Just in case your timeline is not already saturated with unsolicited information about Taylor Swift, her goofy handsome boyfriend, or the Super Bowl, I figured I’d give you one last nudge in that direction. It’s not that I care too terribly much about Swift or football; it’s that the national conversation around both has taken a wonky turn toward the absurd, and I want to help people reel in the crazy.
In the past week or so, I’ve received no fewer than half a dozen private messages trying to convince me that Taylor Swift is a demonic psy-op, specifically engineered to rig the upcoming election. Beyond that, I’ve also received a number of impassioned lectures about how the NFL (including the Super Bowl) is completely rigged, also as part of some sort of election interference. I could probably write a whole piece on the Herculean effort it would take to stage a single football game, let alone an entire season. It occurs to me that people who believe these things have probably never played a day of sports in their entire lives. If you really believe that hundreds of athletes are just faking their injuries, victories, and losses for a grand stage, then every actor in Hollywood should step aside and cede their ground to the NFL because that would be one heck of an Oscar worthy performance.
But I digress..
In any case, as proof of this assertion that the NFL is staged, one crunchy mom friend sent me a link to an article on an obscure website, claiming that an NFL attorney whistleblower responsible for sounding the alarm on the matter was murdered by the global elites for daring to expose their master plan.
“See, Kaeley?” she gloated. “You don’t know the truth because powerful people are hiding it from you. People are literally getting killed for speaking up about this.”
She was as certain as the day is long.
The problem is that when I followed the bread crumbs she laid out for me, they led to a complete dead end. There was literally no record of an NFL attorney by this name. There was no police report, no coroner record of murder, no concrete evidence whatsoever to substantiate her claim. I tried to explain to her that literally anyone could hop on the worldwide web, invent a fake person and a fake murder, and point to it as proof positive of whatever weirdo conspiracy they were trying to sell. But she was undeterred. She just interpreted the absence of evidence as further proof that the powers-that-be were up to no good.
And listen: I get the distrust. It’s merited. We have the media to thank for this. They’ve spent at least the last decade peddling demonstrably false garbage and gaslighting the public with outright lies. They publish pictures of bearded male rapists and call them women like we’re too stupid to know the difference. They publish photos of looted cities burning and call them “peaceful protests” while calling actual peaceful protests “dangerous terrorist gatherings.” When Trump encouraged the COVID jab in the early days, the New York Times warned that he was being hasty and said that it was dangerous. Then, as soon as Biden got behind it, we were selfish mouth-breathing trolls if we didn’t get the shot and its corresponding 45 boosters.
According to the mainstream media, concerns about Hunter Biden’s laptop were nothing more than paranoia, Ivermectin is exclusively for horses, Kyle Rittenhouse is a neo-Nazi, Antifa is just an idea, and men bulldozing women’s sports is the new frontier of civil rights. If you can’t understand why public distrust is at an all time high, I’m not sure what to tell you.
But I’m concerned about the eagerness with which many people reject one set of lies in favor of an equally absurd set of alternative falsehoods. As humans, it’s perfectly natural to crave certainty in a world of chaos, but the truth is that there are a whole litany of things about which we have zero right to be certain, and sometimes we just need to bite the bullet and make peace with the reality of our powerlessness.
I see this all the time in conversations about election interference and vaccine skepticism, and I honestly get it. I have zero problem whatsoever when someone tells me they believe the election could possibly have been stolen. Similarly, I have no problem when someone tells me they are concerned that the COVID jab could have been a lot more harmful to the public than the powers-that-be are letting on. These are not entirely unreasonable positions to take, and asking questions and challenging narratives are absolutely necessary parts of responsible engagement in the world around us.
But there’s a difference between having questions or doubts and pretending to know for certain that your pet theory is God’s honest truth and that anyone else who disagrees with you is just some stupid, ignorant sheep who’s not on your supreme level of enlightenment.
It’s possible to get so caught up in conspiracy theories or beliefs about what’s going on behind the scenes that you render yourself pretty useless in the here and now.
I’m obviously all about questioning mainstream narratives and exposing corruption wherever it tries to hide. Evil does exist in high places. But there must be balance, and there shouldn’t be certainty where certainty has not been earned.
If you can’t conclusively prove that the election was stolen, that Soros manufactured the virus, that the pope has been arrested for child trafficking, that Apple hijacked the emergency broadcasting system to thwart Trump, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Holocaust was a hoax (Don’t get me started on that one), that the US government is intentionally poisoning its citizens with chemtrails, that your least favorite political figure is secretly the antichrist, that China is going to invade America tomorrow, or that we are 100% living in the end times, then you have no business pretending like any of these assertions are matters of concrete fact. The most you can honestly say is that you suspect something along these lines might be true. And you should expect to have to defend your ideas with evidence that you did not find via Alex Jones, the demonstrably unhinged Gateway Pundit, or some random person on YouTube.
In a chaotic world, it’s really tempting to be drawn in by the promise of insider information or the secret inside scoop. We want to make spiritual sense of things and to feel like we’ve got more control over it all than we do. We can get lost in controversies and conspiracy theories about end times and elections, about freemasons and the Illuminati, about secret celebrity demonic hand signs and microchips. But to what end?
And why are so many so quick to believe obscurities? Where does discernment factor in? It’s good to scrutinize the narratives peddled by the mainstream media. It’s good to poke holes in their stories and ask questions and demand proof and accountability. But if we aren’t doing the same exact thing with our own sources, we’re gonna end up in Crazy Town with a deed to some oceanfront property in Arizona.
Some good questions to ask yourself when entertaining a claim: Why do I believe this? What proof is offered to support the claim? Is the author a self-proclaimed expert, or does he/she have recognized qualifications and credentials in the topic? Is the claim balanced and fair, or is it one-sided and sensationalized? Does the piece I’m trusting claim secret knowledge? Am I drawn to the promise of secret knowledge? Why?
I don’t think it’s ever been more important to learn the skill of subjecting our own biases to the same scrutiny we employ to screen our doubts. We can’t afford to believe things just because they demonize the people we already distrust.
As Dr. Russell Moore put it, “Our task is not just to say what’s false, but to bear witness to what’s true.”
If it’s truth we’re after, we’ve got to screen our own biases.
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This is sadly not surprising. I tried to investigate the source when suddenly almost every conservative commentator I read was shit-talking Taylor Swift, and mostly ran into people saying it was a psy-op, that nobody was *actually* criticizing her. Yeah, right. I really despair at how hard the right tries to lose -- all it would take is to just not be COMPLETELY EFFING INSANE, but they can't often manage it. Taylor Swift is literally a feminine woman dating a masculine man and instead of running her billion dollar business empire lately she spends her time on the sidelines cheering for him. Which somehow, along with the seriousness of a relationship that appears headed for marriage and babies, has made her an *enemy of conservatives*. It's so damn dumb, it makes my head hurt.
Preach for sure! I assume you let us know when our subscription runs out to your site.