I am trying to have empathy for conspiracy-believers.
One person's wacky conspiracy is another person's simple truth.
We all know the canard about having a right to one's own opinion but not to one's own facts. Nonetheless, people have their own facts.
Media commentator Brian Stelter, with information uncovered by the discovery process in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, reported that the Dominion-vote-switch idea arose from an email sent to Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell, who was a guest on Maria Bartiromo's Fox show. Powell's source was a woman who said she gets information through semi-conscious time travel. The source explained
how do I know all of this? … I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. … I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live. … The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”
Powell repeated the source's assertion that the Dominion's tabulating machines flipped votes. Bartiromo presented it as evidence. Donald Trump began repeating the assertion, citing Fox. The idea spread. A majority of Republicans now tell pollsters that tabulating machines helped steal the 2020 election from Trump. In states and counties all across America -- including my own Jackson County -- Republican groups descend on election officials demanding they hand-count all ballots.
Intelligent people can believe crazy things. A college classmate with a long and successful career in investments writes me sharing information that the murder of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was staged. Absolutely. For certain. The supposed dead children were child actors. All the deaths were faked. The local and state police, the town, the school, the mortuaries -- hundreds of people -- are all in on the hoax. Alex Jones had it about right, he tells me.
That seems utterly crazy to me. As does the idea that Bill Gates is somehow getting micro-chips into the Covid vaccine for future mind control. And that Michelle Obama is actually male. And that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats have a side hustle imprisoning children for use as sex toys. And that top Democrats imprison children to harvest a youth elixir, adrenochrome. And that most of the people at the Capitol on January 6 carrying Trump banners were Democrats carrying out a false flag operation.
What crazy nonsense, I think.
And yet on this 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination I am reading and listening once again to problems with the standard official government story of the lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Report has holes, improbabilities, and inconsistencies. I have nagging doubts. Were there multiple shooters? Wasn't JFK shot from both the front and back? Were the autopsy photos switched? Why did the autopsy doctor change his autopsy notes and burn the originals? Was the CIA involved? The FBI? Castro? The USSR?
I don't know what really happened, but I am pretty sure the official story isn't the whole truth. So, recognizing my own belief in a JFK conspiracy of misinformation, I recognize that doubting the "official story" of other controversies is a matter of choice. We pick and choose evidence. I think I make reasonable, wise decisions. People who believe wacky nonsense conspiracies think their decisions are wise and based on evidence.
Here is an exchange this morning on X, formerly Twitter, following a bit of video of Trump at the Clemson football game on Saturday. The video depicted people jeering Trump, thus proving Trump was unpopular, the tweet asserted. Then this:
Of course the video was cherry picked. It was real, and cherry picked, both. I also think Biden got 81 million votes; some don't.
Governments and media want to be credible, but each has incentives not to be fully truthful. They have interests to protect -- their popularity, their offices, their audiences. It was in the interest of the CIA, FBI, the Johnson Administration, and even the Kennedy family, to let sleeping dogs lie. So they came up with a simple story that eliminated awkward, embarrassing truths that would be part of any backstory.
I try to have some humility and empathy. We understand the world in a fog of facts, sham, and mis-information. People who believe conspiracies are piecing together what they hear from sources they find credible. As do I. Empathy does not mean I give up making distinctions. I am not a Pollyanna about the NY Times, Washington Post, and other news organizations. I recognize they curate news. They emphasize some things and not others. But Fox News is fundamentally different. The network cynically spread lies to fit Trump's claim of a stolen election. They knew better. They did it anyway. And they were enormously successful doing so. They understood their audience and they fed it what they thought it needed to hear. As did the Warren Report.
America is worse off for both of these.
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8 comments:
Conspiracy is the most alluring, compelling form of storytelling, and for that, quite addictive. Its special feature is its turning of compelling "facts" that disprove the conspiracy into exciting further proof of the insidiousness of the tale. Conspiracy is endlessly entertaining, and uniquely demanding of creativity; the reader is not passive but rather an active contributor to the story's furtherance. Conspiracy, fact and fiction, is here to stay; a permanent feature of human nature.
That all said, read Bugliosi's massive tome on the JFK assassination and the Warren Report. One shooter; Oswald acted alone.
The road from plausibility to possibility to probability to certainty can be very short indeed and hard to reverse once it is “settled truth”
The evidence showing that we are not rational creatures is paradoxical because that assertion is based on it being rational. Oh my.
Isn’t religion kind of a conspiracy theory that lots of people buy into?
Another popular conspiracy is the one regarding "chemtrails". Saying that the government is poisoning us by the use of poisonous vapors coming from airplanes. I got tired of arguing with people about this, but it persists.
All kinds of explanations and excuses are given for why people swallow crackpot conspiracy theories, but the simplest explanation is usually the best one. Basically, they believe them because they want to, evidence be damned.
In the case of Trump’s “stolen election,” his supporters believe him in spite of his being a notorious pathological liar because they’re as crazy as he is. And don’t bother trying to reason with them – they couldn’t care less about the facts.
I've been present in groups of highly educated people who spout the c I dswallop about Chemtrails with utmost sincerity.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and an actual event is evidence. Conspiracy theories make entertaining novels and movies, but most people with a modicum of intelligence are able to tell fact from fiction. The crackpots who swallow such nonsense as the Sandy Hook shooting being staged, widespread voter fraud and microchips in the COVID vaccines deserve the ridicule they attract. It won’t change their mind, but neither will anything else.
Ironically, one of the hotbeds of anti-vax conspiracy theories is Ashland, whose residents would probably scoff at the ignorance of those who don’t believe in evolution. The intelligent are just as prone to crazy as the ignorant.
Religion is for people who can't accept reality and don't understand science.
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