your 'research' is just confirmation bias with extra steps

when you don't understand how systems work, every outcome looks like a plot

tl;dr: ignorance doesn't create skeptics. it creates paranoids. and paranoids are easy to manipulate. nearly one in five americans now qualifies as a qanon believer. this is a plea, a rant, and maybe a prayer for us to be actually curious again. this email may get truncated on account of the sweet tracks i have spread all around… enjoy.

i feel like we’re all a version of this meme at some point… goddddd!!!! my nervous system can’t handle it anymore.

i.

mi tío sent me a video yesterday about how the government controls hurricanes.

i watched the whole thing. twenty-three minutes. a man in a polo shirt standing in front of a whiteboard, drawing arrows between haarp and fema and something called “ionospheric heaters.” his confidence was immaculate. his sources were vibes.

i had to understand what i was up against.

here’s what i know about my tío: he’s smart. i mean, like, genuinely smart. he ran a successful business, raised good kids, can fix anything mechanical for sure. he’ll talk your ear off about baseball statistics going back to the roberto clemente era. the man is clearly not stupid, i know it.

but he doesn’t know how weather works. not really. fluid dynamics? pressure systems? the actual physics of how a hurricane forms and moves and dies? why would he know any of that? he’s not a meteorologist. most of us aren’t. i’m definitely not.

so when a hurricane hits puerto rico with suspicious timing, when the federal response is slow, when the death toll climbs and climbs… and nobody seems to care. when you watch your island drown while the president throws paper towels like he’s at a pep rally and gringos just talk about it as the political football du jour. when all of that happens, you see it build up around you, and you don’t always quite understand the boring mechanical reasons why. well… someone must be doing this on purpose, right? because it really feels like that.

here’s the thing about those deaths: a study published in the new england journal of medicine estimated that hurricane maría killed 4,645 people. not the 64 the government initially claimed. a 62% increase in mortality compared to the year before. households went an average of 84 days without electricity, 68 days without water. one-third of the deaths came from delayed or interrupted healthcare. it was a cascading infrastructure failure that was documented. it was fucking measurable. and it was also fucking preventable.

but that explanation doesn’t satisfy something in us. the cruelty must be the point. so there must be a plot… right?

and you know what? i get it!! the alternative is almost worse. these systems we depend on are broken in banal, extremely preventable ways. incompetence and selfishness and neglect have killed millions of people (see: covid) because nobody was steering the ship. and right there… that’s the fucking problem. and it’s terrifying in a way that doesn’t give you anyone to fight, much less any will to fight in the first place.

conspiracy theories offer comfort because they promise that someone, anyone, is in control. even if that someone is evil, at least the chaos has an author we can all rage against. it prevents us (and is designed to prevent us), really, from doing anything.

ii.

let me tell you what happens when you don’t know how anything works.

when you don’t understand how legislation passes, every law looks like a backroom deal.

when you don’t understand epidemiology, every vaccine looks like an experiment.

when you don’t understand journalism, every story looks like propaganda.

when you don’t understand economics, every price increase is a cabal of elites.

when you don’t understand algorithms, every coincidence is proof they’re listening through your phone.

when you don’t understand how elections are administered (by actual county workers, by volunteers, by your neighbor carol who’s been doing this for twenty years) then of course it seems possible that millions of votes were fabricated. why not? you don’t know what the process actually looks like. you’ve never been in the room.

and the gap in your knowledge has to be filled with something. a story about fraud is going to be way more interesting than a story about poll workers eating cold pizza at 2am while they scan ballots one by one under the watch of police and lawyers and county officials.

ignorance makes you easy prey for bad policy dressed up as salvation.

take last year’s proposal for 50-year mortgages. the pitch was seductive: helping young people afford homes by stretching payments over half a century. suuuuure. sounds reasonable, right? housing is expensive. longer term means lower payments. problem solved!

except not if anyone runs the numbers.

on a $400,000 loan, you’d save about $56 a month compared to a 30-year mortgage. fifty-six dollars. that’s two mediocre burritos. one, really, if you’re ordering it through doordash. that’s the price of “helping young people” while the vast majority of your payments go toward interest, while equity builds at a glacial pace, while lenders and bankers collect decades of additional profit.

if you understand how amortization works, how interest compounds, how equity actually builds? you see through this instantly! it’s theater, it’s panem et circenses with a fixed rate.

but if you don’t understand those things, it sounds like someone’s finally doing something… it sounds like hope.

