the truth where lies she

Walking down a street in the town of Naas.

A large poster headlined Veracity Index catches my eye on the door of O'Reilly's pharmacy.

It is a blown up version of an opinion poll by a group styling themselves Ipsos MRBI.

The opinion pollsters claim they asked Irish people who they trusted most.

According to the poster on O'Reilly's door, 96 percent of Irish people trust their local pharmacist.

Ha, ha, ha.

We all trust Fred behind the counter.

But that's not what should have been asked.

I scanned the rest of the report.

I was looking for the number of people whom Ispsos MRBI would dare to claim trusted pharmaceutical companies.

But of course pharmaceutical companies was not an option allowed for respondents to the survey.

So no figure was given for how many people trust pharmaceutical companies.

Just a figure for how many people trust "their local pharmacist."

This is one of the methods Ipsos MRBI routinely uses to falsify their routinely falsified polls.

The other method is that quaint and venerable practice known as outright lying.

I would suggest that the opinion pollster's claim that 57 percent of Irish people trust opinion pollsters is an outright lie.

The notion that 87 percent of us trust the authorities in regard to the Corona Virus is simply egregiously false.

In the era when Chief of Police Martin Callanan has been caught framing a hero cop called Maurice McCabe for child abuse, and Callanan's successor as Chief of Police Noirin O'Sullivan has been caught doing the same thing, and yet more cops have been caught working for drug gangs, and yet more cops have been caught running a money laundering operation for the mafia at the police training Collge in Templemore, and still more cops have been caught concealing Ireland's astronomical murder rate, in this very era, the claim that 83 percent of the Irish people trust the police is pure hokum.

The idea that 79 percent of us trust Judges in the court system is also blatantly untrue.

The claim that 87 percent of us trust scientists is a howl.

The claim that 49 percent of us trust European Union leaders and 46 of us trust trade unionists, is risible fiction.

Although I knew the poll was meaningless, I couldn't help wondering who Ipsos MRBI would put at the bottom of it.

Who would Ipsos MRBI claim are the least trusted people in Ireland?

My eyes went to the bottom of the list.

There I was.

Social Media Influencers according to Ipsos MRBI are trusted by only six percent of the Irish people.

How was that statistic faked?

Well an outright lie to begin with.

But the use of an indefinite term, a term which most people don't precisely understand, is a good way of getting a low rating in trust.

The use of the word "influencer" is a good way of prodding suggestible people (if there were any real people giving answers to the survey) to give a negative rating.

And influencers.

Oh influencers.

That must be bad whatever it is.

Going around the place influencing people.

And most of us don't know what it is.

So we can't very well trust something when we don't know what it is, can we!

For the record, the most widely accepted definition of this essentially non defined term, posits Social Media Influencers as internet commentators who have their own websites or social media pages and who have developed a following often but not explicitly among young people.

Some of this category of influencers find themselves being paid to use products on their websites as a form of advertising.

There are also a lot of supposedly teenage commentators running their own websites, some of which promote negative and or extreme and or criminal behaviours.

None of us trust those.

Among those criteeking Islamic culture, you could call Christian commentators Brother Rachid and Hatun Tash and David Wood social media influencers, as well as ex Muslims now atheists who do the same thing, Ridevan Eydemir, Abdullah Samir and Harris Sultan.

But these are very scholarly sincere courageous people, and are explicitly trusted by millions including many Muslims who wish to honestly consider and answer their arguments in order to more truly espouse their own faith in Islam.

You could call internet corporations like Google or Twitter or Facebook or Youtube or Blogger, social media influencers and I assure you that's what many of the people answering the Ipsos MRBI question thought they were talking about.

And the term social media influencer might equally apply to the dying conformist leftist atheistic abortionist old media groups which have so long trahaised the free world amidst this Corona Virus kabookie. I mean CNN, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Compost in the United States of America, and the BBC and the Guardian in Britain, and even here in Ireland, those great commissioners of Ipsos MRBI polls, the most anti Catholic media groups in the West, RTE, the Irish Times and Independent Newsapapers, all of whose ghosts haunt the internet with largely unwatched attempts to socially influence us.

They and Ipsos MRBI, are sinking giggling beneath the waves of their own irrelevancy.

At last.