CSotD: Falling For The Fakery
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As the Rock Man told Oblio, “You see what you want to see, and you hear what you want to hear.” The point — no pun intended — is that “You got to open your mind as well as your eyes. But first you got to get yourself together; Dig yourself.”
Pett is right about the amount of lies and fakery on social media, but it’s not as one-sided as it appears in his scenario. We all, both conservatives and progressives, wise and foolish, see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear from time to time.
According to Newsguard’s Reality Check, nearly half of us fell for fakery over the last seven months of 2025. Some of this nonsense is kind of stupid, some of it is truly toxic, and some is wishful thinking while some is purposeful lying. As they noted:
(I)n July and August, when the Reality Gap Index reached a high of 64 percent, two particularly viral false claims dominated the news: that U.S. President Donald Trump declared martial law to address the crime problem in Washington D.C., and that Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigrant detention center was surrounded by an alligator-infested moat.
The alligators don’t much matter, but martial law would be serious, and people fell for both lies at a depressing rate. Throughout Newsguard’s study, in which they tested a series of bogus reports to see how many people fell for them, there were differences in age groups, but not enough to give anyone bragging rights. Those who spotted all the frauds were rare and close in age.
As for party affiliation, on average, 54 percent of Republicans, 44 percent of Democrats, and 42 percent of Independents believed at least one false claim in a given month, demonstrating only modest variation across party lines. There’s a chart for this, too, at their site.
While it doesn’t disprove the overall point in Sheneman’s cartoon, the amount of bogosity should make people not be too confident in embracing “proof,” particularly if it isn’t firmly attached to the actual Epstein files document. And given the size of what has been released, the size of what hasn’t been released and the clumsiness or dishonesty of redactions and revelations, there’s not a lot of certainty so far.
AI has made things particularly difficult. 73 percent of Americans either believed (35 percent) or were unsure about (38 percent) this bogus photo, and Newsguard adds that even photos marked as AI-generated fooled a distressing number of people.
In a separate posting, Newsguard offered an array of fake photos that have advanced lies, including photos purporting to show Zohran Mamdani as a child, posing with Jeffery Epstein and Bill Clinton. The premise sounds foolish enough to ring alarms, but Alex Jones had 1.5 million views and 14,000 likes in one day with the lies, and @AlBuffalo2nite got 2.7 million views and 22,000 likes with them.
Some opinions are more argumentative than either true or false. Kelley hypes this portrait of division with a ridicuously hip progressive and an absolutely normal coworker, but stereotyping is a tradition in cartooning, and it’s no different than liberal cartoonists who draw Trump supporters as pot-bellied dimwits.
The argument in the cartoon, however, is very much alive and unsettled: Trump supporters cite high ticket sales for the movie, while opponents suggest that, just as political camps make mass buys of books nobody really reads, so, too, they’re buying blocks of tickets for a movie nobody really sees.
Kelley declares the question settled because it’s his job to portray what his followers want to see and what they want to believe. That’s hardly an unprecedented approach to political cartooning.
Still, there should be a modicum of honesty. Varvel’s claim of a massive wave of lawsuits by regretful transexuals sent me to Google, where I found most of the relevant material was on websites for groups opposed to transexuals in general and transitional surgery in particular.
But I did find Benjamin Ryan, who is anti-transition but approaches the issue with what appears to be honest opposition. He keeps the above spreadsheet of detransitioning lawsuits, which you can find in a more readable form here.
Ryan notes that “detransitioning” — reversing the process of transition — is an imprecise term that includes reversal surgery but also halting hormonal treatment early because, while patients continue in their new gender identity, they either feel they’ve gone far enough physically or are having side-effects.
But while he salutes the one case that has ended in a victory for the patient, he only knows of 29 other lawsuits. Given that the National Institute of Health provides a total of 8,403 cases of transition between 2010 and 2021, the giant tidal wave Varvel cites seems like a ripple.
And a case of seeing what he wants to see and hearing what he wants to hear. I’d be interested in finding out the percentage of other surgeries that wind up in malpractice court.
But he’s not alone, and, as Kearney tells us, the Penis Patrol is active in Kansas, where a bill would not only ban people from using the “wrong” restroom but offer cash bounties for anyone “aggrieved” by it.
Joe Heller mocks Turning Point USA’s alternative halftime show, which they mounted in opposition to the NFL’s choice of a enormously popular, multiple Grammy winner for its Super Bowl Halftime Show.
These critics include a lot of people who apparently don’t know that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, feel nobody should sing in Spanish and are sure nobody who speaks Spanish belongs here at all.
I hope the winning touchdown is a return of the second-half kickoff before the bigots have switched back to the broadcast.
To end on a constructive note, my former college classmate Bill Mitchell has a solid Substack piece on the importance of cell phone journalism, with expert tips on how to make sure your efforts to record the truth succeed.
It always made me nervous in seminar when Bill sat up while I was speaking, because I knew he’d read in depth the stuff I’d only skimmed. His input here is similarly credible.
Now here’s something to confuse the haters:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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