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‘We all can’t be wrong.’ Oh yes, you can.

There are sentences you hear on the radio that stop you cold.

Wednesday’s winner came from a woman explaining why she remains convinced Lindsay Clancy did not kill her children.

“We all can’t be wrong.”

Oh yes, you can.

In fact, the Internet has spent the last couple of decades perfecting the art of allowing enormous numbers of people to be wrong together.

This woman was genuinely shaken by the possibility. She and other women had been following the Clancy case, comparing notes, watching videos and apparently reaching the conclusion that Lindsay’s husband Patrick was responsible.

Never mind that this is not Lindsay Clancy’s defense.

Never mind that Clancy was charged with killing her three children and her lawyers have argued that she was not criminally responsible because of her mental condition.

The Internet had compared notes.

Case closed.

Then came the sentence that really fascinated me: if all of them had fallen for a conspiracy, she said, that would be “scary.”

Yes.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Because Wednesday’s Rush Hour inadvertently became a little tour of what happens when people spend enough time online convincing one another that whatever they already believe must be true.

And Clancy was only the beginning.

Another woman informed the world that she will not date a man who makes less than $200,000 a year.

“I’m not trying to struggle,” she explained.

Fair enough. Everybody is allowed to have standards.

Mine would include not dating someone who regards $199,999 as poverty.

She then upgraded the requirement to millionaires, which raised the obvious question I had while listening: Where do you work?

I never got an answer.

Before I could fully process the plight of America’s tragically underpaid $199,000 bachelors, another woman took me along to her doctor’s office.

She had an outstanding MRI bill of about $2,000.

For two years.

She was not paying it.

Her reasoning was magnificent: What are they going to do, take the scan back?

You have to admire the simplicity.

The doctor already looked at it. She already got the results. Apparently medical billing now operates on the same principle as eating half the steak and telling the waiter you changed your mind.

The office asked her for $50.

No.

Twenty?

No.

Ten dollars?

Now she was offended on principle.

And somewhere in America an accounts-receivable clerk quietly updated her résumé.

Then we went grocery shopping.

A young woman showed us her cart and complained that after losing her EBT benefits, she could no longer fill it without worrying about prices.

She actually had to stay within a budget.

Imagine.

Apparently people had reported her because, according to her own account, she was receiving benefits while spending her own money on things like her hair and nails. Now she was furious with the people who reported her because she had to pay attention to what groceries cost.

Welcome to the club.

Millions of Americans have been wandering around supermarkets doing this strange ritual for years. We look at the price, look at our bank account, look back at the price and occasionally put the steak back.

We call it Tuesday.

But the Internet wasn’t finished with me yet.

One woman argued that if men claim hormones can influence their sexual behavior, perhaps we should treat them the way we treat male dogs that cannot control themselves.

I will allow you to work out the proposed medical procedure.

She also wondered why men should be allowed to hold leadership positions if hormones make them so uncontrollable.

Then another woman offered a theory about postpartum mental illness involving male DNA. Her theory, as I understood it, was that a pregnant woman’s body may be struggling with this foreign male DNA and that perhaps this explains postpartum mental-health problems.

At that point I began missing the $2,000 MRI.

At least we knew the MRI existed.

This is what makes the Internet such a strange place. It did not invent people with unusual opinions. We had those long before Wi-Fi.

What it did was give every unusual opinion a search function.

Believe Lindsay Clancy didn’t kill her children? Somewhere there is a group waiting for you.

Think your medical bill ceased to exist because the doctor already saw the scan? Somebody will hit “like.”

Think budgeting after losing government benefits is an injustice? There is an audience.

Male DNA is responsible for postpartum mental illness?

Give it five minutes. Somebody will start a podcast.

Even my own Countess of Conspiracy was sending me messages about inconsistencies in the Clancy case. I finally asked her directly whether she was telling me Lindsay didn’t kill those children.

Her answer boiled down to: only God knows the truth.

I give up.

And that may have been the real theme of Wednesday’s show.

We still managed to get actual news in there. I discovered that I had somehow missed the verdict in the Tupac Shakur murder case. We got into voter fraud, Tiger Woods, Iranian hackers and plenty more.

But I kept coming back to those women and that one remarkable sentence:

“We all can’t be wrong.”

There was a time when believing something because everybody around you believed it was called peer pressure.

Now it is called research.

We have more information available to us than any generation in human history, yet somehow we’ve built a machine that can take one person’s suspicion, introduce her to 10,000 people with the same suspicion and send everybody home feeling independently verified.

The Internet did not make us stupid.

It did something much more impressive.

It gave us supporting documentation.

— Bo Snerdley

Rush Hour airs Monday through Friday and moves quickly through the day’s hottest political stories, breaking developments and media absurdities. It is the fastest hour in American media because there is always more happening than the legacy media has time—or desire—to explain.

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