brendan halpin

(You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. But you don’t have to!)

A few years back I had a fight on social media with the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, which is located in the neighborhood of Boston where I live. The folks running the place hate dogs, and they put out this story about an unleashed dog killing a great blue heron in the arboretum. Except the story didn’t make sense. It came out that someone had seen an unleashed dog in the area the night before the heron was found. When I pointed out that this “unleashed dog” might well have been a coyote, since we’ve got lots of ‘em in my neighborhood, the arboretum’s social media person replied that it couldn’t have been a coyote because the heron was found in a plastic bag.

Now, this contradicted their initial account of the heron incident which was that the bird was found floating in a pond, but also, their contention seemed to be that folks go on dog walks with great blue heron-sized plastic bags on their person. Which, of course, is ridiculous.

I couldn’t figure out at the time why this made me so angry. But then I figured out that I got similarly angry at stories about sports superstars that were just obvious bullshit. Here’s something we all know: you don’t suddenly get better at sports in your late 30’s. Which is what happened to Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and the rest of the superstars of the steroid era of baseball. Clemens had been in decline for years and suddenly got great. The press sold us stories about him plunging his pitching arm into a barrel of rice. They also just pretended that Mark McGwire could have just grown into a cartoonishly muscular, michelin-man-lookin dude without assistance.

Ah, but we learned our lesson, right? Nope! People still believe Michael Jordan, a man with a gambling addiction and pathological levels of competitiveness just decided on his own to play minor league baseball because he had nothing left to prove, then came back with a neck 3 sizes bigger than when he left and won championships. Move along, nothing to see here.

I hazarded on social media that Tom Brady was almost certainly juicing, and a bunch of guys jumped into my replies to yell at me that Tom Brady doesn’t eat carbs! Now I believe that depriving yourself of carbs might make you cranky; but there’s no way it keeps you able to compete at an elite level in a violent game against people half your age. Simply impossible. You can’t out-diet or out-train time. Unless you have assistance.

Now, you could argue (As the Simpsons did in the famous “Lisa The Iconoclast” episode) that believing these myths is ultimately harmless. Who cares if Tom Brady cheated? The myth can inspire people, and that’s okay!

Well, I propose to you that it’s not. Because shutting off your critical thinking skills in order to believe bullshit gets you in practice, so that when really dangerous bullshit comes along, you’ll be ready to swallow it.

Fascism runs on bullshit. One way fascists love to flex their power is spouting bullshit and getting people to pretend they believe it. But, sadly, not everyone is pretending. I saw someone argue very sincerely that when Trump mocked that disabled reporter, he wasn’t actually doing what we all know he did.

I recently watched a lot of the trial of Karen Read in Massachusetts, where the prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on trying to make people believe bullshit. Yeah, it sure is weird that a guy could be struck by a car at 25 mph and have no bruising on his body! But that’s what happened! Don’t listen to your pesky common sense—listen to us!

Fascists will continue to sell you bullshit. Not just the “I didn’t say what I said” variety, but also the “when I said that, I actually meant this other thing,” variety. And pretty much every other variety.

So when PR people, the media, or even just people in your life try to sell you bullshit, don’t gaslight yourself. If it sounds like bullshit, and it smells like bullshit, it’s probably bullshit! So call bullshit!