What do you even say?

When my boys were little, they often used me and/or my wife as the grand arbiter. If there was some issue or question in dispute between them, they would argue about it for a while and then decide it was time to get a ruling from Mom or Dad about it.

Sometimes it was about whose turn it was with the Nintendo or who gets the last red popsicle. But other times, it was about getting the right answer to a question.

Is bubble gum really made out of spider eggs? Can a bear run faster than a lion? Is the Tooth Fairy real? You know, important things. And almost always, whatever answer they got from us (the experts) was the ultimate answer on that particular matter.

We all want the answers and we want them to be correct.

When we are confronted with information that seems suspect, we want to know if it’s real or imaginary. Well, at least that’s what most of us want. Some of us, unfortunately, don’t want the truth unless it’s the truth we want to hear.

I have a relative. I won’t name names but if he reads this, he’ll know it’s about him. He’s normally a pretty smart guy, but he’s got a thing for conspiracies. He’s got it all figured out and he can’t figure out why we the sheep are simply ignoring the truth — whether it’s the Deep State, the Illuminati, the Lizard People running the world from their lair in the center of the Earth. Nothing is what it seems and we’ve got to start paying attention.

I used to get a kick out of hearing his latest ideas, whether

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it was about 9/11 being an inside job or Geico using caveman spokesmen to trick us into believing in evolution or whatever he’d found down the online rabbit hole, but it has become clear that he has really bought into serious things like the 2020 election being rigged and he’s perfectly OK with spreading misinformation that has already been debunked all over his social media. I think his current kick is explaining to all of us “sheeple” about how this Omicron variant is just a smokescreen to take our minds off the Ghislaine Maxwell trial or something.

What is my obligation here? On the one hand, he’s got the right to believe whatever he wants. But on the other hand, there are people who are going to read his posts (which are mostly reposts of some right-wing nut-job alt-news site) and believe them, which is exactly how you end up with otherwise sensible people who 100 percent believe that Obama is a Muslim terrorist who was born in Kenya, or that the Sandy Hook school massacre was staged or that the coronavirus vaccine is just an excuse to inject us all with microchips so that the shadow government can… well, I honestly don’t know how to finish that sentence.