There’s No Gravity Left in American Politics

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Given everything happening this week, I keep thinking about how easily the MAGA movement can manufacture a lie and watch it take over the national conversation. It’s maddening.

I’m not going to linger again on Donald Trump’s DOJ targeting my company on the “strength” of Laura Loomer’s conspiracy theory reporting, but there’s a pattern here worth diagnosing — because once you see it, you understand how insane our discourse has become.

Politicians have always lied. There have always been grifters and shameless people who see our politics as a way to grab money or power. I’m not naïve about that.

What’s different now is that there’s no accountability. When someone is caught lying or cheating or stealing, nothing pulls it back to earth — no consequence proportional to the lie, no price for the cruelty, no cost for being deliberately full of shit.

There is no gravity left in American politics.

Start with what happened to Dean Withers this week, a fellow YouTuber I’ve never met. From what he’s laid out on Instagram, a MAGA operative built a fake profile using photos of a real thirteen-year-old girl and invented a sexual assault out of thin air to burn his reputation down.

I want to be careful — these are serious allegations, and I always lean toward believing victims. But the evidence he’s presented that this “victim” never existed looks credible.

What do you have to believe about the world to steal a child’s face and accuse someone of raping her? That you’ll get away with it.

And you might — because there’s no gravity.

Take the NYT story this weekend that Trump’s DOJ opened an investigation into my business. We’ll fight it, and it’ll be fine — but understand the pattern, because you’ll see it everywhere: the lie doesn’t have to become true anymore. It just has to activate something.

A fake allegation activates an algorithm. A bogus report activates the police. A smear activates the media. Loomer’s “reporting” apparently gets the Department of Justice poking around my business — and suddenly the person being lied about is the one spending their money, reputation, and sanity proving that something that never happened never happened.

The liar gets five minutes. The victim gets lawyers, legal fees, and anguish. We’ve transferred the cost of the lie from the liar to the person they lied about.

Six weeks ago I wrote about Pete Buttigieg, after someone falsely reported him to CPS for abusing his four-year-old twins. The allegation was bullshit, but the process it triggered was very real — as it should be when allegations are that serious. Police showed up. His kids were sent to their grandparents.

I called that piece “This is how they pick us off,” because this cruelty doesn’t just hurt the target — it scares good people out of public life. Somebody watches what happened to Pete and decides that running for school board isn’t worth putting their family through it.

Here’s the half I missed the first time. It’s not quite right that there are no consequences. There are. We’ve just gotten very good at making the victims pay them.

Pete paid. Dean is paying, in death threats. I’m paying. What are the people manufacturing this shit paying? Where’s the accountability for the person who reported Pete to CPS? Where’s the accountability for Loomer?

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Go back to 2024. Vance and Trump invented a lie about immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets, and millions swallowed it whole because it flattered the ugliest corner of the internet. Vance went on national television that weekend and admitted out loud that he’ll invent stories to jerk the media around.

What happened to him? Nothing. The media thanked him and booked him for the next hit. The lasting legacy of that lie isn’t that JD Vance is a grotesque liar — it’s a catchy TikTok song stuck in my head.

That’s what covering politics like sports does: Jon Ossoff gets dinged for name-dropping Trump’s alleged mistress in a speech — too far, below the belt — while the other side fabricates a child’s sexual assault to annihilate one of our most effective activists.

These things are not equivalent, and pretending they are is how we got here.

I’m done fighting with one hand tied behind my back, and you should be too. And before someone deliberately misunderstands me: I’m not saying we become them. I’m saying we stop pretending we’re playing the same game.

That’s what I mean by the next version of the Democratic Party — one willing to throw a punch, for the people it loves and the Americans the MAGA machine poisons every day.

You don’t beat a lie by lying harder. You beat it by refusing to reward it — by calling bullshit bullshit, by imposing consequences, by restoring some gravity.

Because a system without consequences doesn’t just tolerate liars — it selects for them. If lying costs nothing, you get more liars. If cruelty makes you famous, you get more cruelty. If shamelessness buys followers and TV contracts, you get more shameless people chasing power. And if decency means your kids get threatened and your life gets turned upside down because someone with an internet connection made something up, decent people decide it isn’t worth it.

That’s how you get the Tate brothers, George Santos, Donald Trump. What kind of person thrives where shame is a disadvantage and shamelessness is a strategy?

So how do we fix it? There’s no one neat policy — government, courts, media, platforms, parties, and you all have a role. But the principle is the same: consequences again.

If Dean can find whoever did this, he should sue them for everything they own, and the platforms that spread it should pay too. When you destroy a life with a lie, that lie should cost you something. I hope Hasan Piker sues Scott Jennings and Fox News for the lies they’ve told about him. I’ve been thinking hard about my own options against Laura Loomer, and it’s a hard road — which tells you exactly where the burden sits.

Six weeks ago I told you this is how they pick us off. This is the other half: this is how the worst people replace them. It’s how you get Trump.

A system without gravity created the conditions for him, and getting rid of him won’t be enough, because the incentives that produced him will still be there, waiting for the next guy.

Nothing changes until there are consequences again.

Nothing changes until gravity comes back.