Politicians Are Playing With Fire
Earlier, I exchanged tweets with Paul Meyers about the nature of MAGAtry. He noted that “The entire MAGA mission is to render words meaningless.” I have no bone to pick with that assertion but MAGAtry is even grander— an attempt to delegitimize established knowledge and expertise in all fields of human endeavor. This kind of erosion of trust, leading to polarization between morons and the rest of society, fuels to an inability to reach societal consensus on important issues, hindering effective policymaking and social progress and creating the kind of vacuum that empowers bad actors who spread misinformation and manipulate public opinion for their own benefit.
To use one example that is pretty crucial when considering what society will eventually have to do to deal with MAGA, QAnon, as well as groups like Moms For Liberty, we know that when people disregard medical and scientific expertise, they're vulnerable to harmful misinformation that can lead to poor health decisions and endanger, not just their lives— lets face it, society is better off with them all dead— but the lives of others. On Thursday, Mari Eccles reported that the quack cure MAGA and QAnon were pushing on people with COVID, hydroxychloroquine, is probably responsible for nearly 17,000 deaths. She wrote that “The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, ‘despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,’ the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy. People died from this is France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S., an 11% mortality rate “because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments… Hydroxychloroquine was considered something of a ‘miracle cure’ by Trump, who said: ‘What do you have to lose? Take it.’”
A simple answer for why people follow QAnon and MAGA: “Because they never learned how to think (at all, let alone critically). They only ever learned how to memorize and regurgitate things they were told. This is a failure of the US education system, more than anything else.” Look at the congressional QAnon/MAGA true believers like high school drop out Lauren Boebert and disgruntled housewives Marjorie Traitor Greene and Mary Miller, 3 from the bottom of the intelligence barrel in DC. But the simple answer isn’t where this ends.
Last summer, the NY Post reported that New psychological research examines why so many are prone to believe in conspiracy theories— and the reasons are more complex than you might expect. ‘Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks— a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture,’ said Shauna Bowes, a clinical psychology doctoral student at Emory University and lead author of the new study. ‘Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.’ Bowes also found that a combination of personality traits— particularly a strong trust in one’s own intuition, combined with ‘feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment’— are some of the largest indicators that a person is likely to indulge in such theories.”
I just sent that description to 5 Democratic members of Congress and one former Republican member. Although one said "Taylor Greene and Boebert," the other 5 all answered “Taylor Greene.”
“The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others,” according to a press release on the study.
“A need for closure” was not one of the strongest motivators for someone to latch onto a conspiracy.
“Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships,” the release added.
“For instance, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power.”
It was also reported that those who deeply believed in the theories tended to show insecurity, paranoia and impulsivity, in addition to being overly emotionally volatile, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.
Just under a year ago, 9 academic researchers asked Who Supports QAnon? A Case Study in Political Extremism. They concluded that “QAnon support is best explained by conspiratorial worldviews, dark triad personality traits, and a predisposition toward other non-normative behavior. These findings have implications for the study of conspiracy theories and the spread of misinformation and suggest new directions for research on political extremism.
In March of 2020, Timothy Caulfield, a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta, wrote that “Politically driven positioning by world leaders has clearly played a role in the coronavirus infodemic. We've seen the blaming of both the outside ‘other’ (‘the China virus’) and political opponents. (Just a few weeks ago, one Trump supporter went so far as to claim that the coronavirus was a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party. I'm curious if she has the self-delusion capacity to maintain this position.) In China, Trump has been the target. In India, scientifically absurd cures have been explicitly tied to ideological positions. And in Russia, there appears to be a co-ordinated disinformation strategy aimed directly at eroding confidence in both our political institutions and health-care systems. This kind of rhetoric both leverages existing prejudices and distrust and seeks to create more of both. Suspicion can breed more suspicion, especially when it is linked to a political agenda. Indeed, there is some research that suggests that distrust of science is associated with particular ideological leanings. A study from 2019, for example, found that ‘vaccine hesitancy and political populism are driven by similar dynamics: a profound distrust in elites and experts.’ A more recent study concluded that Trump's anti-vaccination tweets increased supporters' concerns, largely because of a willingness to believe the related conspiracy theories-which are almost always rooted in a narrative of distrust of scientific institutions. Political ideology and wellness nonsense can also merge into a mashup of conspiratorial and hateful noise— as we have seen from the likes of Alex Jones and his InfoWars brand and wellness quack Joseph Mercola, who sells supplements to fight the ‘weaponized coronavirus originating from the Biosafety Level 4 facility in Wuhan City.’”
The MAGAts and QAnon nuts tend to reject information from traditional sources like media outlets, scientists, and government officials, viewing them as part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against their beliefs. This creates an echo chamber where misinformation thrives and reinforces their distrust of anyone outside their circle. Both movements thrive on complex, self-referential, interconnected conspiracy theories that involve powerful elites, hidden agendas and sinister plots, feeding into a pre-existing sense of distrust towards authority and fueling skepticism towards anyone who challenges their narrative.