The photo above is not real. But it never fails that it will be shared on social media as a real image during and after any major hurricane that hits the United States.

Snopes has debunked it, pointing out it’s a PhotoShopped image, a clever clown mixed the real shark image with a flooded highway image. The photographer who took the original image of the shark in South Africa has a bemused webpage about how his image became famous for kind of the wrong reason.

Pointing out that the image is fake often gets “ehhhh I don’t know, I heard it’s real” responses as if throat noises and “I heard it’s real” are evidence enough that it is legitimate, and sometimes even enraged responses. More on that in a bit.

The winter version of this, by the way, is a photo taken right after the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Penfield, Illinois, of a huge snowdrift that shut down railroad tracks. This is shared on social media as being a photo taken anytime from the 1960s through the 1970s, and anywhere from Montreal to Pennsylvania. God help you if you point out the real origin of the photo, as you will get a lecture from the person that their uncle’s barber’s cousin’s son’s mail carrier’s aunt’s butcher’s dad took the photo so it has to be real.

All of this, of course, is harmless weather stuff, but it’s indicative of how easy it is to spread misinformation and do it quickly. The sometimes angry reaction to even gentle debunking is indicative of how we as a country love our bullshit, even treat it as a sacred part of some national religion.

I say this because often the reaction when someone nicely points out something is fake or not true is flat-out rage, very similar to how a religious person reacts to something they find blasphemous. Bullshit, it seems, is holy in America.

There’s no surprise that people were eating horsepaste during COVID based on stuff they read on social media. No surprise that people share the absolute most ridiculous nonsense as gospel truth. No surprise that it is often impossible to know exactly what is happening in Gaza. Both Hamas and the Israeli government know the power bullshit holds over Americans, so they use it to affect American perceptions.

Unless he croaks, the Republican Party’s nominee for president of these here United States is the High Priest of Bullshit, Donald Trump. His mean-spirited bullshit munchers who support him love his lies, referring to it as “saying what he thinks” and hilariously, “telling it like it is.”

Technology has given the Religion of Bullshit all the juice it has needed. First, it was the Internet’s chat groups, online forums, and your crazy uncle’s chain emails. Then it was social media, which was like pouring gasoline on the fires of delusion. Now, unfortunately, it’s AI.

This already is alarming scientists and others who are fighting a key dogma of the Religion of Bullshit, anti-science, such as Scott Gavura over at the website Science-Based Medicine. He notes that it is much easier to produce bullshit than it is to fight it:

It is much harder to debunk misinformation than it is to spread it. In 2013, Italian software developer Alberto Brandolini observed Silvio Berlusconi, then-president of Italy, tell lie after lie in an interview. Despite efforts by the Italian media to fact-check Berlusconi’s statements, the lies persisted and spread. Brandolini commented, “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.” Thus was born Brandolini’s law or the bullshit asymmetry principle.

AI will only make it that much easier. Using prompts, a bullshit artist can produce dozens of fake articles in less than an hour on the free online AI tool ChatGPT. They can also sound authoritative, as Gavura points out in the link I shared above. The Gospel of Bullshit is no longer turbocharged, it’s moving at warp speed.

Those of us who are atheists of bullshit need to figure something out, and figure it out quickly. Steve Bannon’s Religion of Bullshit-based political strategy, Flood the Zone with Shit, likely will become a tsunami.

The last word goes to Skip Marley.