Articles traced back to the evidence

TruthBased.org covers a variety of subjects, including politics, economics, health, history, physics, and psychology. Each article traces its claims back to the strongest evidence available, whether that is official statistics, a peer-reviewed study, or a systematic review of many. Each states what the evidence supports, presents the strongest opposing case, and says what would change the conclusion.

Political Fact Checks

Claims politicians make, measured against the record

Do Voter ID Laws Reduce Turnout?Not by much. The largest study found no fall in turnout after strict voter ID laws. Most studies of single states found falls of less than half a percentage point, and a GAO audit found about 2 to 3 points in Kansas and Tennessee in 2012.
Is Voter Fraud a Real Problem?Heritage’s database lists 1,619 cases from 1982 to 2025, about 7 for every 10 million ballots cast in federal general elections alone. Fraud has forced one congressional election to be re-run; nothing found comes near a presidential result, and the kind voter ID is aimed at is among the rarest.
Do the Richest Americans Pay Less Tax Than Everyone Else?It depends what you count as income. On income reported to the IRS, the top 1 percent paid 26.3 percent in federal income tax in 2023, against 14.1 percent for all taxpayers. Count the rise in value of unsold stock, and the 400 wealthiest families paid about 8 percent in federal income tax over 2010 to 2018.
Is There Really a Border Crisis?It depends what you count. Counted as encounters, which are events, FY2021 to FY2023 were the three highest years on the Border Patrol's series; counted as attempted crossings, on DHS's catch-rate estimates, the years around 2000 were probably higher.

History & Myth-Busting

Things everyone "knows," tested against primary documents

Was Hitler a Socialist?No. Hitler defined his socialism as national, racial and in favour of private property. His regime sold state holdings and destroyed the socialist parties and free trade unions, while directing private firms toward rearmament.
Did the U.S. Political Parties Switch?Yes, over about thirty years. Black voters moved to the Democrats from 1936, and the former Confederate states’ House seats went from 94% Democratic after the 1960 election to 70% Republican after 2024, mostly through elections rather than politicians changing party.
What Does the Record Show About Columbus?The school story is mostly myth, but the enslavement is in his own writing. His journal and 1493 letter record captives and offer the monarchs slaves, and on Hispaniola the Taíno fell to a few thousand under forced labor before smallpox arrived in 1518–19.

Science & Perception

Viral phenomena explained with primary source neuroscience and physics

Was the Dress Blue and Black or White and Gold?Blue and black. The retailer said so, and a bought copy of the dress measured blue and black. The photo divides viewers because it gives little clue to the lighting, so people assume different light.
Is the Mandela Effect Real?Yes, as a shared memory error. A 2022 poll and a controlled study found many people making the same specific errors about famous names, images and quotations. None of the records shows a change, and why the errors recur is not yet explained.
Does Hot Water Freeze Faster Than Cold?Sometimes, but not reliably. Hot water does sometimes start to freeze before cold, mostly by chance, through differences in supercooling and in a freezer’s air currents. In the experiments a 2016 review compiled, water that started hotter generally took longer to cool to 0°C.

Science & Media Accuracy

What studies actually say vs. how they get reported

Is Climate Change Real and Human-Caused?The IPCC puts 2011–2020 about 1.1 °C above 1850–1900 on four temperature records and its best estimate of the human share at all of the warming; 2024 was the warmest year measured, CO₂ is at its highest in 800,000 years, and the ocean, sea level and ice agree. What coverage gets wrong, both ways.
How Dangerous Is Nuclear Power?Nuclear power has caused far fewer deaths per unit of electricity than fossil fuels and about as few as wind and solar. What Chernobyl and Fukushima killed, where the waste goes, and why the case against it is cost.
Do Trans Women Retain an Athletic Advantage?It depends what you count. Hormone therapy brings haemoglobin down to cisgender women's levels within about four months, but muscle falls only about 5 percent in the first year and the skeleton does not change. A 2026 meta-analysis finds strength and aerobic fitness comparable, at very low certainty, and two Air Force studies disagree on running. World Aquatics, World Athletics, the UCI and, from 2028, the IOC keep trans women who went through male puberty out of women's events.

