A friend, making the point that the left and the right both live in echo-chambers today, asked me if I believed things I heard from the media sources I generally trust.   I told him I did.   He smiled and rested his case — everybody on both sides faithfully believes the bullshit of their own political side.   I smiled and let it slide, as we were having a nice dinner, and there was no need to further comment on this unending, rapidly escalating, dark money funded march to one-party rule, the open oligarchy that has been plowing ahead for decades here, during our long “culture war”.   It occurs to me that next time we have dinner I have to clarify one thing.

When I read something that surprises me, or hear something that sounds too outrageous, or convenient, to be true, I consult the world’s knowledge base that is in my pocket.   It is so fucking easy to find corroboration or refutation in a few seconds of research by looking at a few disparate sources.   If Democracy Now!, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all agree that certain things actually happened a certain way, it’s a pretty safe bet they happened that way.  

Certain claims are easy to dismiss out of hand, like the brief rumor during Donald Trump’s alarming rise to power that Trump and his friend Sheldon Adelson gang banged a thirteen year old girl — and videotaped themselves doing it.   You wouldn’t put it past men of their high moral standing, maybe, but at the same time, I knew the story was clearly bullshit.   That one I didn’t need to check.   But there are claims that shock, like that all but twelve House Trumpists recently voted against lowering the price of insulin, and those claims are easy to find multiple sources to confirm or refute, or spin according to echo chamber.   Verification takes literally seconds.  Here you go:

So, yes, I generally trust Ari Melber, Mehdi Hasan, Amy Goodman or Glenn Kirschner, when they make statements about reality, or present complex issues.   I generally dismiss the vapors that come out of things like furrow browed TV dinner heir Tucker Swanson Dansby Dickhead Carlson’s puckered blow hole.   Make a false equivalence between these sources of information/disinformation if you like, but also, do an honest ten seconds work before accepting statements from any of those sources and we’ll compare notes afterwards.  Then I’ll join you on your armed trip to that DC pizza place to liberate those child sex slaves Hillary and Barbara Streisand keep chained up there for Tom Hanks to molest and bleed, for his Satanic pleasure.