Here’s the thing about our politics right now: the biggest moments often never happened. Not in a studio, not on a stage, not anywhere outside a creator’s editing suite and your feed. This week’s “showdown” between Senator John Kennedy and New York Assemblymember Zohran Kwame Mamdani—complete with a gold-embossed folder, a primetime Hannity slot, and a mic-drop line about trust funds—was one of those moments. It read like a screenplay and spread like breaking news. And yet, there was no broadcast. No folder. No silence on set. Just a highly engineered piece of political fan-fiction that found the exact pulse of what audiences crave: clean lines, rich villains, and a hero who never stumbles over his syllables.

If you’ve covered this beat long enough, the mechanics are familiar. You can spot the cinematic tricks at fifty yards. The invented pause for drama. The prop with a tidy label. The specificity that feels like reporting—$14,000 rents, $61,000 tuition, 47 flights, a roll call of brands—because a precise number wears the costume of truth. It’s old-fashioned prestidigitation. You don’t notice the trick because you’re enjoying the performance.

Why does this stuff travel? Start with catharsis. In an age when actual accountability is slow, procedural, and allergic to spectacle, people want fast justice and a punchline. They want their side’s champion to land a clean hit on the archetype they’ve learned to hate. That’s the psychology that makes these fictions hum: confirmation bias greased by craft. No need to verify when the arc matches the emotion in your chest.

Then there’s the packaging. Political fiction today borrows the grammar of sports highlights and courtroom TV. A face-off, some heat, a reveal, a blow. Social platforms reward volatility, and volatility loves scripts. Real hearings drone. Real policy is full of caveats, cost estimates, footnotes nobody reads. But a seven-second studio silence? That’s catnip. It’s also a tell. The world doesn’t hand out silence that clean.

You don’t need a conspiracy to explain the reach. You need algorithms doing their boring, consistent job. Outrage expands the radius. Familiar names—Hannity, Kennedy, a progressive foil—supply credibility cues. The more the clip cycles, the more “true” it feels. Familiarity bias is undefeated. By the time a fact-checker shows up, the crowd has already moved on, secure in its memory of a thing that never happened.

I’m not here to scold satire. Satire declares itself and earns its laughs. This genre is different. It uses real people without consent, assigns them manufactured lines, then releases the scene into the wild unlabeled. It’s theater dressed as journalism, and the harm is simple: we spend time arguing about ghosts while the real stuff—budgets, bills, the drudgery that shapes lives—waits outside like a cab no one wants to take.

To be fair, the ground was already softened. The culture has been warming to a WWE version of politics for years. We import the framing: babyface vs. heel, signature moves, finishing blows. We judge moments as wins or losses. In this ring, a laminated folder is not absurd; it’s merch. So a fictional Kennedy becomes the plain-spoken Southern truth-teller with a blade under the drawl. A fictional Mamdani morphs into the eager progressive punching above his weight, rich hypocrisy hidden in his gym bag. None of it asks you to understand policy or history. It asks you to choose a jersey.

There’s a quieter cost that never makes the viral graphics. Real people become caricatures first and punching bags second. The portrayal lingers even after the debunk lands. You can feel the residue in conversations, in town halls, in the way a constituent frames a question they’re sure is grounded in “that clip I saw.” It’s hard enough to do politics with imperfect facts. Try doing it with invented scenes.

So what’s left besides shaking our heads? Some basic hygiene that takes discipline. Ask if any reputable outlet ran the segment. Look for video, not a screenshot of text framed in red boxes. Check whether the claimed audience numbers sound like primetime or like a teenage fantasy of virality. Pay attention to tone. If it reads like a screenplay treatment, it probably is. If it name-drops kitchen brands, private jets, and Hamptons parcels like the world’s pettiest audit, you’re not reading reporting. You’re reading wish fulfillment.

I can hear the counterargument: lighten up, it’s just content. But politics is one of the few human projects where “just content” becomes law. Narratives move voters. Voters choose legislators. Legislators mark up the world. In that chain, fiction isn’t harmless. It’s a solvent. It erodes the shared floorboards. When reality arrives with receipts, the crowd shrugs. They didn’t come for receipts. They came for the feeling.

Let’s also be honest about why the fictional showdown worked as a story. It put a neat bow on simmering anxieties about class and authenticity. The “trust-fund progressive” is a sticky trope on the right because it speaks to a real resentment: the sense that moral sermons are cheaper when rent is paid by somebody else. Is that fair to every progressive? No. Is it effective? Absolutely. It turns nuance into a T-shirt. The thread count is high enough to sell.

There is a responsible way to channel that critique. Do the boring thing. Look at campaign finance filings, donor networks, legislative records, who benefits in the footnotes of a bill. Follow the money the old-fashioned way. You may even find something worth the outrage. But that takes time, and time is the one thing viral creators can’t afford. They need a climax by the end of the swipe.

If you want a rule of thumb, here’s mine: any political clip that makes you feel like you just watched an athlete dunk should be quarantined for twelve hours. Real governance rarely dunks. It grinds. If a moment flatters your priors so perfectly that you can already hear the soundtrack, it’s trying to rent space in your head without a security deposit.

As for Kennedy and Mamdani, they’ll go on doing what elected officials do—some mix of real work and real performance. They’ll give speeches you don’t see, sit through hearings you won’t watch, cast votes that matter more than a scripted zinger. The fan-fiction version of them will keep sprinting past the truth because it’s lighter and shinier and doesn’t trip over contradicting facts. The platforms will help. They always do.

I don’t expect the genre to fade. It meets demand too neatly. But we can make it less profitable by starving it of free labor. Stop quote-tweeting the bait with performative skepticism. Don’t dunk on fakes; starve them. If you’re going to share, share the correction with the same energy you reserve for the clapback. Boring? Yes. Effective? Over time, also yes.

Here’s the part I can’t sugarcoat: this is the media ecosystem we built. Not them. Us. With our clicks, our cravings, our reflex to believe the most emotionally satisfying version of the story. We can keep living in the loop, where fiction wins the morning and facts limp in after lunch. Or we can rebuild some muscle memory for verification, for patience, for the slightly unsexy work of caring whether a thing is true before we use it to bludgeon the other side.

A showdown that never happened told us something real about the moment we’re in. The line between news and spectacle didn’t just blur; we smudged it on purpose because the spectacle was more fun. If we want it back, we have to draw it ourselves—one decision at a time, one non-share at a time, one long exhale before we hit post. Not righteous. Just adult. Which, in this climate, might be the most radical pose left.