Economics & Policy

Contested economic claims vs. BLS, CBO, and peer-reviewed data

Is the Gender Wage Gap Real?Yes. Women working full time in the US earned 82 to 84 cents for each dollar men earned in 2025. Most of the gap reflects differences in jobs and the effect of children; a gap of about 8% was left unexplained in a study of 2010 data.
What Causes Inflation?Supply and demand together, in shares research has not settled. Shortages and energy shocks raised prices in the U.S. and abroad alike, and estimates of what relief spending added to U.S. inflation run from about 0.3 to 3 percentage points.
Where Does U.S. Federal Spending Go?Mostly to health care, Social Security and interest on the debt, in CBO’s projections for fiscal 2026. Net interest has cost more than defense since fiscal 2024, and all international affairs spending, foreign aid included, was 0.6% of outlays in fiscal 2025.
Is College Still Worth It?Yes, for most people who finish. Bachelor's graduates earned 63% more a week than high school graduates in 2025, but 23% of bachelor's programs do not repay their cost, and starting without finishing almost always loses money.
Do Tariffs Bring Back Manufacturing Jobs?Steel, tires, China, and the 2025 escalation, with each episode measured by jobs saved, jobs lost downstream, cost per job, consumer prices, and the trade deficit.
Does Raising the Minimum Wage Kill Jobs?Mostly no, at the increases studied so far. Across 72 published studies, the median estimate is that job losses offset about 13 percent of the potential pay gains. The dispute is over large increases, such as the $13 step in Seattle and the $20 fast-food minimum in California.
How Bad Is the National Debt?Serious, and getting worse. Debt held by the public is about as large as the economy and, under current law, CBO projects it at 175% of GDP by 2056. Measured against the economy, the debt rose under every president from Reagan to Biden except Clinton.
Which Presidents Created the Most Jobs?Bill Clinton, on the usual count: 22.9 million payroll jobs in his two terms, the most since 1939. A study of 1949 to 2013 traced none of the faster economic growth under Democrats to fiscal or monetary policy.
Which Did Better, Communist or Capitalist Countries?Mostly the capitalist ones. The market sides of divided Germany and Korea ended far richer, and China and Vietnam grew fast after market reforms. Planned economies did well on health and schooling for their level of development, and their famines killed millions.

Health & Medicine

Medical statistics and health claims vs. peer-reviewed evidence

Are Supplements Worth It, or a Waste of Money?Six in ten American adults take a supplement. The largest trials find little or no benefit for a healthy adult who is not short of anything; for a short, specific list of people, supplements are treatment rather than insurance.
Are Vaccines Safe and Effective?The vaccines in routine use prevent the diseases they target, and their serious side effects are rare. The autism claim came from a fraudulent, retracted 1998 paper, and studies of about two million children since have found no link.
Is Ultra-Processed Food Bad for You?Two controlled feeding trials, the cohort studies of death and disease, and the kinds of ultra-processed food most consistently linked to harm.
Does Social Media Harm Teenagers’ Mental Health?Probably a little, for some teenagers. Heavier social media use goes with slightly worse mental health, more so for girls, and the studies best able to show cause find small harms, in college students and adults.
How to Help Someone With an Eating DisorderFor families and friends. The emergency signs, what to say, the reassurance that backfires, meal support, and an honest account of how little of this advice has actually been tested.
What Is Anorexia Nervosa?Anorexia nervosa has one of the highest death rates of any mental illness: roughly five to six times that of people of the same age and sex. You do not have to be underweight to have it, many people recover over many years, and no drug treats the illness itself.
How to Help Someone With DepressionFor families, partners and friends. Asking someone directly about suicide has not been found to raise their risk, and a written safety plan has more behind it than a promise. Most everyday advice on what to say and do has not been tested; this page says which is which, and lists helplines for supporters.
What Is Depression?Two people can be diagnosed with major depression and share no symptom. The 227 ways to qualify, how dangerous depression is and why the old 15% suicide figure is too high, what is known about its causes, how much antidepressants, therapy and exercise help, and why treatment rose about fourfold while prevalence did not fall.
What Exactly Creates a Sociopath?Sociopathy is blamed on a warrior gene, on an abusive childhood or on a damaged brain. This page sets each explanation against what twin studies, genetic studies, maltreatment research and brain imaging measured.
What Is Gender Dysphoria, and What Does the Evidence Actually Show?Adults. What the diagnosis is, the distinctions people get wrong, the causes put forward, and what adults who have been through treatment report. Every figure with its population and its certainty.
Can Sociopaths Be Fixed?Companion to the causes article. What has been tried for antisocial personality disorder, what the trials measured, and why nobody yet knows whether it can be treated.
What Is COVID-19, and Where Did It Come From?What the virus and the disease are, how the virus spread and how deadly it was, and where it came from. The evidence best supports a natural spillover from animals near a Wuhan market, but the origin is not settled and a lab-related accident has not been ruled out. The vaccines are on a separate page.