ignorance makes you grateful for crumbs. that’s the trick.

and the gaps always get filled… that’s literally how our brains work.

neuroscience backs this up in uncomfortable ways. people who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to perceive meaningful patterns where none exist. they see connections in random coin flip sequences. they find intentional designs in abstract art. research using eeg measurements shows that conspiracy believers exhibit reduced frontal beta power (which is linked to cognitive control and decision-making) paired with heightened sensitivity to pattern detection in ambiguous information. brain imaging studies show increased activation in the prefrontal cortex when conspiracy believers evaluate conspiracy content, but not when processing factual information. something specific is being triggered.

listen, we’re pattern-seeking animals. we have evolved to see faces in clouds and predators in shadows because the cost of a false positive was low and the cost of missing a real threat was death. paranoia kept us alive on the savannah.

but we’re not on the savannah anymore, are we?

we’re out here, raw dogging a crazy fucking world with the same pattern-seeking machinery that helped us survive the ice age. this machinery is now being hijacked by algorithms optimized for engagement, pushing nothing but fuckery. that is how the instincts that kept your ancestors alive now make you believe that bill gates wants to microchip you through a vaccine. now, you sit around with the anxiety of a small animal being hunted for sport.

evolution isn’t helping you here and neither is your phone.

and the scale of this is staggering. according to prri’s 2024 research, 19% of americans now qualify as qanon believers, up from 14% in 2021. that’s based on agreement with specific statements about political violence, “the storm,” and satan-worshipping pedophiles.

yougov polling found that 40% of americans believe a secretive shadow government rules the world, registering a nine-point increase from the previous year.

this isn’t fringe anymore.

this is your neighbor. your tío. your roommate who seemed so normal until last thanksgiving.

iii.

i want to make a distinction that matters.

skepticism says: i don’t know if this is true. let me investigate.

paranoia says: this can’t be true! someone must be lying.

skepticism requires effort. you have to actually learn things, you have to read boring documents, wrangle your focus to do it. it makes you understand processes and accept that reality is complicated and most outcomes have multiple causes. sometimes bad things happen without anyone planning them.

paranoia is lazy. you just have to distrust. you don’t have to understand monetary policy, just believe the fed is a scam. you don’t have to understand viral transmission, just believe doctors are compromised. cook up a story that confirms your biases and lulls you into suspicion. and suspicion is the whole job.

skepticism makes you smarter over time. you accumulate knowledge, you develop judgment. you start to distinguish good sources from bad ones. you start to trust your gut more because you’re well informed.

paranoia makes you more isolated. how? well, everyone who disagrees with you is either a sheep or a shill or a dumbass, right? the circle of people you can trust shrinks and shrinks until it’s just you and the youtube guy and the telegram channel with phishing links. and somehow that feels like winning?! you figured it out! you’re not like the others… you’re special smart.

but the lady always shows a little leg here: skepticism can change its mind when presented with evidence. paranoia treats evidence against as evidence for. the harder they try to convince me i’m wrong, the more i know i’m onto something.

that’s not critical thinking, y’all. that’s a trap door.

once you’re through it, it’s fucking hard to pull back out.

iv.

“haz tu propia investigación,” my tía tells me. do your own research. okay…

this phrase is thoroughly poisoned for me now.

it used to mean: don’t take things at face value. verify, be curious. now it means: find youtube videos that confirm what you already believe or “think”. confirm your biases, disregard facts.

the guy who “did his own research” on vaccines did not read peer-reviewed immunology papers. he watched a documentary made by a chiropractor instead. the woman who “did her own research” on election fraud did not audit ballot chains of custody, she watched a pillow salesman give a powerpoint.

these people aren’t conducting research. what they’re actually doing is conducting confirmation bias with extra steps.

and look, i really get the appeal. experts have been wrong before. experts have fucking lied! the government has done fucked up things and the experts enabled it. we know this is true.

we know because the real conspiracies are documented. they come with receipts.

tuskegee happened. from 1932 to 1972, the u.s. public health service enrolled 399 black men with syphilis in macon county, alabama, telling them they were being treated for “bad blood.” they weren’t being treated at all. the study continued even after penicillin became the standard cure in 1945. by the time it was exposed, 28 men had died directly from syphilis, 100 more from related complications, 40 wives had been infected, 19 children born with congenital syphilis. the men were never given informed consent. never told they had syphilis. guinea pigs.

