Don’t believe everything you read. That has always been true, but it is especially important to remember now that there are so many fake news sites. A number of left-leaning bloggers have been planting fake news in order to trick conservatives into sharing it so they can then ridicule them.

One fake news site admitted to especially targeting Tea Party types since they can sometimes be fairly gullible. People who land on the site think it is legitimate since it often has a picture of Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz. The goal is to get a reporter or just a person surfing the net to fall for one of their hoaxes. They have been able to fool a Fox New host, a radio talk show host, and many other journalists.

By the way, there are also attempts to fool Christians These fake news bloggers take some comment in the news and make it many times worse. That is why it is worth having some discernment when you find something on the Internet. By the way, it is funny that sometimes the tactics of these liberal fake news sites backfire on liberals. One MSNBC host apparently fell for a story that said Sarah Palin wanted to invade Egypt.

There are ways to check the veracity of a story. Over the years, I have tried to address some of the perennial rumors that are spread by Christians on the Internet. You can type my name and the words “Christian rumors” to read the transcript of a week of radio programs that I have done to address many of these.

You should also check a story you read by comparing it to other legitimate news sources. If you only see the story that makes some outrageous claims on one blog and nowhere else, it is probably not true. Be careful. There are fake news sites being used to undermine your credibility.

The percentage of teenagers suffering from hearing loss has jumped by a third in little over a decade. That is the conclusion of researchers writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They drew numbers from the government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Adjusting for factors such as age, race, and exposure to infections that could damage the ear, they found a slow but significant rise in hearing loss.

The researchers were unwilling to jump to the conclusions most of us would draw from the results. While they acknowledge that hearing loss could be due to listening to iPods and other portable music players, they couldn’t rule out other factors ranging from exposure to loud noises to nutrition to exposure to toxins.

Hearing loss has been linked to slower language development, poorer performance in school, and lower self esteem. And social skills are dependent upon language so the long term impact most likely will be in progressively lower scores on communication tests and greater anxiety.

Although the researchers were unwilling to draw too many conclusions, let me venture into this area. For example, a previous study in Australia noticed a correlation between hearing loss and using a portable music player (such as an iPod or other music player). Another study in New York documented that more than half the college students were listening to these players above the recommended exposure. And we should also add that teenagers also go to loud concerts and other noisy events such as NASCAR races.

When you think about it, we shouldn’t really be surprised by these findings. Loud portable music players may not be the only reason for hearing loss, but they are certainly a significant reason. Parents need to tell their kids to turn down the volume.

Politicians complaining about Ford’s decision to build small cars in Mexico might want to look at the government’s policies that forced this decision. Merrill Matthews in a recent column points to two issues that explain why Ford will be moving its small car production south of the border.

First there are the CAFE standards. These are the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that all car manufacturers must meet. U.S. automobile manufacturers sell many more light duty trucks and SUVs but must keep these small, light cars with better fuel economy in order to offset trucks and SUVs with lower fuel economy. These cars (and electric cars) are the best way to keep within the required CAFE standards.

As you might expect, there is little or no profit in producing these small cars. Moving small car production to Mexico makes sense. There is less overhead and cheaper labor. This is the best way for Ford to break even or even make a profit on these small cars.

The U.S. corporate income tax is a second reason for the move to Mexico. As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, this country has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. When you add state taxes on top of the federal tax, the tax rate is in the 40 percent range. By contrast, Mexico has a lower tax rate and probably provided some additional incentives to Ford Motor Company.

There is a solution: fix the corporate tax system. The plans put forward by House Speaker Paul Ryan, and the current plan put forward by presidential candidate Donald Trump, would do just that.

Politicians can continue to complain about automobile companies and other manufacturers moving operations out of America, or they can do something about it. Other companies will follow Ford to Mexico or other places where they can break even or make a profit. Congress and the next president needs to make changes before other companies decide to turn out the lights and head south.

In just a few days, the nation’s strictest LGBT non-discrimination laws will go into effect in Massachusetts. According to the latest pronouncements from the state government, even churches and Christian schools will be affected since they are defined as public accommodations.

Any accommodation must allow patrons to use men’s or women’s restrooms as well as locker rooms and changing rooms that are “consistent with their gender identity.” Moreover, it requires that these venues must also “use names, pronouns, and gender-related terms appropriate to employee’s stated gender identity in communications with employee and with others.”

As Christians we believe that sex and gender are essentially the same thing. But the Massachusetts laws instead defines gender identity as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to see where conflicts will arise between this latest transgender law and Christian teaching and church programs. Most churches hold events that are considered to be “open to the public.” Churches will probably welcome people of any sexual orientation, but they also will probably balk at opening up their bathroom or locker room facilities to transgendered people. They might find it difficult to use pronouns that are not consistent with biology. If pastors and teachers in Massachusetts churches teach on various biblical passages, a transgender person could take the church to court over the content of the sermon or Sunday school lesson.

Massachusetts was the first state to grant same-sex marriages. It now might be the first state with a lawsuit against a church over transgender issues, and that case might make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

David French says this happens every time he criticizes a private corporation for progressive bullying. He gets a response something like: “How do you like free markets now, Mr. Conservative? What’s your problem with free speech, Mr. Lawyer?” The problem with this response is why he wrote a column with the provocative title: “Free Speech Is Killing Free Speech.”

