09/13/2026
BEFORE YOU SCROLL PAST THIS ONE…
Give me ten minutes.
Not because I expect you to agree with me. I don’t. In fact, if everybody who watches THE 501 CORONER agrees with everything I say, I’m probably not doing this right.
I’m asking for ten minutes because something has happened to the way we consume information in this country. Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped asking, “Is this true?” and started asking, often without realizing it, “Does this agree with what I already believe?”
There is an enormous difference.
This morning I was reading something about loving your enemies, praying for people you disagree with, resisting hatred and examining your own heart before condemning somebody else. That got me thinking about this compilation I had just finished.
I’m not much of a Bible scholar, as anybody who knows me can attest. But Judge Wendell Griffen pointed me toward a couple of passages that made this old coroner stop and think.
One was Matthew 25. Strip away the theology for a moment and there is a pretty powerful human question sitting there: How did you treat the person who was hungry, sick, imprisoned, a stranger, or simply somebody society found easy to disregard?
Then I read 2 Timothy 4.
That one really got my attention.
It warns of a time when people will seek out teachers who satisfy what they already want to hear, then “turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.”
Well, hell.
They didn’t have Facebook. They didn’t have algorithms. They didn’t have TikTok, YouTube, memes, influencers or somebody screaming into a microphone telling millions of people that the thing they already suspected was absolutely true.
But apparently human nature hasn’t changed all that much.
That is what this ten-minute compilation is really about.
Yes, Charlie Kirk is part of it. Nick Fuentes is part of it. Turning Point USA is part of it. We look at propaganda going all the way back through history and at what happens when a real person or a real tragedy gets converted into a symbol and the symbol becomes more important than the facts.
But this isn’t really a test of Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Donald Trump, Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives.
It’s a test of us.
How many things do you believe today because you actually examined the evidence?
How many because somebody you trust told you they were true?
How many because you saw them repeated fifty times?
And here’s the hardest question of all: When was the last time you discovered that something you strongly believed wasn’t true—and actually changed your mind?
I’ve had to do it. More than once.
I spent a career around death, violence and grieving families. I learned that rumors can become accepted facts astonishingly fast. “They said he was in a gang.” “They said it was drugs.” I eventually started asking the question that still drives me crazy today:
Who the hell is THEY?
Sometimes nobody knew.
That experience taught me something I’ve carried ever since. Being wrong isn’t a character defect. Being fooled isn’t either. Every one of us can be fooled.
The dangerous part comes when our attachment to a belief becomes stronger than our willingness to examine whether it’s true.
So don’t watch these ten minutes looking for ammunition against the other side.
Watch them looking for yourself.
And if something makes you uncomfortable, don’t immediately reject it. Stop. Check it. Find the original source. Look for evidence that contradicts it. Ask whether you’d apply the same standard if the names and political parties were reversed.
You may finish the video believing exactly what you believed before you started.
That’s fine.
Just make damned sure you reached the conclusion—and that a meme, an algorithm, an influencer, a politician, a preacher, a podcaster, or even this old coroner didn’t reach it for you.
Truth is not negotiable.
And maybe that other old instruction isn’t such a bad place to finish either:
Y’all be kind to each other, okay?
Three names keep appearing in the same conversations: Charlie Kirk,...
