Do You Believe That There's a Secret Sabanic Cult of Petipiles?

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Some people really believe this stuff. We know one guy believed it enough to show up at a peerea with a rifle and actually fire a shot and go looking for the children, t the child ec slaves, that were in the basement. For a lot of people, it has more to do with a being feeling like they're part of a social network where you have privileged, special knowledge that other people don't have access to. You know, finding traces of stuff, clues, almost like pursuing clues in a video game. A and for a lot of people,. it's just about finding friends on line, really. It's like imanity thing. It's aan. So

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.