My brother Kenny has a friend named Jimmy Greene, a jazz musician like himself. I’ve never met him, but back in 2012, Kenny told me that Greene’s six-year-old daughter, Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, was one of the 20 children and 6 teachers killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14 of that year. Out of grief and love for his daughter, Jimmy Greene recorded an album dedicated to her memory and titled, “Beautiful Life.” The album includes a recording of Ana’s voice singing in her church choir. He and his wife, Nelba Márquez-Greene, have also sponsored a nonprofit foundation in her honor, the Ana Grace Project, which promotes love, community and connection between children and families.
I remember buying copies of “Beautiful Life” when it was released and sharing the album with friends and family. I think sometimes about Ana Grace and the dignity with which her family has grieved while celebrating her life. I thought about this most recently, with special sadness, following the recent shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kirk’s murder was horrific. Sandy Hook Promise, an organization led by the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, responded with a dignified statement deploring the violence that killed him and other victims in recent shooting incidents. Many of Kirk’s supporters used his death to make more political declarations. Some of my conservative family members (cousins, aunts and uncles) joined a family text chat to express their belief that Kirk was a wonderful human being and a martyr. I have a different opinion of him, because I am familiar with Kirk’s history of support for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who subjected the survivors of Sandy Hook and the families of the murder victims to years of harassment and slander. On the MediaMatters website, you can find a video of Kirk fawning over Jones as a guest on Kirk’s podcast.
Jones spent years claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre did not even happen, that the victims did not exist, and that their parents and other survivors were “crisis actors” paid to create a “false flag” incident as a pretext for gun control. This is ludicrous, and anyone who cares enough to spend even a little time looking at the facts has to know it is ludicrous. We don’t just have the words of Jimmy Greene and the other families of the victims. The massacre was reported by news media, by police and other first responders at the scene. The horrors of that day have been described by survivors of the attack, by Sandy Hook school administrators, by an FBI agent, and numerous other witnesses. Even Jones himself, after years of maligning the victims’ families, belatedly admitted that the massacre was “100% real” when they successfully sued him for $1.4 billion in damages.
Charlie Kirk was not stupid, and he was certainly capable of informing himself about the facts of the massacre. Instead, he invited Jones on his show on multiple occasions and nodded along sympathetically as Jones painted himself as a martyr for free speech and claimed that he merely made a mistake on one “25-minute” segment of his show. This too was a lie. As the Sandy Hook families proved in their lawsuit, Jones repeated his claims that the massacre was a hoax on numerous occasions, over a period of years. He actively incited his millions of listeners to “investigate,” and he sent people in his employ to harass the Sandy Hook victims at public meetings and at their homes and places of work. The families, including the Greenes, endured harassment including death threats and physical confrontations. Strange men acting at Jones’s behest videotaped their children. The stalking was so severe that some of the families had to flee their homes and go into hiding.
“The only thing worse than losing a child in a mass shooting in America is having to live the rest of your life defending that she’s actually gone.”
Nelba Marquez-Greene, Ana’s mother
Like the massacre itself, Jones’s campaign of lies is well-documented, and Charlie Kirk could not possibly have been unaware of it. It is hard for me to believe that a good person would promote Alex Jones in the way that Charlie Kirk did on his podcast on multiple occasions. I think he invited Jones onto his show because he wanted the support and money that he could garner from Jones’s misguided followers.
For this reason, I cannot agree with my family members and other people who see Kirk as some kind of saintly martyr. I kept silent about this on the family chat because I did not think it would change anyone’s mind, and I didn’t see the point in starting an argument. However, it did make me think a bit while I was reading Steven Pinker’s book, When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows, which explores the concept of “common knowledge.” The concept refers to knowledge that is not only shared but commonly acknowledged. Pinker illustrates this with the familiar story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which everyone can see that the emperor is naked, but no one dares to say so. When a little boy blurts out the truth, he doesn’t just describe what others already see; he changes the social reality by making that knowledge common.
I think my family members who hold Kirk in high esteem do not share the same “common knowledge” that I do. Moreover, I think they would probably ignore, minimize or avoid that knowledge even if I were to share it with them. I wonder what implications that has for Pinker’s book.
The concept of “common knowledge” assumes that we live in a society with a shared epistemic foundation—a common sense of what counts as true, credible, or morally relevant. In the 21st century, that assumption is crumbling.
Fractured Realities
I chose to stay silent on that family chat because I knew that pointing out Kirk’s record would start an argument, not a conversation. It wasn’t just that we disagreed on values; we don’t even share the same reality of facts.
In my information world, it’s common knowledge that Alex Jones lied and that his lies wounded real people. In my relatives’ world, the common knowledge is that Kirk was a truth-teller persecuted by the “mainstream media.” Each group not only believes different things; each “knows” that the other group “knows” something false.
Pinker’s book describes the recursive structure of common knowledge: “I know that you know that I know.” That recursion exists, but in our fractured information environment, the recursion is happening within parallel tribes, each running its own recursion inside a separate, sealed epistemic loop.
In these loops, trust replaces evidence. “Common knowledge” becomes tribal knowledge: what everyone in my group knows, and what everyone in my group knows that we know. Facts themselves don’t travel freely anymore, because every fact carries a social accent.
The Emotional Cost of Knowing
For me, this isn’t theoretical. I’ve heard the voice of Ana Grace on Jimmy Greene’s album. I’ve seen what the grieving families have to say. That knowledge isn’t up for debate. Yet even if I should share that experience, I doubt it would change my relatives’ minds. Accepting it would force them to re-evaluate not just one man but an entire worldview built around distrust of “the other side.”
Psychologists call this “motivated cognition”—the tendency to process information in ways that protect our identities and affiliations. It means that what people can know is bounded by what they can bear to know.
That’s the limit of Pinker’s concept. Common knowledge isn’t simply about information that everyone has; it’s about information that everyone can acknowledge without shattering their sense of belonging. Sometimes we remain silent—not because the emperor isn’t naked, but because we fear what will happen to our tribe if we say so.
The New Emperor’s Clothes
The tragedy of our polarized age is that we now inhabit multiple overlapping realities. The internet was supposed to give us shared access to truth, but it built fortresses of belief, each with its own priests and heretics. Within each fortress, there is common knowledge, solidarity, and moral certainty—but almost no permeability between them.
That’s why the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes might not succeed today. If he cried out that the emperor was naked, half the crowd would cheer him as a whistleblower and the other half would denounce him as part of a liberal plot. Truth no longer guarantees consensus.
Rebuilding the Common
None of this makes Pinker wrong. His insight—that public, mutually recognized knowledge underlies cooperation—remains profound. But our current moment shows that the precondition for common knowledge is common trust. Without shared standards for evidence and empathy, information alone cannot unite us.
Knowledge is not just cognitive. It is moral. We don’t simply know things; we choose what we will allow ourselves to know together.
That choice, more than any algorithm or argument, determines whether a society still possesses common knowledge—or only the illusion of it.
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