Reasoning Truth from Propaganda
The search for truth requires free access to all information and the bravery to question narratives.
It is with some trepidation that I venture onto the Internet each morning to get my daily dose of news and political analysis. It is an unfiltered and unregulated cacophony of information. Notice I did not say mis-, dis-, or mal-information. These are not real words but were created by propagandists to turn people away from the truth. Information is mere data; either true or false. Propagandists present false data as true or true data as false; it is up to the discerning reader to elucidate the truth. God has given man the power of reason to discern truth.[1] We have the capacity—if we choose to use it—to see past the deceit of the propagandists.
Why, then, venture into such dangerous waters? Because the so-called legacy media is thoroughly corrupt, having sold their souls to their corporate and political masters. They are mere propagandists, committed to an agenda rather than to objective truth. They bury information counter to their agenda, making it impossible to discern truth from the meager and selective information they release. If an honest man seeks truth, he must search for it himself. The truth can be had if one takes the time to wade through the abundant information online and use our God-given capacity for reason to tease out the truth. As I said, it is a dangerous endeavor and one can be led astray by the many liars, deceivers, and fabricators online.
Fortunately, this is a not a new problem. The great philosophers, orators, and rhetoricians of the past were faced with liars and deceivers and identified several logical fallacies that can be used to test information and the claims of others. Cicero was particularly adept at identifying and labeling rhetorical fallacies. For example, he identified the ad hominem, an attack against a person rather than their argument to undermine that argument. He also identified the ad numeram, claiming something is true simply because many people believe it’s true. These two, among others, are known as informal fallacies. There are also formal fallacies, like the non sequitur, where the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. There are many, many more—too many to list here—but it would be instructive for the reader to brush up on these concepts. The legacy media is awash in these fallacies and once you learn to recognize it, it will astound you.[2]
Yes, these fallacies exist online as well. The difference is the lack of a filter. Without the legacy media gatekeepers (i.e., censorship) the information can be found and used to discern truth. This fact is why so many global leaders, like Keir Starmer[3], are trying to censor social media. That ever-present threat (e.g., covid censorship) is one reason it is critical to widely disseminate information without restriction. Get information into the hands of the citizenry and let thinking, reasoning people discern truth for themselves. That used to be the mission of the legacy media. Now, the so-called new media (influencers, podcasters, citizen journalists, etc.) have taken up the mantle the legacy media has abandoned. To be clear, as a blogger, I should be viewed with equal skepticism. Test what I write against the list of logical fallacies I previously pointed out. If you find an error, call me out. We can begin a dialogue (Gr. dialogos “through the word”) to uncover the truth together.
Sadly, not all humans think and reason with equal capacity. Even more sad, many humans choose not to think and reason at all. They take what they are fed by the incessant scroll of social media at face value without any discernment. Still, this is not a reason to suppress information. On the contrary, it demands even more freedom of information and expression so that truth has every opportunity to be heard.
This leads me to a recent post on X by Bill Ackman, a red-pilled billionaire who has spoken out on social issues in the past. The post was in response to a Gallup Poll showing that over the past twenty-five years (since the invention of the smart phone)[4] women have moved radically leftward while men have remained largely unchanged. Gallup does not provide an explanation, but Mr. Ackman proffers his hypothesis.
To be clear, the poll is just information. The underlying data may or may not show some bias, but generally, because the raw data is freely disclosed, we can have a certain degree of confidence in its accuracy. Mr. Ackman attempts to bring information from other sources, including anthropology, to interpret Gallup’s information and draw some conclusions. This is solid reasoning and I applaud Mr. Ackman for admitting his model may not be right. This is opening the door to dialogue in true Socratic fashion.
In summary, Mr. Akman’s thesis, which he calls “capture,” is all about social media platforms optimizing for engagement “time on platform, clicks, shares, comments.” Social media “wasn’t designed to capture women specifically . . . but it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively.” Consensus pressures hits women harder than men for anthropological reasons (which he explains). Because of those hard-wired anthropologic traits, women, says Mr. Akman, “respond more strongly to emotional content on average, they are more empathetic, they can be more easily manipulated with sad stories. That higher neuroticism again, higher sensitivity to negative stimuli. The machine learned this. It fed them content calibrated to their response patterns. Fear. Outrage. Moral panic. Stories about danger and injustice and threat and wars and ‘victims.’”
Mr. Akman wisely does not posit the result of this “capture,” but events in Minnesota seem to bear witness: affluent, white, female, urban liberals (AWFULs) chasing down ICE agents, labeling them “gestapo,” and calling Trump “literally Hitler.” Now, did I just make a correlation without causation fallacy? I think not, but am willing to be convinced otherwise. One problem I see with Mr. Akman’s analysis is if women are so hard-wired for consensus, why have they become so militant and opposed to consensus building? Is it a “mamma bear” reaction wherein they sense a threat to their family? As Akman points out, most of these women are childless and hate men so that doesn’t seem logical. There are dynamics at work here that we do not fully understand that are making these women decidedly unreasonable.
Blogger Copernican on his Always the Horizon substack, offers a rather callous explanation. “The tautology of liberal thought [consists of a m]oral relativism with appeal-to-majority and appeal-to-consensus stacked atop one another. Recent events have demonstrated that even classically liberal political positions cannot be maintained without a strong underlying social and moral framework. Lacking that, liberalism (again, as recently demonstrated) defaults to meaningless tautologies and a feminine urge to ‘not harm’ people who in many circumstances damn well need to be harmed . . . . The political Left has built its entire philosophical core on minimizing harm and playing the role of victim. The Left believes there’s some inherent nobility in having your home burnt to the ground and your family murdered. That’s why they pursue with suicidal ideation the opportunity to die for their psychotic religion. Better yet, they zealously pursue the opportunity to get other people to die for their psychotic religion. Leftism is a cult that requires blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of its most zealous supporters.” As I said, callous, and prone to hyperbole. But he, like so many other reasonable people seek an explanation to the madness playing out in places like Minneapolis. Absent reasoned dialogue, commentators are left to speculate. Sadly, few of the agitators display any interest in ascending the steps of the Lyceum to reason this all out.
[1] “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.” Isaiah 1:18 (ESV); “I applied my heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things.” Ecclesiastes 7:25 (KJV); “But test everything; hold fast what is good.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (ESV).
[2] Some of the most common are: the false dichotomy, where two alternative statements are given as the only possible options when, in reality, there are more; begging the question (petitio principii), using the conclusion of the argument in support of itself in a premise; and correlation without causation (cum hoc ergo propter hoc), a faulty assumption that, because there is a correlation between two variables, one caused the other.
[3] https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2026/01/14/big-brother-all-your-texts-are-belong-to-us-n4948281.
[4] A correlation without causation fallacy?