But speaking up and trying to bring conservatives to my side of the political spectrum feels gross. It’s like religious proselytizing. I believe in showing, not telling. This means shutting up and just being, doing, acting. Because people have minds of their own and I believe we should respect how others believe…as long as they don’t try to impose those beliefs on others.
Howeverrrrrrr….my cousins are criticizing FACT CHECKERS because they are owned by corporate interests who want to take down their president who apparently represents their values. One cousin says: “When you actually see who owns all of the Fact Checkers, you do ‘critical thinking,’ verdad?”
This makes no sense to me when I believe I, myself, am a fact checker, and no one owns me. I have access to Internet, libraries, books and information ad nauseum to do my “critical thinking” about a man who has become our president and represents values, concepts and behaviors we’ve already seen in history has lead to nothing positive.
So, rather than fall into my cousin’s assumptions, I take a breath and recall the words of my grandmother whenever life got irrational: “Cojelo con take it easy.” Neither of us is right, neither of us is wrong, just our experiences of the world are different. One of my cousins worked for Trump and grew to admire him and the empire he built; my other cousin worked at the fire department, Jet Blue and studied theology. Personally, I worked in print and online newsrooms in New York, DC, San Francisco and Miami with freelance gigs in London, Prague, Brazil and India among journalists and fact checkers trained to ask questions and always be skeptical, especially of business people, politicians AND corporate/broadcast news outlets which are forced to distill news into sound bytes and clickbait. A source I’m trying right now is called “The Factual,” which uses algorithms and machine learning to aggregate both left and right leaning news – that users read (not watch). It is self-funded and run by people living in both “red” and “blue” states.