They're all valid concerns, Peter, and I share them as well.

For all of the information we have available to us through the net, you would think we'd be collectively smarter. But we're not. People merely need to find someone who agrees with them (no matter how ridiculous the belief may be), and they're content to not try and find the real truth.

It can be the most frustrating thing to try and show someone where their thinking is in error or even just to show them a different perspective. I can trot out a link to Snopes but they laugh at it because apparently, Snopes isn't trustworthy. The same with The Washington Post or The New York Times -- both liberal rags that are biased and not worth their time to read a related link from them they say. But Fox or Breitbart, they'll devour that stuff all day long.

I recall reading an article where a person was writing about fake news. The author had interviewed one of the more prolific authors of fake news, and this person was saying that the fake stories he'd write for conservatives would take off like wildfire whereas the fake stories he'd write for the left-leaning crowd would seldom if ever gain any traction.

I just found the article. From it: "During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election."

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait."

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert- fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs

I just noticed it's a link from NPR -- no doubt it's to be discounted because NPR isn't to be believed. It seems that unless a publication adheres to a strict conservative message, it's not trustworthy.

And, Reg -- Behghazi did actually yield something for conservatives: it helped them defeat Clinton. That was the only reason for the many investigations of her. It had nothing to do with gaining an understanding of what went wrong. Republicans were only too happy to stand on the bodies of 4 dead Americans to score political points.

I don't know how this all ends. Trump* has no desire to unify the country and those on the right seem content to allow him to continue unchecked, save for a few who have come out against him. McConnel has taken the Senate to new lows under his leadership, further dividing us.

I always felt that if Trump* truly wanted to unify us he would've acknowledged the wrong done to Obama's pick of Merrick Garland and advanced his nomination for the good of the country. How stupid of me to ever entertain such a thought.

Kevin g