it is only being drained.
Consider the influencers. They speak of tragedy, corruption, collapse — but their eyes gleam with the shine of clicks. They are not mourners. They are actors. They are not witnesses. They are sellers. The camera is their confessional, their bed, their stage. They beg you to touch them with your finger — that tiny gesture, the click, the like, the subscribe. A movement as meaningless as it is enslaving. They want your finger, always your finger. And you give it to them, again and again, as though each click were a caress, a thrust, a climax.
The algorithm has discovered what every pimp already knew: human beings will degrade themselves endlessly if only they are given the illusion of control. They will click until their souls are empty. They will watch until they cannot see. They will consume until there is nothing left to consume but themselves.
Thus the news has been reduced to the oldest human ritual: masturbation in the dark, shame afterward, emptiness in the morning.
Chapter 6: Synthetic Messiahs
AI, fabricated influencers, and the infinite multiplication of lies.
There was a time when lies required labor. To deceive, one had to write, to print, to broadcast, to act. Now the machine does the work. Artificial intelligence — what a phrase, what a euphemism — has become the printing press of false prophets, a generator of infinite messiahs without bodies, without consciences, without even the decency of shame.
What is AI in the hands of America? Not intelligence. Not knowledge. But fabrication. Fabrication at scale. Infinite faces, infinite voices, infinite stories. You no longer need a real person to lie. You no longer need an anchor, a preacher, a prophet. You only need the code. The AI will do it for you. It will conjure a face, a voice, an accent. It will shout into the void with an authority it does not have, until the void itself starts to believe.
And who owns this machine of lies? The same men who own the resentment industry, the same who profit from outrage: the rich, the hollow, the sadists. In their hands, AI becomes not a tool for enlightenment, but for segregation. For manipulation. For preserving the lie. Because society, left to itself, tends toward mixing — toward disorder, toward the endless mingling of skin, blood, and desire. Whites with Latinos, Latinos with Blacks, Blacks with Asians. The ordinary promiscuity of humanity. But power cannot allow this. It needs division. It needs enemies. It needs borders drawn in the soul. And so AI is summoned to manufacture the story of the Other, again and again, in infinite variations.
On YouTube, you can see them: the influencers who are not influencers, the prophets who are not prophets. Their mouths move but the words do not fit. Their eyes gleam with a mechanical light. They rage about corruption, injustice, apocalypse — but the rage is hollow, the excitement synthetic. They are mannequins. They are puppets. They are avatars of manipulation. Yet the audience watches, clicks, subscribes. Because the lie does not need to be convincing — it only needs to be entertaining.
And so, AI is the perfect gift to the sadists of power. With it, you no longer need a thousand journalists. You need one machine. One machine to speak in a thousand voices. One machine to multiply the lie until truth disappears under the weight of imitation. The synthetic messiah never tires, never doubts, never falters. It preaches without pause. It manipulates without conscience. It seduces without shame.
The future is not human faces speaking truth. The future is counterfeit faces screaming lies. And the audience, exhausted, narcotized, masturbated into numbness, will no longer care which is real and which is fake. The distinction will collapse. The only reality will be the click. The lie will have become not an aberration, not a distortion — but the only thing left to believe.
Chapter 7: The Pornography of Death
Gaza, massacre videos, and the sadistic marriage of outrage and voyeurism.
There is a special kind of sickness that reveals itself in moments of slaughter. Not just in the act of killing, but in the way it is consumed. Gaza today is not only a graveyard. It is a stage. The corpses of children are not only victims. They are content. Their deaths are filmed, uploaded, packaged, distributed — and the world watches, clicking, commenting, performing its outrage. The murder of innocents is now a genre. Death has been transformed into pornography.
YouTube is filled with these videos, clips of bombings and bloodied bodies. On the surface, they are evidence, “journalism,” proof of crimes. But underneath, they are entertainment. Outrage entertainment. Sadistic entertainment. There are those who watch and fume, their anger a form of self-gratification. There are those who watch and gloat, their hatred fed by the sight of another culture’s ruin. And there are those — perhaps the majority — who watch with the numb pleasure of spectacle, the way they would watch a fight, a car crash, a pornographic film. The massacre becomes an erotic theater of violence, a chance to touch death without being touched by it.
