Remember when your parents told you to believe half of what you see and almost none of what you hear?

I think of that, every time I see a Tweet or Facebook post from people I know never check out their information. These erroneous posts get traction mostly because they are received by friends and family members who think you would never send them something that weren’t true.

Many have been bitten, including me, because we don’t take time to check it out. Yet it seems when it comes to political issues (especially), we never, ever, ever want to challenge loved ones. Well, it’s time to start.

Last week a Tweet floated by, asking the question: “What is it with white men in society? Why are so many killing American Muslims, women, blacks and children?” This from a person who has worked in the media and claims they speak only the truth while people like me on the right are whacked.

Low-IQ voters and those with the victim mentality eat up posts like this. But it’s all wrong. I didn’t go to any right-wing sites or left-wing sites. I went to those highly partisan sites known as the FBI (for crime stats) and the U.S. Department of Justice (for crime reports).

Let’s look at a few:

DOJ, 2012 – The percentages of black adults and white adults arrested for murder were similar, with 49.3 percent being black and 48.3 percent being white.

2012: Black juveniles accounted for 51.5 percent of all juveniles arrested for violent crimes. White juveniles accounted for 61.6 percent of all juveniles arrested for property crimes.

Doesn’t look like a wide margin to me.

As I looked for the numbers, I found a little known fact. The DOJ combines Hispanic and white in many statistics. Why? They really can’t get percentages on Hispanics because they can’t get an actual count on them.

According to a 2009 report by the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2007, Latinos “accounted for 40 percent of all sentenced federal offenders.” This was an increase from 24 percent in 1991. Seventy-two percent of the Latino offenders were not U.S. citizens. For Hispanic offenders sentenced in federal courts, 48 percent were immigration offenses and 37 percent drug offenses.

According to the DOJ, blacks accounted for 52.5 percent of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, whites 45.3 percent and “other” 2.2 percent. The offending rate for blacks was almost eight times higher than whites per 100,000, and the victim rate six times higher per 100,000. Most murders were not interracial, with 84 percent of white homicide victims murdered by whites and 93 percent of black victims murdered by blacks. I couldn’t find anything saying most crimes committed by whites were against the various parties stated in the false Tweet.

According to the Human Rights Commission, World Health Organization and the Human Rights Watch, more than 5,000 honor killings are committed every year and many of them by the fathers, brothers and uncles of Muslim women. That means Muslim men are killing Muslim women.

Here it is, America: You can’t find any stats on white men killing Muslims – oh, except the three who were killed by a nut a week or so ago. There were 93 honor killings in America by family members over the past few years. None of them were those pasty white guys looking to kill Muslim women.

On black crime, the FBI stats don’t play out to the left’s lies. FBI stats indicate blacks are more likely to commit hate crimes than any other race. According to downtrend.com, we are told that’s because blacks are incarcerated at a disproportionate rate compared to their population because the criminal justice system is racist.

We are also told that because blacks are suspended from school at a disproportionate rate compared to their population, the education system is racist. What are we to make of this? The facts show blacks commit hate crimes at a disproportionate rate to their population.

The FBI just released the latest hate crime statistics, and it doesn’t look good for the black community, which is portrayed as America’s biggest victim. In 2013, 24.3 percent of all hate crime offenders were black. According to the last census, blacks make up 12.6 percent of the population. That means blacks commit hate crimes at nearly double the rate of their population percentage.

Now let’s compare that to whites. The FBI reports that 52.4 percent of hate crime offenders were white. Keep in mind that the FBI considers Hispanics as whites, so the percentage of actual white hate crime offenders is likely lower. In any case, non-Hispanic whites make up 63.7 percent of the U.S. population. Throw in the Hispanics, and it’s 72.4 percent. Either way, whites commit hates crimes at a rate lower than their population percentage.

The point of all this is not to attack any particular group. It is to simply point out that I’m tired of lazy, hateful people who simply Tweet and post supposed “facts” labeled as “truth” and then hide in cyberspace.

Do your own homework. Let’s act on true information; then we can fix the problems in society today.

Joe Messina is host of The Real Side (TheRealSide.com), a nationally syndicated talk show that runs on AM-1220 KHTS radio and SCVTV [here]. He is also an elected member of the Hart School Board. His commentary publishes Mondays.