Mehdi Hasan tweets about the conservative retreat from reality:
I did @bbcquestiontime with a live audience including Trump voters in Philly this week. The Trump voters booed and laughed sarcastically at every official statistic mentioned from the stage: unemployment, inflation, even Border Patrol stats on border crossings. They don’t believe anything. It’s scary. And dangerous for the country.
Hasan was responding to an Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel about the insane misinformation surrounding the recent hurricanes:
It’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.
....Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
Needless to say, I have no general disagreement with either Hasan or Warzel. And yet, I still wonder: has this kind of behavior really increased or is it simply more visible thanks to Twitter and other social media?
I can't figure out a way to test this. I'm not talking about garden variety conspiracy theories here—JFK, 9/11, the 2020 election—I'm talking about the flat-out insane stuff. Faked moon landing. Mena airfield. Bogus national statistics. Has there been a rise in the number of people who are, as Warzel puts it, dissociated from reality?
Maybe someday I'll figure out some clever way to test this. In the meantime, though, I came across a surprising and weird related thing. If you look at polls of trust in government, Democrats act fairly normally: they generally trust Democratic presidents more than Republican presidents. But here's Republican trust in government over the years:
Republican trust in government routinely falls off a cliff at the end of Republican presidencies. This starts before election years and before Democrats are elected. Generally speaking, their trust in government doesn't fall during Democratic presidencies. It falls, apparently, after one of their own has been in office a few years and betrayed them by not delivering what they wanted.
It's possible this is a coincidence. Both Bushes ended their presidencies with recessions and Trump ended his with COVID. Maybe it's bad luck. But I wonder. And I wonder if it's related to periodic outbreaks of conservative insanity?
NOTE: Obviously this doesn't explain what's happening right now at the end of a Democratic presidency. Nor does it offer much insight into whether our current insanity is actually normal but simply more visible than before. But it's still interesting, no?
Good time to be a con man, I'm thinking. May need to make a career change...
Regarding Bush (W, especially), I'm thinking Dems owe a "told ya so" to Republicans who forget/pretend those presidencies never happened.
However, I'm not certain those who shun Bush now were among his vocal supporters in 2000 (and especially '04, when his boobery was evident to all). How many Trumpers might honestly say, "I never liked Bush"?
There can't be that many Trump voters that didn't support Bush. Claiming after the fact that they didn't ever like W is just a rationalization.
RE "dissociated from reality"
I understand why Trump's narcissistic personality warps his perceptions, but I can't see why anyone feels the need to enable him. Nor why "alternative facts" is necessarily packaged with the conservative platform.
It benefits the GOP to go along with the insanity. I think they thought they could control him. It turns out he ended up controlling them more than they did him. The blame for Trump lies primarily with the cowardice, and to some extent, the depravity of the GOP. If they had any type of morality or ethics it's long since disappeared.
Post Trump presidency it's become more apparent that either republicans are really gullible to these crank theories OR they are employing "Russian Misinformation" techniques as a way to push back against democrats and their governing winning elections.
I have no doubt that if Trump is elected that in January 2025 there will be a dramatic shift in republicans perception of the economy and we will see and hear them praise Trump saving the economy.
He did the same thing in 2016. Everything was horrible till he was elected. Then everything was the best it ever was. To quote the orange menace, "People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you." The MAGA movement is a cult, or at the very least cult like.
No, they are really pretty damn gullible. There was a story just the other day about all the scams rampant on Truth Social. Mention how investing in something is a great way to honor Trump and pwn the libs and you can fish these suckers in all day long.
There was always a streak of paranoia in America dating back probably to its founding. One good example is the panic created by Orsen Wells radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. The red scare of the fifties, or was it sixties? A bit before my time. Social media has amplified this streak tremendously.
Add the McMartin pre school to the list. https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/video/the-crimes-that-changed-us-investigation-discovery-atve-us/mcmartin-preschool-trial
We could go before our founding to the Salem witch trials. There are probably dozens of examples of American paranoia. Unfortunately.
My wingnut cousins will have highly engaged, serious conversations about conspiracy theories, comparing one to another, and tying themselves in knots to find common threads or any hint of reality within them they can hang on to. They can be intense about it. But it's only conspiracy theories and they rarely even mention Fox or other wingnut media.
The only information they will listen to is essentially word of mouth from the idiots they trust.