cointelpro happened. from 1956 to 1971, the fbi ran counterintelligence operations to “disrupt and discredit” groups deemed threats to national security. in practice, that meant civil rights organizations, anti-war activists, the black panthers… anyone fighting for a better america, basically. they surveilled martin luther king jr. they sent anonymous threatening letters. they used police harassment and dirty tricks to destroy people’s lives. they were exposed in 1971 when activists burglarized an fbi office in media, pennsylvania and confirmed by the church committee investigation in 1975-76.

and in puerto rico, sterilization campaigns happened. from the 1930s through the 1970s, approximately one-third of childbearing-age puerto rican women were sterilized. the highest rate in the world. so common it was simply called la operación. many women were coerced, misled about the procedure’s permanence, or sterilized without consent during other medical procedures. family planning clinics in factories provided free sterilizations funded by usaid grants. american population control policy targeting puerto ricans. it was documented and exposed.

so believe me when i say i understand the distrust. i carry it too.

but distrust without understanding is just vibes. and “the government has lied before” doesn’t mean “therefore anything i want to believe is equally valid.”

the documented conspiracies (the ones you can actually read about in declassified files and congressional hearings and investigative journalism) are almost always more boring and more fixable than the ones people invent.

it’s usually pretty easy: it all comes down to powerful people protecting their interests through legal or quasi-legal means. it’s not a secret satanic cabal harvesting children for adrenochrome.

the real conspiracies are zoning laws that maintain segregation. lobbying that blocks climate action. private equity gutting hospitals left and right, all around america. pharmaceutical companies bribing doctors to push fentanyl to people. wage theft. the police stealing from innocent people through civil asset forfeiture.

these are only a very small selection of the menu of fuckery… there are many, many more actual documented ways that power screws people over, every day, in plain sight, and with receipts.

but those require you to understand how zoning works, how lobbying works, how healthcare finance works. and that’s hard, that’s boring an requires effort and focus. that doesn’t make you feel like neo dodging bullets in the matrix.

so people skip it, they jump straight to the juicy stuff. people end up believing in jewish space lasers while ignoring the mundane evil happening in broad daylight, like the atrocities in gaza and sudan and myanmar, for instance.

v.

i was a republican once. i’ve told this story before, but it matters here.

i worked for right-wing media in the 2010s and i saw how the sausage gets made. i saw myself how a story gets seeded in a fringe outlet, picked up by fox, aggregated on drudge, and then repeated constantly until it becomes “conventional wisdom”. i saw how easily you can launder a lie into a “controversy” just by getting enough people to repeat it. so much smoke for so little fire… but her emails!

and i saw how the people running these operations thought about their audience. they didn’t respect them. they saw them as marks. they all knew they were peddling bullshit and went through the theatre of “critical thinking” and “facts don’t care for your feelings”. they thought it was funny when people bought it. there was contempt in those “newsrooms”, like… real contempt.

so when i watch misinformation spread now, i don’t just see victims. i see a fucking entire supply chain. someone is making this content. someone is funding it. someone is profiting from your confusion. the algorithm accelerates it, sure, but the algorithm didn’t write the script. people did. people who are betting (correctly) that you won’t know enough to call bullshit.

the best defense against manipulation is knowledge. the specific, substantive knowledge about how things actually work. when you know how a hurricane forms, when you know the physics, you can’t be convinced that the government aimed it at puerto rico. the claim becomes obviously absurd, you’re immune.

but you have to do the work because there’s no shortcut. there’s no youtube video that going to give you twenty years of meteorology training in one sitting. you can’t hold a book to your forehead and learn through osmosis. at some point, you either do the reading or you don’t. and if you don’t, you’re vulnerable. forever.

vi.

let me tell you what i’m actually asking for because “be smarter” is useless fucking advice. let me try to present something concrete for you (and me, too).

one: learn how one thing actually works.

pick something… anything! the electoral college. how vaccines get developed and approved. how a newspaper fact-checks a story. how a bill becomes law and not the schoolhouse rock version, but the real version with the boring committee markups and amendments and procedural fuckery.

go deep in as much as you can. read primary sources, not bullshit or heated takes about primary sources. find the most boring, detailed, technical explanation you can find and make yourself understand it.

two things will happen. first, you’ll actually know how that thing works. that’s fucking useful! and second, you’ll learn what real and true expertise looks like. you’ll see how much complexity hides underneath even the most simple-seeming systems. and that will make you better at recognizing when someone is bullshitting you about other systems.

two: talk to someone who actually knows.

