Before Room 101: Choosing Truth While We Still Can

Orwell, Renee Good, and the Death of Shared Truth

The video shows what happened. Yet people watching the same footage see two incompatible realities. Some see Renee Nicole Good trying to murder federal agents with her car, requiring them to shoot in self-defense. Others see ICE agents surrounding her vehicle, reaching through her window, blocking her exit, and shooting her when she tried to drive away.^¹ Federal officials labeled it “domestic terrorism.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, having watched the same footage, said plainly: “That is bullshit.”²

Both accounts claim to describe the same reality. Both cannot be true.

We’ve arrived at something worse than political polarization: We’re inhabiting fundamentally different realities. The collapse isn’t just political—it’s epistemological. We’ve lost our shared understanding of truth itself.

Pilate’s Question

When Jesus stood before Pilate facing execution, he made a startling claim about his purpose: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate’s response has echoed through two millennia: “What is truth?”³

Christian tradition reads this as cynical dismissal—the words of a man too jaded to recognize truth standing before him. But perhaps Pilate was asking the question we’re all asking now: In a world of competing claims and manufactured realities, how do we know what’s real?

The exchange reveals something crucial: Truth isn’t just information. It’s a relationship. Jesus doesn’t say “I have the truth” or “I know the truth.” He says he came to “testify to the truth” and that “everyone who belongs to the truth listens.” Truth requires witness. It demands participation. It can’t be possessed—only followed.

Pilate wanted to adjudicate truth like a referee. Jesus insisted truth is more like following a guide through unfamiliar territory—requiring trust, relationship, and willingness to be led beyond what you already think you know.

The War on Knowing

This week, the Trump administration released dietary guidelines that directly contradict decades of nutritional science. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced we’re “ending the war on saturated fats,” elevating red meat and full-fat dairy to the top of a new food pyramid while dismissing the overwhelming scientific consensus linking saturated fat to cardiovascular disease.⁴

Stanford nutrition expert Christopher Gardner, who served on the advisory committee that reviewed the evidence, was blunt: “I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid that features red meat and saturated fat sources at the very top, as if that’s something to prioritize. It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research.”⁵

But the assault runs deeper. Kennedy has spent years undermining vaccine science, promoting debunked autism links, and treating public health expertise with contempt. His appointment represents institutional capture by someone who rejects the premise that systematic inquiry can reveal reliable knowledge about the world.

The pattern is consistent: When evidence contradicts ideology, discard the evidence. When experts disagree with political goals, dismiss the experts. When reality itself becomes inconvenient, manufacture a new one.

Competing Realities

After Renee Good’s death, President Trump watched the video during a New York Times interview. His response: “I want to see nobody get shot. I want to see nobody screaming and trying to run over policemen either.” Hours later on Truth Social, he wrote that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.”⁶

The video shows no evidence of any officer being run over.⁷

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called it “an act of domestic terrorism” and claimed “a rise in vehicle-ramming attacks against federal officers nationwide.” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, who has no political reason to defend protesters, confirmed: “There’s nothing to indicate the shooting was justified.”⁸

This isn’t spin. Spin acknowledges a shared reality but argues for favorable interpretation. This is reality manufacturing—the insistence that a thing both is and is not, depending on which version serves power’s needs.

Room 101

George Orwell understood where this leads. In 1984, the totalitarian Party doesn’t just demand compliance—it demands that citizens genuinely believe whatever the Party declares true, even when contradicting observable reality. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”⁹

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history to match the Party’s current claims. But he still harbors private doubts. He knows two plus two equals four. He loves Julia.

The Party can’t tolerate even private dissent. They arrest Winston and Julia for “reeducation.” O’Brien—Winston’s torturer—makes clear what the Party demands: not just obedience, but genuine belief. Physical torture forces Winston to see five fingers when O’Brien holds up four. But that’s not enough.

They take him to Room 101—where prisoners confront their worst fear. For Winston, it’s rats. O’Brien brings a cage containing starving rats and explains they’ll attach it to Winston’s face. The cage door begins to open.

Winston breaks: “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me!”¹⁰

And he means it. In that moment, he genuinely wants the woman he loves to suffer in his place.

Julia went through the same process. She betrayed him too. When they meet again, both are broken. The novel ends with Winston genuinely loving Big Brother, genuinely believing the Party’s lies. Room 101 reached inside his mind and made him betray not just what he knew to be true, but who he loved.

The Cost of Unreality

When we lose shared truth, we lose the ability to solve shared problems. How do we address public health crises when half the country rejects medical expertise? How do we respond to shootings when we can’t agree on what the video shows? How do we confront the climate crisis when we can’t acknowledge what atmospheric science reveals? How do we govern when facts themselves become partisan?

The cost isn’t abstract. Renee Good is dead. Measles is resurgent because vaccine skepticism has become political identity. Americans will develop heart disease from dietary advice designed to placate meat and dairy lobbies rather than protect health. Children inherit a destabilizing planet because we couldn’t agree on whether climate science can be trusted.

