You yourself are awefully fond of basing elaborate narratives on dubious sources, which is fine, but why then stoop to high-school debate club level gaslighting like "Ultimately, this is an epistemological question - what do we know? And the only things one can say one knows, is stuff you have personally verified.", unless this is satire?
If you think my point about how you know something is satire, you are mistaken - I am serious.
The problem is that most people are unable to discern what they know from what think they know (aka belief). Because they saw it on a screen or other people say so this. This is NOT knowing. Watching something on a screen only means that you know you saw something on a screen, not that what you saw was faithfully portrayed! You didn't believe Independence Day was real, but you do believe the news, etc is.
Knowing is not easy, but believing we know is.