This is how America consumes the world. Always through the screen. Always through the lie of distance. The screen promises, you are safe, you are not them, you are not the one being burned, buried, butchered. And yet it offers the taste of their suffering as a delicacy. The audience sits in the privacy of their homes, masturbating to atrocity — not with their hands, perhaps, but with their eyes, their clicks, their cheap words of condemnation. Pornography is not only about sex. It is about the reduction of life to spectacle, about stripping away dignity until only the raw mechanics remain. Gaza’s dead are stripped bare and displayed like bodies in a brothel of death.
The killers know this. The killers count on this. Every bomb dropped is not only a military act, but a broadcast. Every corpse is not only a consequence, but a message. Israel knows the world is watching. America knows the world is watching. And in a perverse way, they want the world to watch. The deaths are part of the performance. See what we can do. See what we will do. See, and know you cannot stop it.
But the more obscene truth is this: the audience itself sustains the massacre. Without viewers, the pornography of death would lose its purpose. Outrage feeds the cycle. Hatred feeds the cycle. Voyeurism feeds the cycle. The massacre becomes a ritual in which killers and spectators are accomplices. One provides the corpses, the other the appetite.
Thus, the Gaza videos are not accidents of modern media. They are its culmination. Proof that in the empire of lies, even murder is not sacred. Even the death of a child can be commodified, packaged, sold. In a world addicted to spectacle, the grave becomes a stage, and the dead become the actors we cannot stop watching.
Chapter 8: The Ape and His Mask
Humanity as liar, storyteller, manipulator — collaboration through deception.
Strip away the myths, the institutions, the pieties, and what remains of man? An ape who lies. The human animal has always hidden behind masks, not simply to protect itself, but to dominate. Lying is not a deviation from our nature — it is our essence. The mask is not worn for occasions. The mask is permanent.
Every civilization is built on deception. Religion was the first mask: promises of eternity hiding the misery of the present. Kings wore crowns not because they were chosen by gods, but because people were convinced they were. Nations were founded on stories of liberty while their hands held chains. Every story we tell about “human progress” is a lie layered upon a lie, a mask painted over a mask.
What makes the modern condition unique is not the existence of lies, but their saturation. We live in a storm of them. Every influencer’s smirk, every politician’s speech, every brand’s slogan, every staged photo of a smiling family — all are masks. And behind them, the ape, still the ape, grinning and gnashing, still desperate to manipulate his fellow ape.
We pretend the mask is for others. But it is also for ourselves. Humans cannot bear to look at their own reflection without distortion. To stare at the truth — the fragility, the emptiness, the eventual death — would be unbearable. So we lie. We construct elaborate roles, identities, stories, not merely to deceive others but to comfort the self. The mask is the lullaby we sing to silence the horror of existence.
Yet the mask is also a tool of violence. To collaborate in a society of lies is to participate in the slow suffocation of truth. When the neighbor posts their carefully curated life, when the news anchor maintains his calm voice while covering blood, when the politician speaks of “freedom” while funding bombs — these are not neutral masks. They are weapons. They conceal atrocity. They enable atrocity. Humanity survives not despite lies but because of them, because each ape agrees to the theater, applauds the deception, and joins in the chorus.
What is more damning than a murderer? A society that smiles while it murders. The ape in his mask is always performing civility, but beneath the thin skin of words is the raw scream of an animal, jealous, violent, insatiable. And it is this duality — mask and ape, actor and beast — that defines what we call humanity.
The tragedy is not that we lie. The tragedy is that we cannot stop. The mask has fused to the flesh. If it were torn away, there would be nothing left but the ape — and the ape would go mad at the sight of itself.
Chapter 9: The Empire of Nightmares
America as a civilization of lies, Hollywood as its cathedral, and the world as its congregation.
America does not dream; America manufactures dreams. It is not a nation but a machine of hallucination, exporting lies as its primary currency. If Rome built aqueducts and Britain built ships, America built screens. And on those screens, it projected the nightmare it called a dream.
