Debunking Debunkers
Sat, 30 Aug 2014 08:00:00 PDT
By Foster Gamble
I love debunkers — the REAL ones. I am a rational skeptic and I know a dedicated and skillful debunker can save us all time and help keep us from being duped yet again in dangerous and impactful ways. The problem is finding and identifying the real ones in a murky sea of fake naysayers and hating trolls with a hidden and biased agenda that does not prioritize truth.
We are living in an unprecedented era where one person or a small team can use independent and alternative media to communicate key perspectives to millions of people worldwide — in a short amount of time. Given what we are dealing with in the way of planetary demise, this is a really good thing!
The flip side, however, is that someone with very little real expertise can undermine valuable inquiry and healthy skepticism. I met one man who said he was going to watch THRIVE, but then changed his mind when he saw that it "had been debunked." I asked if the debunking had made sense to him. "Oh I didn't actually read it. I just saw it had been debunked." My immediate reaction was a punch in the gut.
How often are people throwing away or discrediting years of valuable fact-checked research on the grounds of a baseless attack?
Most importantly, why is that and how do we get good at sorting out the truth?
Lessons from the Trenches
If you are challenging the dominant paradigm as peddled in the corporate media and your influence is expanding, debunkers will enter your life. It goes with the territory. One of our seasoned advisors, a successful whistleblower who has survived one wringer after another, told us before THRIVE came out, "You're going to get it from all sides, and if you're not taking flak, you're probably not over the target yet."
I want to offer some of what we have learned about debunkers, detractors, haters and trolls in relation to THRIVE.
- Who are they?
- Why do they do what they do?
- How can we recognize and deal with them effectively?
- And why bother?
An accurate assessment of what's going on is critical if we want to create effective solutions. If we don't have a true understanding of the problem, we won't put our attention on the innovations that can best meet the challenges we face. So debunking the debunkers has a huge payoff. It helps us to sleuth out factual truth and create a safe environment from which to engage in meaningful public dialogue and transform our world into one that actually works for everyone.
Hogwash and Hooey, Baloney and Bull
I looked it up, and "bunk" is short for "bunkum." It's an old word from 19th century America that means "nonsense." Other dictionary synonyms are "baloney, rot, hogwash, applesauce, bull, and hooey." So when a group like snopes.com spends serious time and rigor separating the fabricated hogwash and hooey from facts and realities on the Internet, it's a valuable service. Wikipedia used to be helpful, but is now so co-opted on virtually every controversial issue, that its merit has been severely undermined for important topics that challenge major money or control interests.
The Fed and ETs
I remember the first time I heard (from my son!) that the Federal Reserve was a private corporation and that no government agency could overrule their actions. I found it hard to believe and went on the Internet to look it up. At the time, there were very few sites addressing this issue, and many of them just discredited anyone questioning the reality or wisdom of the Fed's printing money out of nothing. I came away not knowing what to think. Fortunately, my son kept giving me more and more evidence. The same thing happened when I first heard about the military covering up their involvement with UFOs. The notion seemed far-fetched to me when I first heard about it, and by the time I made it through the first debunking sites, I would have been pretty skeptical that there was any real issue to discover there were it not for the dedication of a few individuals to wake me up.
Fast forward to 2014, where we now have over 36 million sites addressing the issue of the Federal Reserve, many of which are intelligent analyses and critiques of a corrupt system of counterfeit finance that has left the country and an alarming percentage of its citizens in debt slavery. It's an acknowledged fact that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (known as the BRICS countries) have now formed their own bank to bypass the stranglehold of the Federal Reserve and the World Bank, and people from all walks of life acknowledge the corruption of the system and the need to get out from under it.
As for UFOs and the military, while debunking sites abound, there are enough credible documents and confessions from high-level government, military and FAA insiders to inspire any sincere researcher to look further, and to recognize that the subject warrants serious inquiry and public dialogue.
What happened? What did it take to overcome a disinformation campaign and legitimize once-denied information and insight? My guess is that it took persistence, and a lot of people with a strong enough desire to get to the truth that simple mudslinging and cheap dismissals weren't enough to squelch their questioning…despite the discomfort.
Challenging the System
By the time we made THRIVE, Kimberly and I had both experienced the discomfort of asking socially-taboo questions and looking into controversial topics enough to recognize the power of disinformation campaigns. We suspected we would be the target of some likely disinformation and reputation-bashing when we released THRIVE. And of course, that turned out to be true.
THRIVE covers at least 14 topics that stretch the status quo. For most people, there is at least one theme that's challenging to consider. But in the nearly three years since its release, there is not a single fact in THRIVE that has been disproven. And yet the debunking of our film was rampant in its early days.
Now, virtually everything and everyone who is effectively challenging the banking elite's agenda for global control will have sites or trolls actively debunking them and their message.
Who Are the Debunkers?
First, let me say again that there are skillful truth-seeking "debunking" sites whose priority seems to be accuracy and they seem to get it right almost all the time. And then there are hired hands who work for the government, for corporations, the intelligence agencies, the military and political parties. I have been assured of this by people formerly on the inside and here is a video clip that documents and verifies some of this.
These cyber mercenaries are called "trolls" perhaps because their behavior resembles the mythical mini-beasts who live under bridges and hassle innocent passers-by.
What Are Some of Their Strategies?
When working for these types of groups, their job is to find anything that might undermine the credibility and propaganda of their institutions and then attack the content — with either:
- Disinformation.
- Distraction.
- Outright lies.
- Trying to smear the credibility of the truth-teller. If none of that is effective, the next tactic is to make it unpleasant and unsafe for anyone to make positive comments, effectively.
- Scaring enthusiasts away from the site or thread altogether.
