Don’t Believe What You Read

One of my biggest pet peeves are those e-mail forwards that breathlessly purport outrageous facts, usually with the subtext of, “They’re all out to get us!” I remember particularly one which seemed popular when I was in college back in the late 90s that peddled screaming outrage over an effort by some atheist somewhere to keep Christian radio stations off the air.

So I guess I wasn’t surprised when I heard that those Hutaree idiots were stoked up in part by a rumor that Obama had signed a $20billion law to resettle Hamas members in the US. (Here’s factcheck.org’s rundown of the rumor.)

I suppose there’s a lot of “what this all means” in here, but at the end of the day, it’s just one of those things where you have to ask yourself where the rumor is coming from. How many friends of friends of friends did it pass through? And, unfortunately, it also means you have to think for yourself even when authority figures push out the same kind of thing. Which in turn seems like something these Hutaree jokers weren’t too good at.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.