Suspend Your Disbelief—Things Really Are This Bad

From the Baby Organ Black Market to the End of America

Suspension of disbelief is the idea of “temporarily accept[ing] as believable events or characters that would ordinarily be incredible,” usually for the purpose of “appreciat[ing] works of literature or drama that are exploring unusual ideas.” The concept is particular to fiction, since non-fiction (by definition, it would seem) doesn’t contain unrealistic events or characters.

But given the very real cultural descent into madness in recent years, I’m increasingly finding the need to suspend my disbelief not about fiction, but about reality—and not in order to “appreciate” it, but in order to come to grips with just how sideways things have gotten.

I’m apparently not alone in this. For years, conservatives have joked about how we now live in an alternative timeline, a “clown world,” where satire continually predicts reality. Unfortunately, the joke is getting less and less funny.

A Black Market for Baby Organs

One recent example of real-life news that boggles the mind was the lead story in Project 18:15 two weeks ago.

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