These are real bodies bearing the cost of manufactured reality.

We’re not yet at Orwell’s dystopia—we don’t have Thought Police or Room 101. But we’re watching preliminary stages: normalizing contradictions of video evidence, elevating ideology over expertise, insisting that truth is whatever serves power’s interests.

The Methodist tradition talks about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as sources of wisdom.¹¹ All four matter. All four check and balance each other. When Scripture seems to contradict reason, we don’t discard reason—we dig deeper into both.

But this requires intellectual humility—acknowledging we might be wrong, that reality might not conform to our preferences, that truth exists independent of our wishes. The current moment demands the opposite: absolute certainty even when evidence points elsewhere, tribal loyalty over honest inquiry, winning arguments over discovering reality.

Belonging to Truth

Jesus told Pilate that “everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Note the direction: We don’t possess truth. We belong to it. We submit ourselves to reality rather than demanding reality submit to us.

This means accepting evidence even when inconvenient. It means trusting expertise while remaining open to its correction. It means changing our minds when facts demand it. Most dangerously for those in power, it means acknowledging truths that threaten our interests—that our government might lie about what videos show, that industries might lobby for guidelines serving profits over health.

Belonging to truth requires following where evidence leads, especially when it indicts systems we benefit from or leaders we’ve supported.

Winston Smith failed this test. Under extreme duress, he chose self-preservation over truth, over love, over his humanity. Orwell wrote 1984 as warning: This is where totalitarianism leads—to a world where power reaches inside your mind and makes you betray everything you know to be true.

The Way Forward

We start by refusing to gaslight each other. By insisting that words mean things. By acknowledging that videos show what they show, that science produces reliable if provisional knowledge, that expertise matters even when we don’t like its conclusions.

We reject the false choice between absolute certainty and complete relativism. Truth exists. We can know things. And our knowing is always partial, always requiring humility before the vastness of what we don’t yet understand.

When your MAGA relatives insist Renee Good tried to murder federal agents despite video evidence, you don’t have to accept their version. When politicians dismiss decades of nutritional science to serve their donor base, you don’t have to pretend both sides have equally valid perspectives.

But you do have to maintain relationship. You have to keep talking. You have to model what it looks like to hold convictions while admitting you could be wrong, to seek truth without demanding you already possess it.

Unlike Winston Smith, we’re not yet facing the rats. We still have freedom to choose truth over tribal loyalty. We can still insist on evidence. We can still trust our own eyes. We can still refuse to say two plus two equals five.

Pilate asked “What is truth?” then walked away without waiting for an answer. He had the power to kill the truth-teller, and he used it. But truth didn’t die on that cross. It kept speaking. It kept drawing people into relationship with reality. It kept exposing the manufactured certainties of empire.

We live in an age when power insists we accept its manufactured realities. Our resistance starts with the simple, subversive act of believing our own eyes. Of trusting that evidence matters. Of insisting that truth exists—however elusive, however contested, however complex—and demands our allegiance more than any political tribe.

The question isn’t whether we belong to MAGA or the resistance, to red America or blue. The question Jesus forces us to answer is simpler and more demanding: Do we belong to truth?

1. "Video Shows ICE Agent's Fatal Shooting of Civilian in Minneapolis," The Intercept, January 7, 2026, https://theintercept.com/2026/01/07/video-ice-shooting-civilian-minneapolis/; "Minneapolis woman Renee Nicole Good, 37, was killed in an ICE operation," Fox News, January 8, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/us/who-renee-nicole-good-woman-killed-minneapolis-ice-shooting.

2. "Federal agents clash with protesters in Minneapolis day after ICE officer fatally shoots woman," CBS News, January 8, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/live-updates/minneapolis-federal-agents-protesters-clash-portland-avenue/.

3. John 18:37-38, NRSV. All biblical quotations use the New Revised Standard Version translation.

4. "RFK Jr.'s new dietary guidelines end 'the war on saturated fats'," NPR, January 7, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/07/nx-s1-5667021/dietary-guidelines-rfk-jr-nutrition; "RFK Jr. rolls out new dietary guidelines backing more protein and full-fat dairy," NBC News, January 7, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-dietary-guidelines-protein-dairy-fat-rfk-jr-rcna252656.

5. "RFK, Jr., Upsets Food Pyramid, Urging Americans to Eat More Meat," Scientific American, January 7, 2026, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rfk-jr-upsets-food-pyramid-urging-americans-to-eat-more-meat/.

6. Fox News, January 8, 2026; CBS News, January 8, 2026.

7. The Intercept, January 7, 2026.

8. CBS News, January 8, 2026.

9. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), 81.

10. Orwell, 1984, 286.

11. The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2020-2024, ¶105, "Our Theological Task."