The thinking behind the reaction is that if you support the existence of a legal right (in this case free speech), you should support every single exercise of that right. That makes no sense. Liberals who criticize any of us concerned about the boycott of North Carolina or Chick-fil-A or whatever entity, know that you can support free speech but also at the same time disagree with the way people exercise free speech. A progressive would support the right to vote but that does not mean they are happy when someone votes for a conservative candidate.

We should support the idea of free markets. But that doesn’t mean we have to remain silent when liberal groups or homosexual activists try to boycott a state or company or shame it on Facebook because it holds to traditional views on marriage and family.

David French also acknowledges that the problem isn’t just found on the liberal side of the political spectrum. He reminds us that the so-called “alt-right” is raising trolling to an obscene art form. They bombard their “opponents with the most vile forms of constitutionally protected expression imaginable.”

He also finds it humorous that various leftwing sportswriters applaud Colin Kaepernick for making some Americans feel uncomfortable, but were silent or even cheered when ESPN fired Curt Shilling for making some people uncomfortable. These examples all seem to fit into the false mantra of “free speech for me but not for thee.”

The leaders of many of the national sports organizations have been promoting social justice especially when it comes to the homosexual agenda and transgender issues. The primary target this last year has been North Carolina. The NBA pulled its All-Star game from Charlotte. The NFL said that it will continue to fight North Carolina’s bathroom privacy bill.

The latest action by the NCAA shouldn’t come as any surprise. They decided to pull seven championship events from the Tar Heel State merely because the North Carolina legislature believes boys and girls should use the bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex.

David French laments that the Left is “weaponizing sports.” He also points to the blatant hypocrisy of the NCAA. “This is an organization, mind you, that reaps billions of dollars of rewards off the labor of disproportionately poor and minority students while imposing on them — as a condition for even participating in college sports — economic restrictions not imposed on any other college student. So-called student-athletes don’t own their time, or even the rights to their own names. The vast majority of them don’t go on to play pro sports, so they’re effectively prevented from making money during the time when their earning potential is at its highest. But the NCAA is now suddenly discovering social justice? Please.”

Not so long ago, sports were neutral. It was a place where liberal and conservative, heterosexual and homosexual, rich and poor could come together and root for their home team and put aside many of the differences that often divide us. We could all gather together to watch the Super Bowl or the World Series without having to deal with the controversial social issues of our day.

The NBA, the NFL, and now the NCAA have changed all of that. The social justice warriors in these organizations cannot leave it alone. In trying to defend the indefensible (putting transgender boys in girl’s bathrooms) they harm their sport and will probably lose audience. Apparently, they don’t care.

Sometimes I hear from a caller worried that our voting machines might be hacked and therefore should be monitored. Well, be careful what you wish for. Now some in the Obama administration are using the unlikely possibility that Russia could hack into our voting machines to justify putting federal agents in our voting areas.

John Fund is a columnist for National Review and the author of Stealing Elections. Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Elections Commission. They are co-authors of the book Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk. They remind us that the U.S. election system is safe enough, and they don’t need federal help to run their polling booths.

The voter-registration systems maintained by state and country governments are separate and distinct from the voting machines that will be used in November. And that is also true of the vote-tabulation equipment used in county election departments.

It is also worth noting that three out of every five countries in this country use optical-scan technology, not electronic voting machines, making hacking nearly impossible. The other counties that use electronic voting machines store them in secured warehouses until Election Day. The Russians would have to recruit thousands of hackers to go to polling places in order to hack the machines without being noticed.

Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund believe all of this new found concern about Russian hacking is really just the first step in federalizing election administration. The Obama Justice Department has objected to election-integrity reforms and filed lawsuits against voter ID laws and other common sense legislative proposals. It may be a convenient way to give Justice Department lawyers and Homeland Security staff legal access to polling places.

We have the most decentralized election system in the Western world. We don’t need to call the feds and put them in our polling places.

Most Americans are familiar with the comments last week by Hillary Clinton that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are a “basket of deplorables” that are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Few are probably aware of the statements by Martin Castro directed at an even larger portion of the American population.

Martin Castro is the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an institution that did good work in the past by ending racial discrimination. Lately is has been a place where some fairly outrageous things have been said and done. Martin Castro continued that tradition last week.

He said: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

Gary Bauer noted that Castro made his comments just days before the nation was remembering the 9/11 attacks where Islamic supremacists killed 3,000 Americans. Instead, this Obama appointee was warning about so-called Christian supremacists. Meanwhile, Christian photographers, florists, bakers, and others have their jobs and livelihoods threatened.

William McGurn, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that Martin Castro has “performed an enormous public service for his county. But it’s not the one he thinks.” His comments on this civil rights report remind us of the bias the elites in America have against Christians and their belief that religious liberty and religious freedom are merely code words of despicable discrimination.

Everyday we seem to find another example of liberal politicians or bureaucrats finding new ways to label large portions of the American population as racist, sexist, homophobic bigots. Perhaps it is the ones doing the labeling who are the true bigots.