https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/08/mark-levin-talks-about-his-1-nyt.html

It’s a complex covering almost three square miles, and the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, and thousands of people lived there, and it’s called “Great” because there are hundreds of smaller ones in the former kingdom.

No more “one building” than Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan.

You can see ideology in action today, for instance, in many libraries all around the country, as each librarian tasked with book selection decides which books to order for their collection.

Given limited budgets, they order a supposedly “representative sample” of the books available–and, wouldn’t you know it–looking over the collections in a number of libraries I have used, apparently very few conservative books end up being selected for purchase.

Speaking of the Xhosa, I ever tell the story from Michener’s The Covenant? It’s crazy, and from what I can tell, largely true. Here goes.

By the 1850’s the English were very active in South Africa, and they were pretty much the bane of the Xhosa’s existence. They (the Xhosa) were on the wrong side of several lopsided battles against them. Evidently a story could go viral even the 1850s and that’s exactly what happened with “The Charge of the Light Brigade” – you’ve likely heard the phrase, but are unaware of the details.

It was a hopeless battle by English forces vs Russian forces in the Crimean war. It became so famous that even members of the Xhosa heard it. It’s probably safe to say there was not a Xhosa alive who could point to Russia on a map or even tell you what a “Russian” was, but what did that matter? Whoever they were, they’d beaten the English.

A young girl had a vision – that the Russians would come and wipe out the English for them, but only if the Xhosa proved themselves worthy. How were they to do that? By killing all of their cattle, the primary food source – so important they were used as currency.

A holy man backed her up and so the tribal leaders saw to it. Paramilitary units were formed and sent to villages to make sure none were hoarding cattle. All, or nearly all, were killed. Tens of thousands of people starved to death and many believe the only reason there are any Xhosa around to talk about is that thousands took refuge on English farms. Told you it was crazy.

What you’re saying adds up to, you can’t outsource your critical thinking to anyone.

I’d say the most common pathologies I see on the right are:

1) Playing “Opposite Day” with legacy media, and thinking that’s more likely to be true. (The far-right fringe is especially prone to this–for example a lot of them think Iran defeated Israel and the US a few months ago.)

2) Choosing particular sources and trusting their takes without checking up. (Commenters on right-leaning blogs do a lot of this.)

3) Gell-Mann amnesia.

There was a period of time roughly coinciding with the 50s through the 80s where most people outsourced their critical thinking to what we now call “legacy media”, and it was biased but not actual propaganda. This was easier but created a lot of bad habits.

After all, so many of the things that our government has told us–these last several years in particular–have turned out not to be true.

Then, of course, there were all of the supposed medical and other experts–many of them who were apparently covering up what was going on behind closed doors, their inside, very lucrative deals and ties to various drug companies–and feeding us various lies about COVID, it’s origin, about prevention measures, and about various medications.

How about the recent spate of reports of many hundreds of supposedly peer reviewed “scientific, research papers” having to be retracted by various Journals, because they were found to have contained fabricated research?

And, now, with the advent of AI, how are we to truly know if any of the images on the Internet and elsewhere have been either manipulated, or made up out of whole cloth?

Thomas Jefferson once wrote something to the effect that he would not believe anything he read in so polluted a source as a newspaper, suggesting that the only way to be sure if something was real/true or not was to be on the ground and observing it as it happened.

But, we can’t all be on the ground at exactly the right time, and in view of the object in question, can we?

I guess my idea is that you first have to start out with a very good, broad education (but how can someone in the position of a student easily tell if they are being fed the truth—and that, in it’s entirety–or a slanted, tissue of lies?), especially one rich in History to make you aware of what has happened, been tried in the past, and what the results were. Then, philosophy, politics,science, geography, literature, languages etc.–the usual content of what used to be a classical Liberal Arts Education.

Then, I’d say an exposure to all sorts of people, situations, and ideas, with the aim of developing the all too rare “common sense.”

Perhaps, with all of this as background you would be much more able to discern where the truth lies.

Of course, in the end, it all also depends on what you might want to be true, as opposed to the hard, cold reality of what might actually be true, doesn’t it?–See Wakanda.