I have many relatives I know are Trumpsters and others I kind of assume are. I try not to engage in conversation with any of them for any length of time. It usually ends up with me mentally rolling my eyes and thinking how could anyone be this stupid! Most are working class, which makes their support of a man like Trump mind numbing.
The worst of the crazies don't even trust Fox News anymore. It's not just social media. They have websites they can visit that will reliably shield them from the truth and provide the most bizarre conspiracy theories you ever heard. A normal person hearing these things would be agape at the seriousness with which people consume this tripe. These things didn't exist even 20 years ago. At that time, Fox News was about as crazy as you could get, but it's sane compared with what's available now. If you want to know what's changed, you need to look no further.
+1
No, talk radio predated Fox News. It is what got my sweet dear auntie. They were the original lying sacks of crap.
Rush Limbaugh. i blame it all on him, may his soul burn in Hell.
Yes; I'm one of the original Feminazis.
I refused to let my husband listen to Rush Limbaugh while I was in hearing range. And he thought I was being mean.
Not all of Kevin's charts are new and noteworthy, but the one here I find fascinating.
Since higher trust did exist during the early years of the three GOP presidencies, I suspect the dramatic falloff comes as the result of crises and bad economies. It's remarkable that the "don't trust government" party really ought to be known as the "don't trust us to run the government" party. How long can we survive before that's better understood by the electorate and media? With each GOP president orders of magnitude worse than the previous one, we can't afford another Republican in the White House, now or as far as the eye can see.
+1
Competency matters.
Before the invention of the internet and the creation of Faux News, the kooks and moon bat crazies had a hard time finding each other and communicating.
Remember the UN-Cambodian invasion conspiracy of the Clinton era? Cambodian troops under UN command massing in Canada for an invasion of the US, black helicopters flying reconnaissance, stop signs labeled with bar codes to help the Cambodians navigate, government facilities built with the barbed wire at the top of the fence pointing inward to keep future political prisoners in? The true believers were convinced it was real, but it never achieved more than a niche presence in the conservative psyche.
Today by contrast, internet algorithms search the internet for conspiracy theories and deliver them to eager moon bat crazy conspiracy enthusiasts.
+1
This is true of many things; my tribe of natural-dye artists found each other here, too.
Perhaps Q and MAGA cults are the dark side to the instantly-available library of everything.
Normalizing abnormal strikes me as a particularly dark artifact.
I thought it was the North Koreans who were massed north of Montana ready to invade?
The distrust seems to be old, but Republicans have long been disconnected from reality. For example, what they call anti-business blue states tend to have more robust economies than so called pro-business red states. The big change is that they platform their distrust and the disconnect at higher levels within the party. Reagan may have been delusional, but he never claimed that the moon landing was faked and vaccines cause cancer. George W Bush may have lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, but when they were never found he didn't claim Jew teleporters removed them. Trump, in contrast, buys into every convenient conspiracy theory and horseshit lie and runs with it.
The whole pet eating thing was absurd. He's done near irreparable harm to the political discourse in this country that insane things like Hatians eating pets would ever be said aloud at a presidential debate.
The only place I see this nonsense is in the “normal” media, lefty sites, and now here. I think y’all are making too much of it. Social media is a cesspool. It’s been that way forever. Ignore it. Government officials who get threats via social media etc. should quit it. What good is the Xitter if it end up being the way you get harassed? Just quit them. They have no redeeming social value.
As they say here… don’t feed the trolls. I’d say… don’t even meet them on the social media.
Here’s how Mr. Drum can test his theory. I am, people say, a troll who will surely burn in hell for my crimes against humanity. The only reason they think this is because Mr. Drum gives me a platform to share my wisdom. He should eliminate the comments (or me) and then the troll / misinformation / crazy internet person problem is solved.
So… kill social media.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like you're arguing against your own presence, not just on social media, but in society.
I am… but I have such confidence in their greed that I’m not at any risk. Ain’t that a kick in the head!
Of course, like most of the trolls, it’s not who I am in real life. So banning me is just the way to silence that actor. Which is why you should ignore the misinformation nonsense. It’s irrelevant.
Republicans (yeah yeah not ALL Republicans, but certainly the large majority of contemporary Republicans) hate ALL Presidents, they hate ALL government, and they generally hate statistics and fact-based rational argument because THEY ARE CHILDREN in many respects. Their emotional and social development stopped somewhere in adolescence, and they are forever stuck hating Mom and Dad and all those STUPID RULES and stuff!! And given a chance to act out, they do, and this is the result.
