I literally heard callers on KDKA radio yesterday pushing this malarkey about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats.
Callers also were peddling the lie that women in some states can obtain abortions after their babies are born. “The governor of Virginia said he would support that,” one lady said. “Not the current governor, who’s good, the previous one.”
(The “current governor who’s good” is the loathsome Glenn Youngkin, a former private-equity bozo, called by the Washington Post “a genial but aggressive culture warrior who has … cozied up to election deniers.”)
To Colin Dunlap’s credit, he was challenging callers and hanging up on them. “Email me the proof,” he would say. “Send it to me.”
“Oh, I’m not going to do that,” they’d reply. The last defense of the bullshit artist, “oh, I don’t have time to prove it, take my word for it.”
There’s a story making the rounds from the Aug. 22 issue of The New Yorker, where a writer traveled through the area around Rome, Ga., and asked voters in a Walmart parking lot where they get their news:
A middle-aged man who introduced himself as Chuck, and said he worked in cell-phone sales, told me that he found his political news on the Internet—“mostly YouTube.” Chuck, who is Black, said that he was leaning toward voting for Trump: “I feel more at ease with him.” A bearded white man in his sixties, who wore a Black Sabbath shirt, told me that he got his political news from “people in the neighborhood. Friends. I don’t got no TV or nothing.” He had a felony on his record, he said, and couldn’t vote. “Biden is a pedo,” he added. Another shopper waved me away, and pointed to his bumper sticker: “HOW ABOUT WE WATERBOARD THE MEDIA TIL THEY TELL THE TRUTH?”
Other people tell the writer, Charles Bethea, that they have tried pushing back on conspiracy theories with their own friends and families. A woman named Monica Sheppard, who lives in the district represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress, told Bethea she provides links to factual information, only to be mocked for her efforts:
I reached out to Scott, who works in private equity. He stuck by his guns. “I love Monica,” he told me. “But I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on.
She says, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Another friend — encouraged by Sheppard to do a Google search for factual information — criticized her:
“I found it scary that she would trust a meme that her friend posted on Facebook, but would not trust Google providing multiple sources from which to choose for more reliable information,” Sheppard told me. She noted that this was not her first encounter with poorly informed Georgians. A family member, she said, gets some of her news from televangelists.
Liberals and moderates are constantly told we have to “reach across the aisle” and “make a bigger effort to understand” people who “think differently” from us. Such impulses in 2016 and 2017 launched a thousand reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, and other East Coast newspapers into efforts to visit diners in small towns in Iowa or Ohio to find out what voters “really think.”
But according to Bethea’s story, believing in conspiracy theories, and trusting memes over impartial information, corresponds with a strong tendency not to think at all. The author cites research done at the University of Alabama by a political science professor, Richard Fording:
After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, and voters largely stuck with Trump, Fording dug deeper into the low-information category. He came across a metric in psychology called the “need for cognition” scale. “A question that really caught my attention on the scale is an agree or disagree: ‘Thinking is not my idea of fun,’ ” Fording recalled. He and a colleague ran a study to see whether agreement with the statement correlated with support for Trump. It did.
I am not here to laugh at Trump voters. I’m also not here to say “Trump voters are stupid.” Many of them are not stupid. They just don’t want to think about information that might contradict what they already believe.
The New York Times and other outlets suggest that Kamala Harris should talk more about her policies in an effort to reach undecided voters. You tell me how Kamala Harris is supposed to reach people by discussing child-care tax credits when they’d rather look at TikTok videos about perpetual-motion machines and fat-burning vitamin supplements.
The country’s trolley is so far off of the tracks, I don’t know if we can still see the wires.