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If you check the sidebar, you'll see that we use Wikipedia's Standard of Verifiability

Which you can find here

> Other reliable sources include university-level textbooks, books published by respected publishing houses, magazines, journals, and mainstream newspapers

I have to admit that respected is a subjective term, but in this case was fairly easy to make judgement on.

The two biographies in question were:

Michelle Obama: A Biography written by Liza Mundy and published by Simon & Schuster.

Which is a notable publisher who has a long history of publishing popular titles and has been in existence for 88 years. They are one of the largest publishers in the United States

and

Michelle Obama: First Lady of Hope written by Elizabeth Lightfoot and published by Lyons Press.

Lyons Press has been a publisher since for 65 years, and a look at their catalog shows notable authors, and arguably popular books.

Neither of those publishers could be considered fringe publishing companies, which made the determination easy.

They were within the reliable sources guidelines, which is why they were admitted to be used as evidence to support the claim.

Of course it makes it a bit shakey that the claim was already an anecdote, but we call it as we see it. When there is reliable sources that back up the claim, and no sources to debunk it, we rate is as true.

If there are some other sources that contradict the validity rating of it, by all means direct us to them in a post. We have no problem changing validity flair after the fact if new information is posted.

On a personal note. In the future, please don't wait until a new thread comes up to air any grievances you have with our decisions. We gladly welcome any critical feedback or discussions you want to have with us. Simply click the message the mod button in the sidebar. We have no problem discussing any of this with any user, we don't like to have to have to derail threads with this.

When I saw your post in the "shoe thread"

>I'm just makin' the early call ;-)
Due diligence is always warranted, I'm just being a snooty snapper.

It doesn't leave me with the impression that you had any issues with the decision.

The mod at the time explained it to you pretty clearly:

>Ok, you may be right. If it turns out that way, promise we'll tag this unverifiable.

And it seemed you had no issue with what he said at the time.

Maybe its my fault, that I saw it and didn't reach out to you at the time to make sure everything was good. If it is, I apologize.

But again, if you have any issues. Please reach out to us

This right here. Our country was founded on the belief that religion should be your choice, as a result of the religious persecution of the Church of England.

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html

It's interesting to me that many of these colonies then imposed strict rules regarding prayer and taxes for the churches they instituted themselves, though.

That said, it was a deeply held value of America to be free to worship as you please.

During the 1950's, the Christian religious leaders of the time began to integrate themselves into the American Government. We saw "In God We Trust" added to money, and becoming the official motto of the US, replacing "E pluribus unum" (Out of many, one).

There's a lovely book, a long read, that covers a lot of the Religious empire taking over the Republican Party called "One Nation Under God". (note: that is an amazon smile link, help donate to the charity of your choice!)

Either way, all of that is to help contextualize how some believe that banning on the basis of religion is ok as long as it's not their religion.

Where that seems to stand against nationality is the predisposition to certain factors, or agreements between governments. It's not always that it's more ethical to ban based on nationality, but that there's more cause to based on nationality. In recent memory, there hasn't been such a combative religious affiliation like the Jihadist of the Islam faith. Attacks were carried out by governments of certain countries -- and thus lied the moral ambiguity to ban based on it.

The book appears real, with a listing on Amazon showing a publishing date of 1989. However, its importance seems highly exaggerated. The book only has 25 reviews on the website, and the majority of those are from just within the last few years, by conservatives complaining about it, and the book doesn't have an entry on Wikipedia. Again, not a definitive indication, but a pretty good one.

Here's one study on that issue: The Spirit Level

There is a book you should check out called Network Propaganda that breaks this down in detail including citing FB accounts, posts, and mapping a Twitter web of influence across various bot accounts.

Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190923636/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_0rC7CbZD1BJ99

America has always had a strain of anti intellectualism but it really has been coming to a boiling point over the last few decades. Two books stuck out at me over this past year as being particularly prescient: The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, and Just How Stupid Are We? by Rick Shenkman.

Both of them diagnosed a problem that is inherent to all people but pronounced in Americans. We are easily manipulated and rarely bother researching our positions. We attack experts who disagree with us as elitist, as though that was a bad thing (relevant rant starts at 7:15). This isn't some isolated thing that only exists in the talking head boxes on cable news. The Texas GOP openly opposed critical thinking. The only way we get past this is to push back against the anti-intellectualism, and we do that by trying to get people to reflect on their own decision making. There are ways of engaging the critical thinking skills of others without directly calling them out on bullshit and starting fights.