An excellent article. Thank you for putting it together.

In my opinion, Fake News, is nothing more than a misdirection. It’s the con man’s associate “bumping” into you, while his partner lifts your wallet. Fake News is false news, a progeny of the older disinformation machines created throughout most of the twentieth century. It’s the manipulation of facts, numbers, and symbols, so as to create a separate reality or truth, which forwards a very specific and usually hidden agenda.

Today, Fake News seems to be all about obfuscation. Accepting responsibility for bringing about something positive, when you had nothing to do with it. Deflecting blame to others by using whatever version of the facts will draw negative attention toward someone else. Truth is seldom the objective, because the “truth” is whatever one side or the other needs at that moment in time.

I find your breakdown of realities fascinating and something I will have to review in more detail later. For me, though, I am from an older school of thought. People, sometimes refuse to listen and refuse to learn, not because there is a fundamental philosophical disagreement in place, but because they are motivated to hold onto their perspective for personal gain. That is, they somehow benefit by not changing their minds, so they won’t.

For most of my life I have followed this principle: If people of obvious intelligence and education take actions that simply boggle the mind and otherwise defy rational thought — find out who influences them and why. Who do they work for? Who signs their paychecks? Who contributes to their political war chest? There’s a reason they are “suddenly” so out of character. It often has to do with money (the need of it) or power or sometimes, as simple a thing as wanting to be right.