not a podcaster. not a random tiktoker. talk to someone whose job is the actual thing. like, a nurse about healthcare, a poll worker about elections, a city planner about zoning. buy them a coffee and ask questions. and here’s a cardinal rule for anything in life, really: listen more than you talk.

you will learn things that never make it into the discourse. you will learn how much of reality is just people doing their jobs, badly or well, with limited resources and competing pressures. you will see that most of the people operating these systems aren’t villains. they’re tired, overworked, and underpaid. just like all of us out here in this bitch.

three: sit with uncertainty.

this is the hardest one. i hate not knowing. you probably do too. we fill gaps compulsively. it’s uncomfortable to say “i don’t know” and not immediately reach for a theory. uncertainty fucks with our sense of safety.

practice sitting with it anyway. practice saying “i don’t have enough information to have an opinion on that.” practice letting questions stay open. practice tolerating ambiguity without resolving it into narrative.

four: know the difference between your truth and the truth.

somewhere along the way, we started calling our feelings “my truth.” i get where this came from. marginalized people have had their experiences denied, gaslit, erased. claiming “my truth” was a way of saying what happened to me is real even if you refuse to see it. that matters.

but the phrase has metastasized. now “my truth” often means “my narrative, which i will defend regardless of evidence.” my interpretation. my story. my vibes. challenge me and you’re invalidating my lived experience. convenient, right?

your experience is real. your feelings are valid. your interpretation of what caused those feelings? your story about what’s happening in the world? that can be wrong. that can be checked and should be checked.

there’s a difference between “i felt unsafe in that interaction” (your feeling, unchallengeable, yours) and “that person is a threat” (a claim about reality that requires evidence beyond your gut). there’s a difference between “this policy hurt me” (your experience) and “this policy was designed to hurt people like me” (a claim about intent that can be investigated and evidenced).

discernment is knowing which is which, honoring your experience without mistaking it for a complete picture of reality. understanding that you, like literally everyone else on earth, are the unreliable narrator of your own life. i am. you are. we all are.

“my truth” is a starting point. the work is figuring out how much of it maps onto the actual world, and having the humility to adjust when it doesn’t. giving yourself room to be wrong and to correct… that’s growing up.

five: notice when you’re being flattered.

conspiracy theories make you feel smart. they feed off our need to belong, our need to feel special, in the know. they make you feel like you’ve seen through the matrix while the sheeple stay asleep.

that feeling? red flag.

real learning humbles you first. real learning will make you realize how much you don’t actually know. if a theory makes you feel superior without making you feel confused first, always be suspicious.

six: read a book.

not a substack. not even this one! a whole ass book, okay?!? from someone who spent years researching one topic and verifying things with peers. let it be boring in parts. let it challenge your priors. let it take longer than a podcast episode.

here’s three recs from me:

• puerto rico: a national history by jorell meléndez-badillo

• bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life by anne lamott

• in this economy: how money and markets really work by kyla scanlon

books are how humans have transmitted complex knowledge for centuries. they work… use them!

seven: don’t sleep on your abuela.

i’ve spent this whole essay talking about expertise and evidence and primary sources, and i stand by all of it. but i’d be a hypocrite if i didn’t acknowledge that some of the best advice i’ve ever received came from people who never finished high school.

my abuela had a refrain for everything. “dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres” (tell me who you walk with and i’ll tell you who you are). “un amigo es un peso en el bolsillo” (a friend is a peso in your pocket). i never knew if that second one was good or bad, actually, because she used it both ways. sometimes it meant friends will use you and take advantage of you (and that you should too). other times it meant that a good friend is worth their weight in gold. i think she liked the ambiguity and i did too. because life really is like that.

my grandma, me, and my grandpa; from when i went to puerto rico in late 2021, in bayamon, puerto rico.

“camarón que se duerme, se lo lleva la corriente” (the shrimp that falls asleep gets carried away by the current)… she’d been saying that one for sixty years before anyone invented “stay woke.”

because here’s the thing about refranes: they survived! they were passed down through generations because they worked. there is always going to be some truth to a cliche, and at least in puerto rico, if a refrán is a cliché… then, fine! i’ll take the cringe of the cliche over the soberbia of feeling like i know better (when i know i don’t!). este manganzón knows which one to take now.

