Infauxtainment

          One night my wife and I turned on the evening news to catch up on the world—wars, elections, maybe the weather. Instead, we got a ten-minute feature about a grandmother in Iowa who bakes muffins shaped like presidential pets.
 

     I rolled my eyes. “We must have stumbled onto Pimp My Pastry.”
 

     My wife didn’t laugh.
 

     “Wow,” she whispered, “that really puts things in perspective.”
 

     Apparently, I’ve been doing perspective wrong all these years. For me—and a lot of other alternauts—information isn’t just an obligatory break between heartwarming human-interest stories. It’s the coin of the realm. I don’t turn on the news to be calmed by a segment about beagle-shaped banana bread. I want to know why the Arctic is on fire and Texas is underwater.
 

     I found a news station that was reporting a horrid civil war developing in northeastern Africa. It wasn’t the tragedy that tightened my chest. It was the narrator’s steady, reassuring voice—the one that I use to explain proper mulch placement.
 

     I didn’t feel soothed. I felt like somebody had translated missives from the front lines into fortune cookie slips while whistling “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.
 

     I gave up on the news and handed the remote to my wife. Flipping through the channels, she briefly landed on a show where over-cosmetized adult toddlers with names like Blaze, Kandii, and Emberleigh were locked in a house, forced to eat spiders for prize money, and then asked to form lifelong romantic commitments based on how well they prepared risotto in a straitjacket.
 

     My wife gasped when Kandii walked out of the room.
 

     “Oh no,” she said. “Blaze was really trying.”
 

     “It’s a TV show.”
 

     “They’re real people.”
 

     “They’re lit like a dental commercial.”
 

     She didn’t look away from the screen.
 

     I have an autistic friend who’s watched every episode of Survivor since the pilot first aired—back when reality was still considered real. But when he talks about it, he’s rattling off vote-outs, weather patterns, torch counts. It’s data.
 

     My wife, on the other hand, was tracking Blaze and Kandii’s emotional arc like it might affect our retirement nest egg.
 

     I, on the other hand, can barely keep up with the personal lives of my closest friends and relatives. Half the time I’m not even sure how many kids my brother has. So there’s just no room in my brain to care whether some attention-deprived millennial whose name sounds like an artisanal candle feels “seen” while toasting rice.
 

     I asked my wife if we could watch something else. She sighed and tossed me the remote, sensing that Emberleigh might set off my emergency stimming protocols.
 

     In retrospect, I realized that show at least had drama—even if it was manufactured, edited, and staged in a mansion full of cameras and boom mics. Because now we found ourselves watching a couple we didn’t know, shopping for homes we couldn’t afford, in some town we’d never heard of.
 

     And somehow, my wife seemed enthralled watching Bryce and Kaylee, this week’s guests on Tile & Error, bicker about subway backsplash like the fate of civilization hangs in the grout.
 

     I started clicking the remote, perhaps a bit too fervently, flipping through several channels of celebrity gossip. The names changed but the gossip never did: someone was dating, someone got divorced, and someone was showing off their post-baby body.
 

     My leg was bouncing. This wasn’t just noise—it was recycled noise.
 

     My wife asked me to stay on a channel showing photos from a celebrity wedding. But my jaw started clenching at the force-fed trivia. I just can’t seem to care about photogenic primates who own yachts with pun-based names. And yet there are people who can’t remember their spouse’s middle name but can recite a Kardashian’s skincare routine like it’s scripture.
 

     So I switched back to the news, hoping to get some investigative reporting—the kind that dug up facts, cross-checked sources, and left me knowing more than when I started. I was smart this time. I brought out my laptop so I could at least be color-coding my spreadsheets during the heartwarming features.
 

     Suddenly, some anchor-bot with impeccable hair breathlessly interrupted and announced “breaking news” with the urgency of a nuclear war.
 

     I dropped the laptop, tripped over the charging cable, and cranked up the volume—only to hear him report that Taylor Swift was overheard requesting no croutons on her salad.
 

     I groaned like a wounded water buffalo.
 

     My wife tried to be helpful. “You don’t have to treat everything like an emergency.”
 

     I just kept clicking, burning through the channels until I found one promising political analysis. They were discussing a bill going through Congress that could radically impact the fate of the universe. But instead of telling me what was in the bill, the coverage consisted of a “he said, she said” book report read as dinner theater. 
 

     “Democrats claim it will bring fairness and dignity to all life, while Republicans warn it will force taxpayers to fund gender-affirming surgery for woke pets.”
 

     And that was the entire segment, followed by a teaser about a bodysurfing beaver before cutting to a commercial for boner pills.
 

