People are often raised to believe certain things without taking the time to question them. During a conversation about how people take information and run with it without research, I brought up Charlie Kirk, who was recently murdered, as an example of how people only share snippets of what someone says to make them appear bad. When his son asked who we were talking about, he replied, “A white supremacist who was assassinated.”
That moment made me realize how easily these beliefs get passed down. Children learn from their parents. If that boy does his own research one day, he will discover that Charlie Kirk was not a white supremacist as far as I can find. But because Kirk supported people my friend dislikes, he only wants to believe the worst. Even when I read him the actual information I had found, he said, “It doesn’t change my view.” And he’s not alone. Many parents unknowingly pass on biased or false narratives to their children, unaware of the harm they are causing.
This is not about attacking anyone; it is about a pattern we all need to break. Because this is how misinformation spreads. When we strongly dislike someone, we accept any negative claim about that person without checking. We often only hear what we want to hear and ignore the rest.
The same thing happened when they were talking about Elon Musk. They said he makes his employees sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, and that they live in the company town he built, where he controls everything his employees and their families do. And that if they should decide to quit their job, they are blacklisted from ever working anywhere else. None of that is true. The NDAs are standard work agreements about not sharing company secrets and have nothing to do with living in the town. The town itself is just a side project that he and his employees built together, and living there is completely optional.
Social media makes this issue even worse. People see a catchy headline or picture, read just the title, and run with it without watching the video or reading the article. They leave ignorant comments based on nothing, and when others call them out, asking, “Did you even read this?” they argue their nonsense assumptions or fantasies without ever reading or watching it.
People also love to take things that wealthy or powerful people say, cut out most of their words, and use that one piece to define who they are and spread misinformation. Such as when someone speaks against racism in a certain way, they will twist it or take it out of context to fit their narrative. Because that is how closed-mindedness works. People take what fits what they already want to believe, and they spread it.
The real harm is what this does to children. Parents pass on unverified beliefs as fact, and their kids grow up accepting them as true, just like racist parents raise racist children. The kids don’t know any better. They trust their parents. So even people who are against racism still teach their children the exact same habit: believing what feels right instead of what is true. That is the injustice we keep repeating, generation after generation.
Leave a Reply