The Boy Who Cried Wolf—and Broke Democracy
How disinformation, emotional manipulation, and strategic deceit threaten our ability to act collectively.
You know the story of the boy who cried wolf. He lies so often that when the wolf finally shows up, no one believes him. His warnings are just noise.
It feels like we’re living in that village now, in a world where lies travel faster than truth and our trust in anything, and anyone, is worn paper-thin. In this age of viral rumors and calculated deceit, fighting back isn’t just about pointing out the wolves. It’s about trying to rebuild the very voice that warns us they’re coming. And the stakes today are a lot higher than a few sheep.
This isn’t new, but it kicked into high gear during the Trump years, when lying felt like it became the official language of the government. Fact-checkers counted a staggering 30,000 false or misleading statements during his first term alone. This was a strategy. Cabinet members and surrogates would repeat and amplify the same distortions, creating a dizzying feedback loop until it was hard to know what was real. The result is a culture of dishonesty that has seeped from the highest office into our daily lives.
Take climate change. Trump once claimed sea levels would rise only an eighth of an inch in 500 years, dismissing decades of scientific consensus. After a hurricane ravaged the Southeast, he called climate change “one of the greatest scams of all time.” He’d mock the term “global warming” because “some places are cooling,” and in a truly grotesque twist, he even claimed rising seas would just create “more oceanfront property.”
Or look at the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the centerpiece of his second-term agenda. He sold it as a bill that eliminated taxes on Social Security—a lie so bold that even the Social Security Administration repeated it in a mass email. The reality? The bill offered a temporary tax credit while slashing funding for Medicaid and food stamps, all while being projected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit.
The lies about immigration have been some of the most poisonous. During the campaign, both Trump and Vance pushed the vile, baseless rumor that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. He blamed immigrants for the housing crisis, even when the economic data showed the opposite. He claimed FEMA couldn’t help hurricane victims because the money was being diverted to migrants. That led to masked raids, detentions without warrants, and the constant threat of mass deportations, even for legal immigrants.
When lying becomes official policy, the truth starts to feel optional for everyone. It leaves you wondering: What’s real? What’s propaganda? This constant erosion of trust is catastrophic. It weakens our institutions, divides our communities, and leaves us all vulnerable to manipulation. Like the villagers in the fable, we’re at risk of ignoring a real crisis because we’ve been burned by so many false alarms.
But we aren’t helpless. We can fight back, starting by demanding the facts. Resources like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes are out there doing the hard work, offering nonpartisan analysis that helps us cut through the noise.
We also have to get smarter about how we consume information. It’s about recognizing when you’re being played. When you see language designed to make you angry or afraid—gaslighting, guilt-tripping, playing the victim—that’s a red flag. The same goes for clickbait. We all know that a headline promising “You won’t believe what happened next…” is almost always followed by something you shouldn’t have bothered believing in the first place. Media literacy is just a fancy term for knowing how to spot the con.
Most importantly, we have to be loud about the truth. We need to challenge the nonsense we hear from friends or see in our feeds. Share verified facts. Support independent media, not because it’s slick, but because it’s solid. When you post something, link to your sources. Engage with the good stuff, comment on and share the articles that elevate the truth, not the trash.
The boy in the story lost his sheep because he treated the truth like a toy. We stand to lose so much more: our democracy, our grip on reality, our ability to solve problems together. But unlike the villagers, we don’t have to just walk away, cynical and defeated. We can choose to listen, to check, and to speak up.
This is a crisis happening in our neighborhoods, our school boards, and our family group chats. If the scale of the lies feels overwhelming, start small. Start local. Speak the truth.
In the end, democracy doesn’t die when the wolf is at the door. It dies when no one believes the warning.