I’m going to be sharing some links again this week, but the context is a little more important.

The firehose of lies is dangerous to democracy worldwide, but it has also had some serious consequences for some of the people who didn’t recognize the lies for what they are, and their victims.

Edgar Maddison Welch, the 28-year old who believed the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy, thought he was charging into a table tennis and pizza parlor to rescue some abused children. A laudable goal, except he was completely misled. He’s now serving four years in prison. Child abuse is obviously reprehensible, which makes it an easy tool for people trying to invent conspiracies to mislead people. Nobody wants to defend a possible child abuser, and everyone is against them.

Mark Aguirre, former captain in the Houston Police Department, is now facing up to 20 years in prison for his attempts to stop ballot fraud. He was hired as a private investigator by a conservative activist firm, but that won’t protect him from serving jail time for running an AC repairman off the road and holding a gun on him.

This conspiracy theorist now faces up to a year in jail for harrassment regarding the Sandy Hook shooting. He believes, or at least claims to, that the children killed were actually crisis actors. He sent their still-grieving parents pictures of what he believed were their children, still alive, among other things.

A young man in Germany will be serving life in prison, because he bought into conspiracy theories about the Holocaust on the internet, and then chose to act (violently) on them. What’s left of his life will be spent behind bars, and that’s to say nothing of the 60- and 20-year-old persons he killed in the name of those absolutely false ideas.

These people were each doing what they thought was best, making the same choices any of us might make if we were under the same illusions about reality. They were allowed to keep those illusions, but that led them to actions that are unjustifiable, criminal, and morally reprehensible in reality. Welch, for his sake, seems to be remorseful of what he did after recognizing the truth. The man in Germany is holding to his beliefs.

I’m putting this in front of each of you, because believe it or not, you can play a part in stopping these tragedies from happening. Not by protesting, wearing body armor, or carrying a concealed weapon, but by simply sharing the truth, online and in life—and perhaps more importantly, by avoiding sharing falsehoods.

With that, I’d like to offer you a couple good sources of information.

Michigan is a tough place to get good news, particularly on what is happening in the capitol. But responsible citizens can’t ignore Lansing in favor of cable news from Washington, D.C. just because it is easy. While D.C. politicians talk a big game, things like voting rights, education and infrastructure are handled directly by the state government, not the president or Congress. We, as citizens, must pay attention to all levels of government if we want our lives to reflect the freedom, liberty and equality contained in our founding documents.

I’ve previously recommended Bridge Michigan as an excellent state capitol news source, but I’d like to add Michigan Advance and David Eggert to that recommendation as well.

Bridge Michigan is a non-profit news source focused on Lansing. They do some good reporting in Lansing, Detroit and have on occasion sent a reporter to the UP for some environmental reporting, too.

Michigan Advance is another great non-profit, Lansing-based news source. A former classmate, Allison Donahue, is one of their reporters, and I’ve been consistently impressed with the depth and scope of their work, especially considering the size of their newsroom (five people).

Here’s a little clip from their ‘About’ page: “Journalists at the Advance don’t view politics as an amusing game. We understand that decisions made at every level of government, big and small, have a profound impact on people’s lives. We don’t believe that reporting on policy has to be boring.”

I’d also like to recommend you follow the Associated Press’s David Eggert. He’s worked in Michigan a while now, but recently began working for the AP and has been writing some great stories.

If you encounter a story shared somewhere, and you want to know if you can trust it before you share it more, there are several reputable fact check sites you can use. I recommend checking two or three for each story, because they don’t all do the same level of research, or check the same stories. You can also apply some of your own critical thinking with this guide from the International Federation of Library Associations.

I could go on, but I won’t. Let me know if you have any questions.

Have a great week, and Happy New Year.

Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash