Ever since The Age of The Virus and the 2020 usurpation, there has been an increased focus in academia on supposed “mis- and disinformation.”  Anytime a small guild of academics champions a cause that runs cover for government and corporate propaganda, we should all activate our skeptical antennae, regardless of our political leanings; there is a good chance someone is lying to us.

The mis/disinformation racket is a lucrative one.  The federal government is shelling out big money to experts in this field to speak at conferences.  Without violating anyone’s privacy, I have direct knowledge of some of the amounts involved for academics giving presentations on the topic.  If I could pull in a cool six grand (and change) for talking about how everyone who disagrees with my positions is suffering from an advanced case of disinformation, I might do it, too.

William Briggs at his Substack Science is Not the Answer hosts a very good guest post by Jaap Hanekamp entitled “The Misinformation Dis(mis)course Revisited: The Losing Battle of The Academic Expertocracy“; it offers a very good treatment of the danger of this mis/disinformation regime.  In essence, it is simply a form of censorship.

Thanks to the corrosive effects of postmodernism in the academy and Western civilization at large, we’re living in a post-Truth age.  Indeed, we’re experiencing a quasi-pagan-New-Age identity politics, in which individuals are encouraged to “speak your truth,” as if one person’s subjective experience is as equally Truth-affirming as anyone else’s.  This claim breaks down under the lightest of scrutiny:  the moment two people disagree in a mutually-exclusive way about their respective “truths,” we have to ask, “which ‘truth’ is true?”  The reality is that neither of them could be correct, but we can know for certain that both cannot be true.

One reason I host Bigfoot and other cryptid content here is because, even though I am a skeptic—and I think that many Bigfoot enthusiast often interpret information about the big ape in ways that confirm their desire for Bigfoot to exist—is because the topic recognizes a certain limit to human understanding.  There is a great deal of bad Bigfoot information out there, but it’s all there for anyone to mull over and analyze.  Scrutinizing this evidence is part of learning to scrutinize any claim, and learning how to parse out what is potentially viable evidence versus what some guy with a blurry trail cam claims is Bigfoot.

I also think we should view the world with a certain intellectual humility.  The strongest argument I’ve heard for the existence of Bigfoot or other cryptids is that the world is so vast, and there is still so much of it that is functionally unexplored, the possibility of some highly intelligent, previously unencountered bipedal simian species is out there.  To be clear, I don’t think that’s evidence—it’s the opposite of it, really—but the claim encourages us to search for evidence.

Personally, I think most cryptozoological “research” is an attention-grabbing farce.  I keep hoping a whimsical Elon Musk-esque billionaire will blanket the primeval forests of Canada with high-quality, unobstructed cameras that are maintained regularly and monitored by a team of video analysts constantly, but even someone as lovable madcap as the Musk isn’t likely to drop potentially billions just to get a lot of deer footage.  That being the case, we’re left at the mercy of amateurs running around in the woods and taking grainy cellphone footage.

All of that aside, I think a healthy approach to cryptozoology is the same as it should be for any field professing to offer up some facet of Truth:  we should check it against rigorous scientific research (which, to be clear, can itself be flawed) and, for Christians, Scripture (again, to be clear, I don’t think the Bible addresses Bigfoot, but I mean here that we should confirm any claim in any field against the Truth of the Scripture).  We should also check it against the vast wealth of human experience preserved for us through the study of history, which is often the only “laboratory” we can reference reliably.

Ultimately, Truth is a very narrow thing.  We can only hope to arrive at it—ultimately—through Christ.  Otherwise, we can only move closer to it in this life, but we’ll never attain it fully until the next life.

Unfortunately, it seems that we’re running away from it as quickly as possible, and a small guild of self-proclaimed experts are going to limit our ability to run back to it even further.