these refrains and sayings are the oral traditions of our ancestors, it is their distilled wisdom. these were people who didn’t have time to theorize because they were too busy raising kids, surviving colonialism, and fucking figuring out how to stretch a pound of rice and beans into a week of meals for everyone. there was no autism, adhd, schizophrenia, nothing. now, i don’t mean that there actually wasn’t… i mean, no one had any idea of these things, much less them being treatable and rightfully acknowledged. a lot of people had to survive, and honestly… a lot of them didn’t.

the trick here is discernment.

my abuela knows everything about how to keep a family together, how to read people, how to stretch nothing into something.

she did not know how mrna vaccines work and she would have been the first to tell you that. “yo no sé de eso, m’ijo. pregúntale al médico.”

she knew what she knew and she knew what she didn’t. and this is coming from a deeply superstitious and stubborn woman. un poquito mañosa.

contrast this with the guy on youtube who’s an expert in vaccines AND elections AND monetary policy AND nutrition AND geopolitics AND ancient civilizations AND also he’s selling supplements! because why the fuck not.

that guy is after only one thing: how to monetize your confusion.

so here’s my rule, only take advice from people who have actually done the thing.

want parenting advice? talk to someone who raised kids. strongly prefer you look out kids who turned out okay and still call their parents. (if not, run the fuck away and don’t say anything.) want career advice? talk to someone who’s actually built the career you want, not someone who teaches seminars about building careers. want relationship advice? (avoid the people who want to bring you down or be you and project their shit onto you.) find the couple who’s been married forty years and still holds hands at the grocery store. (not your friend who cuts and runs at the first sign of discomfort.) ask them… they know something.

this sounds obvious, of course. but watch how often we violate it. or fuck, i’ll speak for myself here… i fucking violate it! i clog up my feeds with influencers who are “in shape” (whatever that means) because they use ai, ozempic¹, or steroids (or all three). i see financial advice raining from people who make their money selling financial advice. i see “life advice” and “get ready with me” videos from twenty-three-year-olds with podcast mics and confident opinions about things they haven’t lived through yet. shit they proudly don’t know shit about. with pride.

yet your abuela, with her sixth-grade education and her sixty plus years of surviving and her mental catalog of everyone in the family and who owes who what, might have more useful wisdom than the entire self-help section at barnes & noble. she’s done the thing, she’s lived it.

“el que no oye consejo, no llega a viejo.” he who doesn’t listen to advice won’t grow old.

she tells me that one a lot. i should listen more.

vii.

i want to be clear about something.

i don’t want to be out here mansplaining and shit. i’m learning myself and this comes from what i have lived and felt and seen.

this, at the end of the day, really comes from grief.

i grieve that my tío, who fixed my first bike and has more practical intelligence in his pinky than most people have in their whole bodies, now believes that weather is a weapon.

i grieve that we can’t talk about politics anymore because we don’t share enough baseline reality to have a conversation.

i grieve that his grandkids are growing up learning that distrust is the same as wisdom.

i grieve the family group chats that became minefields. the friendships that cracked along fault lines of “did you see that video?” i grieve the impossibility of explaining, of reaching across, of saying tío, that’s not how any of this works in a way that lands.

i’m also scared. very scared.

i’m scared of what happens to a country where a hell of a lot of young people have adopted a belief system based on political violence. this is a country where basic facts are contested. where public health is impossible because so many people genuinely think vaccines are trying to kill them. where elections can’t be trusted because the losing side will always claim fraud. where nothing can be done together because we can’t even agree on what’s happening.

this is how democracies die. not with a bang. with a shrug. with “well, who can really know anything?” with “both sides lie.”

our country is dying to the tune of the exhausted surrender of people who stopped believing that truth was even possible.

i refuse to shrug.

i believe people are capable of more than this. we weren’t always like this. not this badly. we built public schools and libraries and land-grant universities because we believed an informed citizenry was possible. we trusted each other enough to get vaccines, to pay taxes, to follow traffic laws. we agreed on enough to function.

we can choose that again. it’s not too late.

but this requires you to be curious. i mean actually curious.

i don’t mean “i’m just asking questions” curious, which is usually “i’ve already decided and i’m performing skepticism.” i mean actually curious, where you are humble enough to learn and patient enough to sit with complexity. you need to be brave enough to say “i was wrong about that” when the evidence demands it.

the conspiracy is that you gave up.

the conspiracy is that learning felt like too much work.

the conspiracy is that you chose the story that made you feel smart over the facts that made you feel confused.

you can choose differently. por favor. te lo pido!

