Does anyone actually believe a 34-year-old northern California housewife was abducted for by two mysterious Hispanic women, held for 22 days with no ransom demand, then released by the side of a road 150 miles from where she was taken, bound, branded, and beaten?
This Sacramento Bee article drips with skepticism, citing disbelieving cops and even a racist blog post written by the abducted woman nine years ago. And I love the headline: “Sherri Papini’s husband says she went through ‘true hell’ and calls online gossip ‘sub human behavior.’”
If you Google “Sherri Papini” you’ll find dozens of news stories about her abduction and return, nearly every headline featuring a variation of “according to her husband.” Why am I thinking of Balloon Boy? Perhaps because I think it’s possible both husband and wife are working together to perpetrate a hoax, just as Balloon Boy’s father and other family members worked together on an earlier, even more sensational hoax. Why? To get on TV and be briefly famous? Hey, that’s what motivated Balloon Boy’s family, but at least they didn’t try to stir up ethnic hatred by blaming it on anonymous Hispanics.
You don’t even have to read between the lines to know the police are furious with the husband for going public with stories about his wife’s post-abduction injuries. Clearly, they were patiently waiting for her to break and tell them what really happened, and now the couple will dig in to defend their story. How long will they stick with it? Long enough to get on TV, I bet. Nancy Grace must be salivating in anticipation.
I can’t resist quoting from Sherri Papini’s blog post, “Being aware and having pride,” written in 2007 under her maiden name, Sherri Graeff:
I got excellent grades, 3.9 – 4.2, but grew more and more resentful of school and conditions around me. I used to come home in tears, because I was getting suspended from school all the time for defending myself against the Latinos. The chief problem was that I was drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage. This really irked a group of Latino girls, which would constantly rag and attack me.
Another thing I’m skeptical about is the ongoing Dakota Access Pipeline protest outside the Standing Rock Native American Reservation in North Dakota. My instinct is to believe protesters—who almost always have a legitimate beef with authority—but I’ve noticed that most of what I read is one-sided in the protesters’ favor, and one-sided coverage is rarely accurate.
The Daily Caller is a libertarian/conservative site, but this article on the pipeline protests is worth a read. I don’t doubt it’s slanted, but parts of it ring true. Between 1995 and 1997, during my last USAF tour of duty, I was involved in military training range and land use planning in Nevada and Utah. A big part of the job was working with the public. That experience tells me the Army Corps of Engineers, as the article states, did in fact make good faith attempts to meet with tribal leaders and accommodate tribal concerns.
Also, too, this:
The #NoDAPL (the Twitter hashtag for the pipeline protests) stuff I see on social media has become creepily doctrinaire, as you’ll see in the screenshot above, where protesters—virtually marching in lockstep—now call themselves “water protectors.” This sort of glassy-eyed conformity always sets off the old master caution light.* It reminds me of when Marxists moved in on our student protest movements in the 1960s and 70s, trying to impose discipline and the party line.
All of which is to say if you’ve wondered why I haven’t taken sides on the Dakota Access Pipeline, this is why. Healthy skepticism for now, even though my heart goes out to the protesters.
Fake news, another topic du jour, is nothing new. I sincerely doubt it’s any worse now than it was twelve years ago, when New York Times reporter Ron Suskind repeated a conversation with an unnamed George W. Bush aide (now said to have been Karl Rove):
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Egg-fucking-zactly. Some on the left, and most on the right, have fallen victim to epistemic closure. For decades, they’ve lived in informational bubbles, never reading, hearing, or seeing anything that conflicts with their beliefs and prejudices.
My inner skeptic says we can’t do anything about it. Have you ever tried to argue with right-wing nut jobs? If you have, you know they have answers for any point you bring up, answers learned at the feet of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Snopes? It’s a liberal site! The New York Times? Even worse! The polls? Who says?
Someone, back during the 2016 presidential primary debates, tried to warn Democrats about their losing strategy. “You’re bringing fact checkers to a culture war,” he said. If there’s one thing we’ve learned with this election—and should have learned two presidential administrations ago—it’s that facts no longer matter.
Trump now claims he won the popular vote. Never mind that Hillary Clinton got almost two and a half million more votes than he did, the media sources his supporters get their news from will repeat Trump’s lie, and you watch, Trump’s popular vote landslide will become an article of faith with them. We’re not going to get anywhere trying to explain to Trump voters that the American people actually voted for Hillary Clinton. We’re not going to get anywhere with our puny “facts.”
So screw them. They live in another reality and have for a long time, and we shouldn’t waste a minute trying to talk them around. It won’t even matter when their reality collapses—they’ll go right on believing the nonsense their leaders tell them, even as the coastlines flood and their Medicare is taken from them. We outnumber them, we reality-based citizens, and we can put our time to far more productive use by organizing to resist and oppose the Trump administration and the GOP-led legislative branch, pushing weak-kneed Democratic congressmen and senators to resist and oppose in turn.
* In the F-15 Eagle (as in most complex aircraft) a master caution light is located on top of the instrument panel at the pilot’s eye level. When it lights up you check the annunciator panel down by your right knee to see which of 40-odd system alert lights have been triggered by some malfunction or other, then deal with the problem. You always punch the master caught light off afterward so that it will light up again in the event of another malfunction.