By Chris Satullo

My razor’s getting lonely. As I observe lockdown and keep the lights low in the room where I Zoom, sometimes three or four days pass between shaves.

But there’s another razor I try to keep sharp and use daily, one that millions of Americans seem to have misplaced.

It’s called Occam’s Razor.

That’s a principle of logical reasoning, named after William of Occam, a medieval theologian. It’s a nuanced rule of simplicity that I’m going to simplify this way: When trying to figure out a situation, the simplest explanation is the most likely.

Not necessarily the correct one. Just the one with the best odds of being true.

Every cop uses Occam’s Razor. When a woman is hurt or killed, look at the boyfriend or husband first. You still need to amass real evidence and run down alternative leads. But it makes sense to look first to the most probable suspect.

As humans, we’re all prone to believe what most flatters our biases. Occam’s Razor is one tool to tame this trait.

Today, a frightened America is awash in conspiracy theories peddled and echoed by people who seem to have stored Occam’s Razor in an old box in their basement. Chief among them, of course, is the fellow who lives in the rental housing known as the White House.  His daily, Occam-free ramblings foment all kinds of online nuttiness.

Let’s apply the razor to some recent claims:

1. The pandemic death count is hyped

A Minnesota physician who just happens to be a Republican politician made this claim and the usual suspects in the right-wing bubble have been pushing it.

The Claim:  Hospitals, nursing homes, state health officials across the land are conspiring with federal “deep state” liberals to exaggerate the death toll from COVID-19.

The Logic Problems:

• Why would they do this? The razor’s favorite Latin phrase is: Cui bono? Who benefits? What payoff would these parties get for pretending, as alleged, that deaths from other causes were due to COVID-19?

• Ah, so their goal is to harm Donald Trump? People who see the world through a filter of deep partisanship have a hard time imagining everyone else isn’t like them. But most of us aren’t. To credit this explanation, you have to believe that physicians who took the Hippocratic Oath (First, do no harm) would lie about a public health crisis on official forms, merely to damage a political candidate. (By the way, per the Wall Street Journal, the party affiliations of America’s physicians split pretty evenly three ways: D, R and independent.)

• And how would the conspirators do this? How would thousands upon thousands of hospitals, nursing homes, doctors, coroners and public health officials scattered around America manage – in the midst of a crisis, with bodies piling up around them and their own health at risk – concoct and coordinate this massive scheme of official lies?

Occam’s Razor says:  The death count is probably as accurate a real-time estimate as you can get amid a ramifying national crisis. If anything, it may undercount the real toll – given reporting lag times and the early confusion about how the virus presents and kills.

2. Masks kill

This and other crazed claims about the pandemic are peddled in Plandemic, a video featuring a chronic anti-vaxxer that swiftly went viral on YouTube – then was as swiftly debunked and taken down by the platform. But it lives on in corners of the Web.

The Claim: Most of what you’re being told by public health authorities about avoiding the novel coronavirus is wrong, including mask-wearing, which actually can infect you. Why would health folks do this awful thing? Because they want the virus to spread so they, and the pharmaceutical companies they’ve hooked up with, can make money off vaccines for which they already hold patents. (Particular bogeymen of this theory are Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci.)

The Logic Problems:

• Re: masks: The only way my own exhaled breath could expose me to the virus would be if I were already infected with the virus. So … huh?

• Wouldn’t 10,000 deaths – a level reached in the U.S. by the end of March and more than three times the 9/11 toll – ratchet up public urgency enough to make the owner of a secret vaccine patent fabulously rich right now? What’s the point of waiting until next year, letting untold numbers die as global wealth shrinks?

• Why would Bill Gates act, as one version has it, as the scheme’s dark mastermind? Why would the world’s second-richest person risk being outed as one of history’s most evil villains just to make a few dollars more? And would the Gates Foundation — a nonprofit that spends gobs of the man’s riches to curb infectious diseases – really fan this epidemic’s flames in hopes of profiting from a vaccine?

• What to make of the doctor featured in Plandemic, who has pushed discredited theories before and holds an acknowledged grudge against Fauci? Now, any decent journalist knows even legitimate whistleblowers aren’t always angels and can have vengeful motives.  So you don’t just dismiss their claims out of hand. But neither do you peddle them unvarnished on YouTube.  You check them out, Occam’s Razor at the ready.

Occam’s Razor says: Wear your mask. And while Fauci and Gates aren’t perfect, and pharmaceutical companies sometimes do evil things in pursuit of gain, both Plandemic and its central voice fail every basic test of credibility and fact-checking.

3. “Obamagate”

A presidential tweetstorm last weekend reheated an old pile of beans and gave it that tired moniker.

The Claim: It’s a chaotic swirl of words, but it seems to boil down to this: In the waning days of his presidency, Barack Obama activated a multi-agency, “deep state” initiative, featuring then-FBI Director James Comey, to falsely blame Russia and Donald Trump for the email hacking and social media disinformation campaigns that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. The supposed real culprit: Ukraine.

This conspiracy theory just produced shocking real-world results when the Justice Department moved to vacate a guilty plea by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. In a rare display of circular logic, Attorney General William Barr ruled that even though Flynn admitted lying to the FBI, it didn’t matter because the FBI should not have been doing the investigation of Russian interference in America’s affairs that led them to interview Flynn. The feds should have, in Barr’s view, been going after Ukraine.

The Logic Problems:

• U.S. intelligence agencies agreed the Russians were behind the hacking and disinformation, so how could the FBI be off the reservation in doing a counterintelligence probe of Russian meddling on American soil?
• Why would Ukraine, a dependent U.S. ally which – in another branch of Trump’s gnarly theory – was in bed with Democratic Vice President Joseph Biden, risk its alliance by undermining Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was at that time way up in the polls?
• Why would Comey, supposedly a key hand in this plot against Trump, turn around and mortally wound Clinton’s candidacy by making a big deal 10 days before the election of his (ultimately pointless) reopening of the FBI’s probe into her emails?

Occam’s Razor says:  The simplest explanation is that the FBI was simply doing its job – running down evidence that our Russian foes might seek to extract something in return for their Trump-tilted meddling.  As for Comey, a revolt by agents in the FBI’s leaky New York office, who were furious at him for not charging Clinton earlier, gives a plausible reason for his flipflop – something the Obamagate theory never bothers to do.

You’ll notice a thread running through these razor-less theories. All its purported villains – state health officials,  Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jim Comey, Hillary Clinton – are people who have publicly contradicted or criticized Donald Trump.

Long before we ever heard of COVID-19, another virus was invading our body politic – a partisan penchant for swirling clouds of lies and innuendo.  That virus did not originate with Donald Trump, but it’s clear he’s a super-spreader.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.