Some people, when they hear a story, assume that it’s a mosaic of strategically placed lies and omissions deployed to benefit the storyteller. The storyteller, they assume, is a salesman, like everybody else, giving only details that will help them sell their product. Isn’t this what all politicians do, with their research teams and spin doctors, speechwriters, donors, advisors, pollsters, surrogates and influencers? Isn’t that what everyone does to try to close the deal? Since everybody will say whatever they need to say to get over on somebody else, truth skeptics reason, why would you even hold lying against someone, as long as it’s done with style and a touch of humor?

Creating reflexive skepticism about knowable, objective facts, cause and effect and common sense, has been the long, deliberate, generously funded, meticulously engineered project of the far right. It is at the center of the far right’s eternally angry focus. Guns, for example, don’t kill people — lying, insane libtard cucks do, radical left corporate media does, those who call for the mass murder of fetuses, defenders of rigged elections do!

The idea that facts are infinitely malleable and that all conversation is 100% transactional is a staple of narcissism, the inability to ever be wrong about anything. If nobody believes anything but what I say right now, if faith in the existence of discoverable truth itself is destroyed, well, every kind of irrational monster can be released, nobody can ever work out any disagreement, conflict will inevitably be fatal and those entitled to keep every privilege for themselves will be the sole beneficiaries of this war of each against all. 

When you hear two opposing stories and one makes much more sense than the other, you believe one narrator is more reliable than the other. Compare these two stories about a long, combative, nightmare marriage.  

One: The wife always, mercilessly and without any cause at all, tortured the poor husband for thirty years. She was ruthless and never let up on the poor devil, who hung in there valiantly for the sake of the children, but was eventually forced to ask for a divorce.

Two: The marriage was doomed from the start — they fought from their first date until the finalization of their divorce. The engagement was called off before the wedding, the wedding had some tense moments, the honeymoon was fraught, fighting was continual until they both finally threw in the towel — after the husband was forced by his wife and the marriage counselor to confront his best friend and accuse him of deliberately trying to destroy their marriage.

I don’t know about you, but the first story makes much less sense to me than the second, though they are both pretty insane stories. We evaluate sense and buillshit through the lens of our experiences. How many conflicts have you experienced in which only one side was completely to blame for all the ugliness? It makes little sense to describe a hellish marriage as entirely the fault of one party. It takes two to Lambada, after all.

When evaluating the reliability of a narrator, use the test that fucking Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught young Boof: use common sense. What does the person telling the story stand to gain, what do they stand to lose? What smells funny about the story? What makes no sense, in light of your lived experience, what has the ring of reasonableness? Which story is a more complete explanation of the thing being described?

Guys like Boof, of course, always reason backwards from the outcome they desire to the argument they need to achieve that outcome. There are liars out there, plenty of them, and an individualized curse on each one of these cynical motherfuckers. There are also more and less reliable narrators, as life teaches us over and over. This is just a simple fact of life here on this ball of confusion.