Tolkkinen: I’ll check into your Minnesota conspiracy theory, but first you have to do something for me

At Farmfest in Morgan, Minn., in August, I met a family who were absolutely certain that there was a school in a nearby county that put out litter boxes for students who identified as furries.

The father insisted he had seen it with his own eyes. His family knew the school janitor, and he was the one who told them about it.

Well, I couldn’t let that stand! Litter boxes in school bathrooms? What about the poor soul who had to scoop it out?

Look, I told the family, meeting their eyes in turn: You get me in touch with that janitor and I will go to the school myself and investigate.

For a moment, they looked incredulous and delighted. A member of the mainstream media was taking them seriously! This school was going to be held accountable!

Then their story began to fall apart. The dad admitted he hadn’t actually seen the litter boxes in person; he’d only seen a photo online. They didn’t know the janitor personally; he was a friend of a friend. A few seats down, a woman was watching us. She looked unhappy. Then she interjected that the school hadn’t actually put in the litter boxes.

“They were going to,” she said. “But they didn’t.”

“No litter boxes?” I said. I looked back at the dad, who had been so sure, 100% sure, never more certain of anything in his life, that the school was supplying litter boxes to furries. He looked down at the table. In that moment, the narrative shifted. It was no longer about journalists being unwilling to write The Truth. It was that this family realized something they believed was true just flat-out wasn’t.

It can be hard to know what you don’t know, especially when opinion leaders pass along bad information, intentionally or not. So often I hear people criticize the mainstream media for not reporting on things they’re convinced are happening. So I try to listen and at least do a cursory check.

Last week a man asked me to look into something terrible he believes schools are doing: helping students change genders without parental permission or knowledge.

I think everybody can agree that if this is in fact happening, the school superintendent should be chased out of the state. The question is, is it happening? I told the reader that if he could name schools in Minnesota that are doing this, I would investigate. The thing is, he doesn’t know of any. He wants me to investigate, but I can’t investigate thin air. I need something substantial, and rumors and suspicions aren’t enough.

He mentioned the 2023 law that keeps another state’s anti-gender care laws from being used against a child or their parent or guardian in Minnesota. That law doesn’t say anything about schools, but it could keep a noncustodial parent in another state from getting involved with their child’s health care when it comes to gender affirmation. I can see how that could infuriate the noncustodial parent if they don’t agree with gender transition. But schools have nothing to do with it.

My approach has had mixed results. A couple of years ago, when I worked for the Alexandria newspaper, a reader emailed me with a conspiracy theory inspired by James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. He thought that ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democrats, was taking money from donors who were falsely using the names of real people.

At the time, I only covered Douglas County. So I told him to pick out five donations from Douglas County residents that seemed suspicious, and I would investigate. He did. One of them included a donation that registered after the donor had died. I called each of those five, and each confirmed their donations. The family of the deceased man said that he had made the payment, but that it hadn’t been processed until shortly after his death.

The reader thanked me for checking into it. But he wasn’t satisfied. He kept sending me messages, asking me to look deeper into the story. As a small-town journalist, I felt I’d done what I could for him. I didn’t have the resources or interest to launch the full-scale investigation he wanted. Finally, I just told him he was making me sad. He wanted so desperately to believe that he was right that he wasn’t willing to let it go, even when, together, we couldn’t produce any evidence that he was right.

I don’t look down on people who have conspiracy theories. We are all bombarded daily by radio shows, podcasts, social media, television, newspapers, YouTube, TikTok. How do you separate things that are true from those that aren’t? I’ve been fooled myself into thinking a pay-to-play online publication was a scholarly journal. The mainstream media were fooled about weapons of mass destruction. We’re all just humans trying to do the best we can with the knowledge we have.

If there’s something terrible happening in greater Minnesota, let me know. I’ll check it out. But you have to do something for me, first. Give me concrete details. I can’t investigate something that doesn’t exist.