The Missing Amendment: Freedom of Reality
Restoring order to American democracy requires a new framing of the Constitution and the political system
Amendment Zero
Facts and truth being necessary to good judgment, the freedom of the people to an unaltered reality shall not be infringed.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution, whatever their flaws may have been, created the most successful democracy that ever existed. Whether it will be the final proof that democracy itself is a failure to history remains to be seen. But I want to offer a simple reason that I think our Experiment is currently failing, and a solution. Let’s call it Amendment Zero.
There is one human right the Framers could not have understood would be necessary to protect in the 18th century: The Freedom of Reality. What I mean by this is the right of citizens to be told the truth by the government, and by the press — and to be protected from organized, harmful lying.
It must be a basic right in a free, democratic country to understand the world as it exists, instead of as a few elites choose for people to see it. It cannot be that Thomas Jefferson or James Madison would have looked at the White House Twitter account and thought, “OK, that looks about right.” They would have immediately asked what the hell went so terribly wrong.
It is the freedom to possess an unaltered picture of the world that has been infringed upon as a diabolical hack around the Bill of Rights and the Constitution — through the novel technology of radio, television, and networked computing devices, which, like a novel virus, have attached themselves as close to our brains as they can get.
It is not a coincidence that if Elon Musk has his way, these devices will be surgically connected.
“You’ll like the chip. I guarantee it.”
When Reagan allowed the Fairness Doctrine to expire, enabling lie factories like Fox News to grow unimpeded like tumors in the body politic, it weakened democracy’s immune system. Countless commutes to work listening to Rush Limbaugh, or lunch breaks on an Army base with Fox on, captured enough people in a false reality to enable a party increasingly run by billionaires, theocrats, and foreign agents to invest in controlling the means by which information itself is transmitted — making it far more efficient and effective to alter reality to benefit themselves.
Last night, after watching 60 Minutes, the President of the United States, who is already suing Paramount for $20 billion over coverage of the campaign, and entered into settlement talks with CBS, announced he wants to take their broadcast license away over an interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy — and a story about Greenland he didn’t like. This is the intentional altering of reality by the federal government.
There is a reason that the only profession protected by the Constitution is the press. The Framers knew that in order to make good decisions for themselves, the People needed information, and that the information could not controlled by the government. Good judgment, “the ability to come to sensible conclusions,” is taken away from citizens when the information they receive is intentionally wrong.
“Social media” is the broad term for a methodology of transmitting messages from person to person through networked computing devices in a collective forum. The Framers could not have known such a technology would exist, much less that it could be used as a weapon to alter the reality of the People such that it would be impossible for them to make good judgments — for themselves, and for the country.
Donald Trump, a deviant psychopath manifestly damaging to the well-being of the People, was voted in by the People because their realities have been systematically altered, making it impossible for them to use their judgment freely. A letter from the White House doctor about Donald Trump’s health yesterday provides another small example.
The political system created by the Framers has been overwhelmed by an external threat they could not have anticipated. The system of checks and balances has been replaced by a system of organized lying designed to change people’s minds for them.
The government, the press, and the technology we use to perceive the world no longer delivers a transparent view through which the People can formulate their own decisions. Instead, we have been trapped in a multivariate Truman Show that delivers an alternate reality which only serves the elites who created it.
A new, modern democracy is required, one that protects the right of the People to see the world through clear eyes, and to be able to make good judgments with facts, truth and reality, unaltered.
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Hi Jim, Is there a way to print out your articles? I want to write my own summary and have print outs of yours to make copies in case they’re removed from the internet.
I set up a book club to start with “On Tyrrany” & want to discuss your work. Lmk.
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Jennifer
Let’s be clear: Manufacturing Consent wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint; we’ve lived in its footnotes for 40 years. Chomsky and Herman told us exactly how media conglomerates, corporate advertisers, and state interests would collude to launder propaganda through "respectable" channels. What they didn’t fully anticipate was the algorithm. The megaphone became a mirror, feeding each of us a bespoke hallucination until consensus was shattered, fact-checkers were framed as agents, and truth became just one influencer’s opinion.
Now, enter Stewartson’s Amendment Zero — a demand for the Freedom of Reality, the right to inhabit a shared world governed by observable truth rather than precision-engineered delusion. It's not just philosophical; it’s survival logic.
Here’s the real kicker: the First Amendment protects the right to speak, but we never enshrined the right to know. That’s the fatal gap that allowed disinformation to metastasize unchecked while billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk monetized mass psychosis.
This didn’t start with Trump. He’s just the most obvious symptom of a reality-distorting virus that’s been cultivated since Reagan suffocated the Fairness Doctrine and let corporate broadcasters whisper whatever they wanted into America’s ear.
We’re not just uninformed; we’re misinformed by design.
We don’t need digital literacy campaigns. We need a firewall between public cognition and private manipulation. Because when “the People” are fed falsehoods with the same cadence and confidence as gospel, democracy becomes a rigged game of make-believe, and fascists always write the script.
So yes, we need a Zeroth Amendment.
A right to unfiltered, uninterfered-with truth.
A right to make judgments based on reality, not weaponized fantasy.
Until then, every election is a lie dressed in red, white, and bullshit.