Over the past decade or so there have been distinct moments when reality seemed like it was on the ropes, when obvious falsehoods paraded as fact and fictions dressed in the finery of truth.
From assertions that Joe Biden is actually an adroit mental gymnast, to men towering over women at swim meets, to mug shots of "black skinned white people," we were told all of this was normal, and real.
But at Thursday night's presidential debate something very rare these days happened, both sides looked at a political event, in this case the implosion of Joe Biden's candidacy, and all saw the same thing, that the president is unfit for office.
Up until the bizarre display from the president in Atlanta, he had always managed to squeak by, getting through the State of the Union or mumbling his way through his few and far between press conferences.
Even when the evidence of his mental feebleness was on unaltered legitimate video, such as wandering off in a field at a meeting of the G7, the White House condescendingly told us that it was "cheap fakes," and there was nothing to see here.
Well, there was sure as hell something to see on Thursday night, and if your last name is Biden then not a moment of it was good; the staring into space, the confusion, in fact almost a sense of fear from the commander in chief.
There was no way around what we all saw, it would be like trying to spin the great Pyramid of Giza.
This is good news, because it was looking touch and go for a while if reality could mount a comeback, after all, almost every lever of every institution from Big Tech that fills our phones to colleges that fill our minds were pushing progressive lies left and right.
But Biden's desperate condition is not the only area where the sunlight of truth is slipping through the dark clouds of progressive obfuscation.
Poll after poll finds that more and more Americans believe that sex is determined biologically, not by the belief a person has about their own gender, and that is hardly surprising as they see the real life impact of the trans movement.
The utter unfairness of men competing with women in sports is only a small part of it, there are also the issues of prisons, shelters, and kids, this is no longer a question of just being polite, the trans movement is clearly pushing a dangerous lie to our children, one that puts women in danger as well.
Americans are also waking up to the profound truth that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies are a race-obsessed solution to a problem that doesn't exist, namely that our society is virulently racist.
This is why companies like Tractor Supply Co., and even many universities are cutting back harshly on DEI programs, the fever is breaking, everyone is again embracing the reality that racial discrimination is bad no matter who it is against.
Much like the polite acquiescence over trans ideology, this acceptance of the idea that America is steeped in bigotry was born of a desire to keep one's head down, after all, questioning the existence of rabid racism is exactly what a rabid racist would do, right?
But at a certain point the small polite lies start to gather, grow heavier, become more untenable until they simply unravel before our eyes as Joe Biden did on Thursday night.
Perhaps the greatest loss of the fractured digital age with its thousands of streams and algorithms tailoring our experiences is the loss of a sense of shared reality. Today, no matter how absurd one's ideas, there is someone online with half decent production values willing to pitch it.
Don't get me wrong, I am not ready to forgive and forget in regard to a corporate media that has lied so much for a decade that trust in journalism is at used car salesman levels, but the reaction to Thursday's debacle was a step in the right direction.
America cannot fix the problems it faces which are myriad and global, unless we do so in a shared reality, unless words have the same definitions for all of us, unless true and false are real and meaningful ideas.
Reality is making a comeback, it is winning again, and as we try to piece back a country that has been so bitterly divided for a decade or more, that victory simply cannot come too soon.
