Americans live in different universes from each other.
One side will say: this happened. Another side will say: that happened. Whatever the event in question is, the truth about it is one hundred percent verifiable. And yet the side believing the opposite of what happened will go on believing the opposite of what happened, no matter what you say.
The most obvious example for people reading this, given what I wrote so much about in 2020 and thereafter, was Covid: there are still people who think the mitigation measures kept people safe, and that California did better than Florida in health outcomes.
California's numbers in terms of excess deaths, as compared to those of Florida, are an easily verified matter of public record, and yet people still believe the literal opposite of the truth.
I would be willing to bet that believing in California's victory over Florida correlates with (1) political ideology and (2) how much a person trusts journalists.
Here's another example:
The View's "Sunny Hostin" says, "There was very limited destruction of property and violence during the BLM uprising."
As you can see, getting the correct answer to this question is correlated with ideology; people on the left are much more likely to think there was trivial damage:
And the more you trust journalists, the more likely you are to make that error:
Errors like this serve to confirm people's faulty and deranged worldviews.
And they are the kind of errors people make when they get their news by osmosis: simply assuming the press is telling you the truth leads people to think absurd things, as we can see in the chart above.
If we don't want our kiddos to become low-information zombies, we'll need to make an active effort at prevention.
This is where Connor Boyack comes in.
Connor used to be my tech guy. He was great at it. But a talent like Connor being my tech guy is like when Michael McDonald sang backup for Steely Dan.
Watching Connor build an empire -- the good kind of empire -- has been profoundly gratifying.
Just one part of that empire has been the gap he filled for children, from the earliest years through teenagers. People used to ask, "What can my children read?" And with the exceptions of a couple of books here and there, our answer was: pretty much nothing.
From Connor, first we got the Tuttle Twins children's books, each of which takes a classic work in our tradition and conveys its key ideas in a colorful and engaging way suited to young readers.
Then the Choose Your Consequence books, where the reader makes the choices that drive the story.
And then the guidebooks, such as their guides to
logical fallacies
true conspiracies
courageous heroes
modern villains
inspiring entrepreneurs
the world's worst ideas
Then there are their American history books. Really, too much for me to describe!
They've got some bundles on sale so the kiddos can stock up on summer reading -- and 68% off, to boot.
Here's why Connor as my tech guy was an unspeakable waste of incredible talent, and why releasing him to the world is one of the best things I've done.
Inoculate those kids against the madness of the world in 2026:
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