This past year, with all the craziness in the world, I coined a term: disqualifying narrative. And what is that? It’s a story that even if it’s true, most people on a given side of politics can’t process it. And if someone states that narrative, the other side immediately shuts that person down and declares it a conspiracy theory. A great example is the whole origin of COVID-19 story. Having reviewed all the evidence, I think it’s pretty overwhelming that COVID-19 did not come from a wild animal. Instead, it was manufactured in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and spread as the result of a lab leak, likely involving the primary researcher’s graduate student.

A year ago, if I told you that story, it would have been a disqualifying narrative. There are certainly some in our community who still would consider it such. But as the evidence piles up that the Chinese were working on bioweapons, and we were basically funding, in part, the research, this is no longer a conspiracy theory. What’s the point? Swimming in the sea of information we have, disqualifying narratives often end up to be true. Regardless of the powers-that-be who prefer they not be released. You just can’t make this stuff up.

So much on the other hot-button topics, like the whole trans-rights movement, fall into this category. One of the Biden regime’s woke poster children, a dude-woman named Sam Brinton, the deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, has been charged with stealing an expensive piece of luggage off the carousel rack in the Minneapolis airport. Brinton has also appeared in various photo shoots wearing a red dress and heels, along with his very bald pate. And pictures have also emerged of him dressed in full bondage attire with folks in very doggy leather attire. If you’re suspicious of the manipulation coming around all things trans, then you’ll believe it. Otherwise, we’re dealing with another disqualifying narrative.

One of the most tragic examples of exactly this was the Colorado LGBTQ nightclub shooting. In that episode several weeks ago, Anderson Lee Aldritch, who appeared to be a loner white male, killed five and injured 19 others in a shooting spree. Following some playbook somewhere, Aldritch declared himself “intersex” (whatever exactly that means) which then caused a variety of trans women to be recruited for the mainstream media say, “No, he’s not.” But that’s not the way any of this works — you get to decide what you are. So what started out as a hate crime might not end up that way. The minute you end up saying, “You can’t make this stuff up,” you’re dealing with a disqualifying narrative.

The tragic thing is that with a little research, you can get to root causes — the things we ought to be working on as a country. Aldritch turns out to be another fatherless young man with a dad who beat and abandoned him. And there’s a new documentary out about the whole Kyle Rittenhouse affair, titled “The Broken Boys of Kenosha: Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse and the Lies We Still Live By,” that drives home the point that all four of the primary actors in the cause of the Kenosha riots were fatherless young men.

If there’s a point in all of this, there are observable causes of these incidents that have nothing at all to do with the popular perspective. They were not caused by racial or trans hate.

They were caused by young folks without dads. And that’s something we can and should act on. I’ve seen it myself, obviously in far less severity than these crazy incidents. But it rings true.

What’s the point? When confronted with a disqualifying narrative, don’t just shut down or sort it into acceptable points of rage. Attempt to figure out if it’s true. And then, if you can, act. Our society depends on it.

Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.