"there isn't a single source worth citing" is not my claim. It's that the field has a very high amount of highly politicized dreck and it can't be _generally_ trusted. I'm sure there are good citations. But one can't know if any particular citation is a good one without diving into the details (probably while having some degree of subject matter expertise), and any randomly selected article is more likely than not to be bad. As such, most people should not take the existence of a citation as proof of very much since it is more likely than not to be borderline useless. Especially given that the worst, most politically motivated articles (again: in both directions) are likely to be the ones that tell the strongest stories and have the least nuance and are therefore likely to be the most often cited.

This is an area where lay people should stay out of it, and should _definitely_ not be making strong claims like "documented, empirical fact" based on a shallow reading of someone else's summary of the literature.