Crime & Justice

Policing, punishment, guns and political violence: what the data can and cannot show

Did Police Funding Cuts Cause the 2020 Crime Surge?Firearm homicide rose 46% from 2019 to the 2021 peak. A study of 264 cities found no evidence the 2020 protests led to police budget cuts, and the sharp rise came before the budget votes. A four-city study of police pullback found no clear rise in violent crime; gun buying and pandemic disruption fit the timing better.
Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime?No one has shown that it does. The National Research Council found the research not informative either way, and the 2003 study behind the claim of 18 murders prevented per execution reversed when re-run. Capital cases cost more in six state studies, and 203 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973.
Is Mass Incarceration a Product of the War on Drugs?Only in part. Drug offences were about 31% of prison admissions from 1993 to 2011 but 13% of sentenced state prisoners in 2022, and releasing every drug prisoner would free about 196,000 people and leave more than a million inside.
Does Gun Control Reduce Violence?Some laws do. Of RAND's 144 pairings of a law with an outcome, six reach the top tier: four for laws acting on young people and two finding that a law increases homicide. For 126 the studies are inconclusive or missing.
Why Does the U.S. Have More Gun Deaths?Mostly its guns. On the Global Burden of Disease’s 2019 rates the U.S. firearm death rate, 10.4 per 100,000, was nearly five times France’s, the next highest peer, and the gap was about half suicide and half homicide. In 2024 Americans were killed without a gun at 1.2 times the Canadian rate and with one at six and a half times. CDC, GBD, Statistics Canada, the ONS, the Small Arms Survey and RAND.
Which Side Commits More Political Violence?Right-wing attackers have killed more people than left-wing ones in every count of a decade or more, from CSIS, the Cato Institute, New America and ADL, while in 2025 CSIS counted more left-wing than right-wing attacks and plots, and more people killed by left-wing attacks; what each count includes and the filing choices that move it.

Groups & Crime

Claims that a particular group commits more crime, or suffers more of it, checked against the records that exist

Is It True That Trans Women Are More Likely to Be Sex Offenders?The data available does not show that trans women are more likely to be sex offenders, or less likely. Two versions of an infographic put trans women in England and Wales at 1,916 and 1,177 per million in prison for sexual offences. Both divide a prison headcount by a census count that the Office for National Statistics says should not be used this way.
Are Trans People Overrepresented as Mass Shooters?No. On the Gun Violence Archive, the only database big enough to test it, trans people carried out 4 of 5,748 US mass shootings from 2013 to September 2025, 12 times fewer than their share of the population would give; the Crime Prevention Research Center’s 6.2 times rests on one confirmed case.
Are LGB People More Likely to Be Sex Offenders?Companion to the victimisation article. The claim is about gay men and children, and no official statistics in the US or in England and Wales give an offending rate by orientation. The three small studies both sides cite, the 10-to-20-times figure and what it counted, and the strongest case the other way.
Do Violent Offending Rates Differ by Race?The last homicide offending rate by race that BJS published is 34.4 per 100,000 against 4.5, and for serious nonfatal violence, victims’ descriptions of white and black offenders match the arrests. Where controls are applied the gaps shrink, some to nothing measurable.
Are the Racial Violence Statistics Being Misread?Yes, both ways. The FBI table people screenshot is a count with no population figure that gets read as a rate, and the offender was unknown for 27.8% of the victims in its file, not half. The 84% grooming gangs figure has no source that can carry it, and neither does the national claim the other way.
Do Immigrants Commit More Crime?No: 674 undocumented and 303 legal immigrants incarcerated per 100,000 aged 18 to 54 against 1,195 native-born in Cato’s estimates from the 2024 American Community Survey, Texas arrest rates say the same, and why Europe differs.
Are Trans People More Likely to Be Victims of Crime?Companion to the sex-offender article. What random-sample surveys in three countries find, the national inmate survey that put transgender inmates’ sexual victimization at eight to ten times the rate of all inmates, the prison records of England and Wales, and what a homicide rate estimate found.
Are LGB People More Likely to Be Victims of Crime?American survey data shows a large gap in violent crime, and most of it survives adjustment. The British analysis in which the gap lost statistical significance covered a range of crimes, not violence on its own. Bisexual people have by far the highest rates in the American survey, and neither country has a national count of murder victims by sexual orientation.

Religion & Society

Measurable claims about religiosity and social outcomes

Are Religious Countries Better Off?No. The more religious countries are mostly the poorer ones and rank lower on human development, but the evidence points to insecurity and inequality driving both, not religion. Religious individuals do somewhat better on crime, giving and health.
Does Religion Cause Violence?Since 1975 a growing share of armed conflicts has been fought over religious demands, and religious terrorist groups have been deadlier; but more religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to have civil wars once income is taken into account, and the popular death tolls for the Inquisition and the witch trials are far above what historians count.

International Comparisons

How U.S. outcomes compare globally

Which Countries Are the Most Educated?It depends what you count. Canada has the largest share of adults with a tertiary qualification of the 46 countries in the OECD's figures, Singapore and four parts of China score highest in the PISA tests, and Germany's adults have the most years of schooling.

Source standards and how conflicts between sources are handled are described on the methodology page.