Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

As the fourth precept says, the good Anubist shuns ignorance...

by The Prophet — 2026-01-15

Italian politics and media use many English terms untranslated, such as “fact-checker” and “spending review”. To an Italian ear they sound foreign and official at the same time. That is where the Prophet starts.

1 Anubistic perplexities.

2 As the fourth precept says, the good Anubist shuns ignorance.

3 To shun ignorance he reads and takes an interest in everything, but he tries not to take hard positions, because he knows that absolute truth is extremely hard to reach and is more likely to be revealed by Anubis than worked out by reason.

4 Information is false by definition, for several reasons: spreading information has a cost, that cost has to be paid, and the higher the cost of a piece of information, the more likely it is to be false, because more funding brings more control.

5 (See TV and the evening news.)

6 Even the best Anubist acting in good faith is conditioned by his own vantage point; different observations need to be shared and somewhat reconciled before a group of humans can call the result truth.

7 Reality does not exist, at least not in the present, which famously does not exist, being merely the point where past and future meet.

8 The idea that you can take in and define a reality in an instant is highly debatable.

9 The good Anubist informs himself, weighs the information and “files it away” pending further analysis.

10 And today we are at a great advantage because we have, ladies and gentlemen... hammer blow to the divine spheres, drum roll… the fact-checkers.

11 Great Dog God almighty!

12 Is it something you eat?

13 No?

What are they, if you can't eat them?

14 The Prophet has always been deeply suspicious of borrowing other languages, because if we already can't understand each other in our own, using another one only serves to stop us understanding at all, or to impose something on us.

15 Take the “spending review”, for example... no, you can't eat that one either, so what is it?

16 In plain Italian it ought to be “parasite removal”, but put that way it sounds bad, because it becomes far too easy to see why they have never done one.

17 Back to the fact-thingy: the hallowed Treccani dictionary has no translation for it, so we'll have to do it ourselves; let's say it means “verifier of facts”.

18 So, I am an Anubist and I believe in Anubis, then along comes a Buddhist who believes in the Buddha, then we call in some fact-fucker who decides what is true.

19 Who the fuck is this guy? A god?

20 Anubis in his Dog-Godhood?

21 Certainly not, he would never waste his time on this crap; it has to be a Dim Soul.

22 How many people delegated this genius to hand down verdicts? Nobody?

23 What did this genius study to claim the right to rule on what is true and what is false?

24 Nothing?

25 Isn't he ashamed? Not in the slightest.

26 When he says someone has lied, is he willing to be challenged to a duel willing to face the person he has trashed? No.

27 The only reason he has a job is that someone pays him to carry out censorship, so let's put it in plain words... “operator of the censorship imposed by whoever funds him”.

28 Censorship is the final goal of finance, after it has, in effect, bought off every political player.

29 Why on earth should anyone believe this parasite, who is certainly no God?

30 That he reveals absolute truth to us?

31 Meh... still, in the Prophet's eyes even the fact-parasite has taken on a fundamental role in sifting information.

32 Any source these gentlemen oppose becomes worth a look!

33 So, dear fact-parasites, the Prophet and all Anubists thank you for your work, and thank your well-known funders for all the time you are saving us.

34 Keep compiling lists of “liars”, so that we have a list of sites and blogs to look at that go against the funded, imposed narrative.

35 The fact that you don't like them becomes almost a guarantee.

36 By the way, fact-thingy... would you put www.anubismo.it on your lists of “liars” too? That way the voice of Anubis will have a better chance of being heard.

37 Thanks!

A postscript from Grand Master Pheel

38 Looking for pictures to represent a fact-thingy, I realised that it is impossible to find any.

39 So the fact-checker has no face.

40 As an eternal student of the mechanisms of persuasion, I can tell you that this is extremely worrying.

41 When a professional figure (a public official in particular) has no clear face, it means he is being mythologised and idealised.

42 Mythologising and idealising someone or something is the first step towards granting that someone or something powers and rights that ordinary human beings do not have.

43 For now, let the Anubist simply notice the deep contradiction that lies at the root of the very idea of a fact-checker:

44 “I do not consider human beings virtuous enough to tell true from false, so I will give one or more human beings the power to decide what is true and what is false”

45 So let the Anubist not be fooled: given the very premises on which fact-checkers were created, it is quite clear that there can be no one on the planet so profoundly wise, Enlightened and above all free of prejudice as to tell true from false with absolute precision.

46 I hope the Prophet's words and mine have helped the Anubist stop getting screwed and start looking at figures of this kind with the proper degree of Anubistic distrust.

47 There is no human being in the world to whom truth can be delegated.

48 At most you can compare different narratives in order to plan a way of life designed to cut the ballbusting to the bare minimum.

49 In the end the only one who knows the whole truth is Anubis but, as has been said many times, being the one true god, he minds his own fucking business.