con todo mi corazón frustrado,

edgard 💖✊🏽🌈

p.s. if you’re reading this and thinking “but i’m not like those people, i’m actually informed,” good. prove it! explain how a bill becomes law. not vibes, baby, process. if you can’t, you have work to do. so do i… and so do we all.

p.p.s. if you want to argue with me about this, i welcome it. but come with sources that aren’t youtube videos and be ready to change your mind if you’re wrong. that’s the deal, i’ll hold up my side of the bargain.

if any of this resonated, you can buy me a coffee. no pressure. no subscription. just a one-time “thanks for existing” if you feel like it.

sources

50-year mortgage proposal:

• Gregory, John. “Is Trump’s Proposed 50-Year Mortgage Right for You? Experts Weigh the Pros and Cons.” ABC7 Los Angeles, 8 Dec. 2025. https://abc7.com/post/is-president-trumps-proposed-50-year-mortgage-experts-weigh-pros-cons/18254870/

hurricane maría death toll:

• Kishore, Nishant, et al. “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 379, no. 2, 12 July 2018, pp. 162–170. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1803972

conspiracy belief statistics:

• “The Rise and Impact of Q: The 2024 Election from the View of QAnon Believers.” PRRI, 4 Nov. 2024. https://prri.org/spotlight/the-rise-and-impact-of-q-the-2024-election-from-the-view-of-qanon-believers/

• “Which Groups of Americans Are Most Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories?” YouGov. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41873-which-groups-americans-believe-conspiracies

cognitive psychology of conspiracy belief:

• Narmashiri, Abdolvahed, et al. “Conspiracy Beliefs Are Associated with a Reduction in Frontal Beta Power and Biases in Categorizing Ambiguous Stimuli.” Heliyon, vol. 9, no. 10, 1 Oct. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e20249

• Zhao, Shuguang, et al. “Neural Correlates of Conspiracy Beliefs during Information Evaluation.” Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, 26 May 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-03723-z

• Mattson, Mark P. “Superior Pattern Processing Is the Essence of the Evolved Human Brain.” Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 8, no. 265, 22 Aug. 2014. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00265

• Rose, Dr. Hannah. “The Dangers of Apophenia: Not Everything Happens for a Reason.” Ness Labs, 10 May 2022. https://nesslabs.com/apophenia

historical conspiracies (documented):

• CDC. “About the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.” 4 Sept. 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html

• FBI. “COINTELPRO.” FBI Vault. https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

• “Sterilization of Puerto Rican Women: A Selected, Partially Annotated Bibliography.” University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian/bibliographies/sterilization/

documented systemic issues:

• Rothwell, Jonathan, and Douglas S. Massey. “The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas.” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 44, no. 6, 9 Apr. 2009, pp. 779–806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087409334163

• “Private-Equity Firms Are Gutting US Health Care Facilities, Study Says.” KFF Health News, Aug. 2024. https://kffhealthnews.org/morning-breakout/private-equity-firms-are-gutting-us-health-care-facilities-study-says/

• “Jury Says Drug Firm Founder Guilty of Bribing Doctors to Push Opioid.” PBS News, 2 May 2019. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/jury-says-drug-firm-founder-guilty-of-bribing-doctors-to-push-opioid

• “Wage Theft, the $50 Billion Crime against Workers.” Working Now and Then, 11 Nov. 2020. https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-billion-crime-against-workers/

• Bentley, Jenna. “Tracking the Numbers on Government Theft of Private Property.” Goldwater Institute, 17 Dec. 2020. https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/new-report-tracking-the-numbers-on-government-theft-of-private-property/

misinformation & media:

• Jensen, Elizabeth. “Clinton Emails: Closing the Loop on a Prominent Story.” NPR, 23 Oct. 2019. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2019/10/23/772328703/clinton-emails-closing-the-loop-on-a-prominent-story

• Chait, Jonathan. “GOP Congresswoman Blamed Wildfires on Secret Jewish Space Laser.” Intelligencer, 28 Jan. 2021. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-wildfires-space-laser-rothschild-execute.html

political violence:

• Beshay. “Americans Say Politically Motivated Violence Is Increasing, and They See Many Reasons Why.” Pew Research Center, 23 Oct. 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/23/americans-say-politically-motivated-violence-is-increasing-and-they-see-many-reasons-why/

background & context:

• Baseball Reference. “Roberto Clemente Stats.” https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/clemero01.shtml

• “Panem et Circenses (Bread and Circuses).” Mercer County Community College.

1. nothing wrong with this, i do not think this is wrong. this is medicine.