     I surrendered the remote to my wife on my way out and defected to the Internet. I discovered that solid news still existed. I just had to dig a little: past the clickbait, behind the paywalls, under the cookie banners, and through a thicket of screaming headlines and algorithm-fueled outrage. But it paid off. A few brave outlets still believed in journalistic integrity—you know, citing sources, disclosing who funded the research, and that sort of thing.
 

     I’d name them here, but odds are they got shut down, deplatformed, or sued into oblivion before I finished this sentence.
 

     It wasn’t like I could relax once I learned to sniff out credible information. It turns out that the people making the big decisions—laws, budgets, missile launches—seem to struggle with the difference between a peer-reviewed study and a TikTok rant from someone named “CrystalVibes420.”
 

     Maybe it’s just my autistic obsession with sanity, but I worry when a non-zero number of elected officials genuinely believe the Earth is flat, birds are government surveillance drones, and lizard people secretly run the United Nations—which, to be fair, would explain their obsession with climate change and cricket protein.
 

     For a while, I tried to be helpful. I tried to school people on how to apply reason and evaluate sources.
 

     Like when I asked the chatterbox repairing my furnace, “How did your cousin’s boyfriend find time to uncover the Illuminati between plumbing jobs?”
 

     Or the time I replied to a Reddit post, “If the moon is fake, then what’s been yanking the ocean around all these years?”
 

     I wasn’t trying to win a debate—just scatter a few sprinkles of doubt. I hoped it might grow into curiosity. Or at least give pause before anyone sent me a link to an article titled “The Shocking Truth Big Toothpaste Doesn’t Want You to Know.”
 

     But I finally gave up my pedagogic pronouncements after a conversation with Carl from procurement. I walked into the breakroom where he was microwaving salmon and watching a vodcast on his phone. He summoned me over as if to share a secret about the boss’s sex toy preferences.
 

     “You see this?” Carl said, angling the phone toward me. “They’ve been lying to us about fluoride.”
 

     I leaned over, glanced at the phone.
 

     “Carl. You may want to get independent verification for anything shouted by a shirtless guy in a Jeep.”
 

     “Oh, I have. Look at this.” He queued up another video.
 

     “You should probably ignore anything, no matter how plausible it sounds, if it involves Gwyneth Paltrow.”
 

     “This is backed by science!” He scrolled furiously, then pushed the phone in my face.
 

     “That guy is selling brain gummies. For $149.99 a bottle.”
 

     “He’s a scientist.”
 

     “He’s a guy wearing a lab coat over a flannel shirt. How many scientists wear John Deere caps?”
 

     Carl pivoted.
 

     “You know fluoride was originally used by the Nazis to keep people docile, right?”
 

     “That’s not true,” I sighed. “Fluoride was introduced in U.S. water systems to reduce cavities. There’s no verified connection to Nazis.” 
 

     “That’s what they tell you,” he muttered.
 

     “Who’s ‘they’?”
 

     “Big Pharma. The dental-industrial complex. Probably the CDC.”
 

     “Do you really believe the CDC and toothpaste companies are coordinating mass psychological control through municipal tap water?”
 

     “Exactly.”
 

      “Okay.” And that’s when I decided to have some fun.
 

      “Hey Carl. Have you ever thought about yogurt?”
 

     “Yogurt?”
 

     “Yes. It contains ‘active cultures.’ You don’t find that phrasing suspicious?”
 

     “I mean…”
 

     “I read that certain strains of bacteria—L. acidophilus, in particular—have been trained to detect voting patterns.”
 

     Carl’s eyebrows lifted, so I continued. “Once they reach critical mass in the gut, they subtly bias your preferences toward lifestyle branding and home scent diffusers.”
 

     I ended on one final piece of advice: “You should switch to pudding. It’s inert.”
 

     Carl tilted his head like a dog hearing its name on TV.

 

     “Chocolate?”
 

     But I should have been more careful. Carl, naturally, did his own “research” (on Reddit, of course) and found dozens of like-minded individuals who had always suspected something sinister about yogurt. Over the next few days, threads multiplied, TikToks went viral, and a full-blown movement erupted on X under the hashtag #CultureWarriors—demanding probiotic transparency, gut sovereignty, and an immediate end to fermented oppression.
 

     Within a month, supermarket yogurt sales plummeted, the Greek economy collapsed, and a minor skirmish broke out at a Whole Foods in Des Moines.
 

     I should have known.
 

     Carl switched to pudding.
 

     Gwyneth Paltrow is thriving.
 

     My wife and I don’t watch TV together anymore.
 

     And somewhere in Iowa, a grandmother is piping buttercream onto a Labradoodle.