The scary part about our current situation is, they now have a leader who is just as much as they -- or even more so -- an emotional child, who routinely flaunts the rules, and who so far has not only got away with it but achieved many of the standard markers of extraordinary success. He's the kid who broke the rules and stood up to the teachers and not only never got punished but was given all kinds of awards. That makes him a role model and a catalyst for bad behavior as well as a nominal leader.
The bottom line, as always, is that the root of the problem is Republicans. This kind of behavior won't stop when TFA has left the stage.
+1
Re: "periodic outbreaks of conservative insanity."
Conservatives can't lose this argument. Their sainted icon has already declared that 'government is the problem.' The presidents of their party strive hard and prove the point by the end of their terms.
Beat me to it. I was going to say pretty much the same thing.
The latest Hurricane Conspiracy is that Vance directed them to FloriDoh! to damage Ron DaSantos chances in 2028!!!!
These are the things that make
me go 🙄 and 🥴.
“I'm not talking about garden variety conspiracy theories here—JFK, 9/11, the 2020 election—I'm talking about the flat-out insane stuff. Faked moon landing. Mena airfield. Bogus national statistics.”
The 2020 election is a “garden variety conspiracy theor[y]?” How does that one not qualify as “flat-out insane stuff?” There is ZERO evidence that the 2020 election was rigged in any way, 60 some-odd dismissed lawsuits corroborate that. Please don’t normalize fascist bullshit.
Like it or not, the 2020 election conspiracy theory, insane though it is, is already normalized. Something like 60% of R voters believe it. So yes, it is garden variety now.
You forgot contrails
These are the moments I ask myself, "What would Walter Kronkite say?"
And set my moral compass accordingly.
It's noteworthy that the Republican National Convention this year had exactly zero people on stage who were named Bush, Romney, or McCain. They really do hate their own predecessors now, and that's a fairly new thing.
Rather an unexamined issue here is the reification of the categories Democrat and Republican - that is the Respondent in Republican in 1980 amy well have become Democrat in 2000
Given the data that shows that the two political partiies have exchanged party memberships with a re-sorting (evident in geographical switching in almost every region) - treating these as fixed categories is an analytical error.
The pattern of a Republican party that has absorbed a signifcant working class segment that was formerly Democratic aligned over the past 20 years, a current Trumpy -R mass reacting poorly to historical R Presidents is not per se puzzling than if there had not been a significant re-sorting.
A more difficult and challenging analysis than simply the Opposition Party are evil cretins
This doesn't make a lot of sense because the ideological re-sorting started in the 1960s as a result of the Civil Rights Act etc. when Democrats from Southern states started turning into Republicans. If it's your argument that the two Bushes were liberals and the party moved away from them, then that argument is nonsense. A better argument is that they were relative moderates and the party has gone off the deep end.
I went to a "town hall" with my Congressman back when Obamacare was being considered by Congress. (Aside here: everyone was talking about Congressional town halls related to Obamacare. I have never heard discussion of town halls either before or since.)
The vast majority of the people at that event were flat out insane, politically speaking. This was 2009 and they were completely saturated in Glen Beck nonsense and a lot of Fox News conspiracies. I remember one thing that really had them pissed off was that as part of the stimulus, the government was spending money on "turtle tunnels". It was the first I'd heard of that but everyone else in that room thought it was one of the biggest news stories of the day.
The contempt this group had for our Congressman and for government in general was just shocking to me. There was no politeness or deference. This was a bunch of pissed off old people. At one point a man held up a dollar bill and dared the congressman to come and take it from him, I guess because taxes bad?
But all that leads me back to the big conspiracy they were all bought in on: death panels. Obama wanted to have death panels to decide who was worth saving. Everyone Republican politician repeated this. Every Republican voter believed it. It was purely a conspiracy theory.
So no, this is not particularly new.
The point is, it's vastly worse now.
Perceptions about the economy have gotten more partisan and extreme over time, and while both sides change perceptions with the administration the Republican swings are more extreme. The same is true about trust in government. Why wouldn't they be when the Republican leaders and right-wing media are just blatantly lying by this time. A basic Republican strategy over the last fifty years has been to excite partisan division based on race and religion and this has gotten more extreme.