The so-called “American Dream” was never about freedom. It was always about spectacle — about the promise that you too could one day be the one doing the deceiving. That you, the worker, the immigrant, the poor, could one day own the mask, wear the crown, and sell your own lies. America democratized deception. It gave every ape the fantasy that he could ascend from the mud not through truth or dignity, but through the ability to convince others of his worth.
Hollywood is its cathedral, the temple where the lie becomes sacred. There, poverty is erased in the gleam of luxury, cruelty rewritten as romance, war sanctified as heroism. A Hollywood film is never just a film; it is scripture for the masses, recited in every language, consumed in every corner of the globe. And just like scripture, it offers both comfort and control. It tells you who to be, who to hate, what to desire, what to fear.
But America’s genius lies in its ability to make the nightmare appear as aspiration. The endless consumerism, the hollow celebrity culture, the politics performed as television drama — all of it is degradation packaged as triumph. The citizen is not invited to live truthfully, but to select their role in the spectacle. Do you wish to be the patriot? The rebel? The victim? The influencer? Choose your costume. The stage is ready. And while you act, the machinery of wealth and power — the true empire — continues uninterrupted behind the curtain.
What America exports is not freedom, but illusion. It exports the very ability to lie to oneself. The teenager in Cairo dreaming of Los Angeles, the worker in Manila wearing Nike, the student in Paris writing like Hemingway — all are participating in the American nightmare, wrapped in glamour, drenched in desire. America colonized the imagination. It owns the world’s subconscious.
And yet, in this empire of dreams, nightmares always seep through. The mass shootings, the police killings, the grotesque inequality — these are not accidents, but eruptions of the truth behind the mask. The nightmare insists on breaking into the spectacle. And still, the cameras roll, the commentators explain, the politicians perform. Even atrocity becomes content, another chapter in the never-ending theater.
If America were to vanish tomorrow, it would not leave a void of truth. It would leave a void of lies. The world would stagger, addicted to the spectacle, begging for another dream, another mask, another empire to whisper in the dark.
For America has never been a place. It has always been a screen. And the empire of nightmares has no borders. It lives wherever a human eye opens and asks to be deceived.
Chapter 10: The Last Truth
On sleep, dreams, and whether honesty exists only in nightmares.
There comes a moment, after all the noise, after all the lies, after all the grotesque carnival of manipulation, when silence arrives. It arrives not as peace, not as reconciliation, but as exhaustion. A human body can only consume so much deception before collapsing. And so it sleeps.
In sleep, there is no New York Times or Fox News, no YouTube or Hollywood, no algorithm deciding what to show you, no influencer begging for your finger, your attention, your soul. In sleep, the empire loses its grip. The screens go black. The masks fall. The actors stop speaking. There, perhaps, lies the only honest moment left in the human life.
And yet, even in dreams, truth is not guaranteed. The dream may still be another lie — an echo of power’s whispers, a residue of the day’s manipulations. But there is something in the nightmare that cannot be faked. When you wake in sweat, heart pounding, haunted by death or loss, you have touched a reality deeper than the carefully staged reality of waking life. The nightmare does not ask for clicks. It does not sell you ads. It does not invite applause. It terrifies because it shows you the truth: you are not free, you are not safe, you are not in control.
Perhaps that is why the nightmare is the last remaining honesty. It tells you what life really is: chaos, cruelty, fragility, despair. It tells you that beneath all the machinery of illusion, you are still naked, still mortal, still broken. And unlike the pundits, the preachers, and the prophets, the nightmare does not lie about that.
But what if truth survives only here, in this liminal darkness between sleep and waking? What if the waking world has become so thoroughly contaminated by lies that honesty can only be found in terror, in dream? Then truth is no longer a guide, no longer a light — it is a wound we carry, briefly revealed, only to be covered again by the daily costume of deception.
The Last Truth, then, is not some radiant revelation. It is not freedom, nor redemption, nor justice. It is the fleeting moment when the mask falls, when the ape stares at himself in the dark and recognizes what he is. It is unbearable, which is why the world must lie again in the morning.
And so the cycle continues. Awake, we lie. Asleep, we dream. And only in the nightmare do we see, for an instant, the naked face of truth.
—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.