This is not a matter of conspiracy theories, it's a matter of rejecting basic facts, such as the government-supplied economic data. Probably the conspiracy theories have become more widespread, but they are not driving the detachment from reality.
I get the distrust for George Bush Jr. Starting an unnecessary war (Iraq) involved massive deception about the situation (basically a proxy for 9/11). And Trump is always deceiving people.
But George Bush Sr.? He was a moderate Republican who mostly played it straight. I don't understand why trust fell during his time in office.
George H. W. Bush made big point during the campaign of promising no new taxes, only to break that promise once in office. That didn’t endear him to conservatives, although I’m not sure it’s enough to explain the numbers. In particular, I recall that people blamed Bush for this, so I don’t know how much that translates into distrust of govnerment.
Trump did something similar, promising to build the wall and then not doing it. The difference is that Trump supporters never blame Trump for anything, so presumably they think the failure to build the wall is the fault of government or the Democrats.
In reality, there was a bipartisan bill in the Senate that would have built the wall in exchange for writing DACA into law. Trump (or more precisely, Steve Miller, representing Trump) insisted that the law include changes to family reunification and the diversity lottery, both of which Democrats agreed to. Then he insisted on reducing the quotas for legal immigration, which is something Trump did not run on. Democrats balked, Miller refused to back down, and the bill died. If Trump had supported the bill, it likely would have passed the Senate, and almost certainly would have passed in the Republican-controlled House because I can’t imagine any Republican blocking the Wall.
It is absolutely worse. Before people had to be normal to get along but now they can find a community of fellow nutters and feed endlessly on themselves getting worse.
I lived in the Dallas Fort Worth at in the early 90s. On one of the religious broadcast channels, almost every time I clicked by it, they were showing that stupid Mena Airport video.
This was prior to the availability of Mosaic, the first graphics browser.
I used Mosaic. I was the first faculty on my campus to do so.
Boy was it terrible! It would not render a page until all of its data had been received which, on the Internet of that day, could take awhile. When Netscape, which, through what James Joyce would call "a circuitous vicus of recirculation," ended up as Firefox) appeared. It's magic trick was rendering pages on the fly and it was like opening a window and letting the Sun shine in. In the end, it wasn't any faster but it seemed faster because you got to start looking at things right away.
Mosaic was licensed from the government by Spyglass which Microsoft licensed from them and it became Internet Explorer which recently died.
I believe Yahoo already existed because it was possible to build a thematic thesaurus of the entire web. Every single site.
Well, a couple of things. Republicans don't just not fulfill their promises, they actually destroy things. Take Bush the Younger. When asked during the campaign if there was a federal agency he thought was valuable, he said FEMA and talked about how much it had helped the people of Texas. After he won the election 5-4, he put a political hack, "Brownie" in charge. They worked together to systematically take down the agency Clinton had built from the detritus that Bush the Elder left behind.
Second thing: they've always been there. What has changed is that the Internet has made it easier for them to find each other. When I was a kid, it was the Birchers. In the 1920's, you couldn't get elected to anything where I live unless you belonged to the Klan.
I've argued for a long time that the US had far better founding fathers than it deserved. Americans have always, by and large, been loutish, prejudiced, doctrinaire countries of one who can't believe that you can't see the truth after having it laid out right here in front of you. We have always been able to disbelieve or willfully misunderstand absolutely anything.
It's our thing. After all, we were founded by Europeans who didn't get along with their neighbors. The Puritans were proto-Birchers.
You can't really talk about this phenomenon without mentioning Steve Bannon.
"Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.
Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted. "
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-6-2024?publication_id=20533&post_id=149903287&isFreemail=true&r=dwey&triedRedirect=true
Bannon is clearly winning here.
Also, trust in government is not really analogous to the willingness to believe in batshit insanity.
Reagan campaigned on government being the problem. Every successful Republican candidate since has done the same. Once in office, they love government for the power they can exercise, until it comes time to run again, at which point their willingness to trash government jumps up substantially.
Kevin's mistake is here: "Republican trust in government routinely falls off a cliff at the end of Republican presidencies. This starts before election years and before Democrats are elected."
It can't be the campaign for president because it happens before the year of the election? Really, Kevin? Are you suggesting the present presidential election campaign started Jan 1, 2024? Of course the campaign starts up the year prior to the election, and I'd expect the effects to show up then, as well.