In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump, the punditry’s focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn’t beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris’ “messaging,” with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won.
Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision. That would seem the wisest choice, but to be fair to people who don’t want to go there, hearing these people out is a truly miserable experience. What quickly becomes evident about the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary, it’s a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS. Of course they voted for Trump, the country’s most reliable dealer of their favorite drug.
This may sound ungenerous to these voters, but only if you’ve been sparing yourself the torture of engaging their actual opinions. If you hold your nose and dive in, it’s startling how much the typical swing voter is allergic to facts. It’s not just ignorance, but overt hostility to anything that smacks of veracity. Such as the Trump voter who insisted to the New York Times that Democrats are “lying about pregnancies,” by conveying factual information about abortion bans. Or the one who falsely believed “so many people just walk right across the border and get free housing, free food.” Or the one who was excited that “Trump brings a Robert Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk.” Or the one who said the “Democratic Party [is] going after average people who disagreed on Covid, who disagreed on school boards, who disagreed on boys playing in women’s sports,” which is just a way to complain about liberals who criticize him on social media for saying things that aren’t true.
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Sarah Longwell’s “Focus Group” podcast ended the year by interviewing Joe Rogan fans who voted for Trump for the first time this election. It was a smart choice, and not just because Rogan’s endorsement likely pushed Trump over the top in a shockingly close election. Rogan’s audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people. Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn’t go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The straightforward details of the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson came out after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and yet these voters refused to believe the banal facts. Some are wallowing in theories that Mangione is a patsy, or that the shooting is a psyop. The truer any information was, the more they rejected it.
Feeling like you know better, while not having to learn anything, is intoxicating.
After the insurrection of Jan. 6, a lot of attention was paid to the rise of QAnon, because so many rioters were adherents to this online cult that preached that Trump is a savior prophesized to stop a worldwide Satanic conspiracy. Alarming reports showed millions of Americans believed QAnon myths, such as the divinity of Trump or that Democrats drink children’s blood. QAnon is still around, but it gets much less media coverage these days. One likely reason is what we see in these focus groups: bonkerballs levels of conspiracy belief is no longer a fringe phenomenon. QAnon-style beliefs are simply the norm in American society.
I wrote about this right after the election, but it bears repeating: One of the best predictors, if not the best predictor, of a Trump vote is how poor a person’s information ecosystem is. People who read or watch real news outlets voted overwhelmingly for Harris. People who get their political information from social media voted for Trump. Subsequently, polls showed that Trump voters couldn’t answer basic factual questions about what the candidates believed. Harris voters were far more accurate.
It’s not like Americans got hit with a stupid bomb, sending millions of us away from the real news and toward nonsense peddlers like Rogan. On “Focus Group,” they briefly discussed how people’s boredom during the pandemic caused them to spend more time on social media and listening to podcasts. Many got deeply addicted to disinformation during that period. (Interest in QAnon certainly spiked.) COVID-19 isn’t the threat it was, but millions of those people still have the conspiracy theory monkey on their backs, as evidenced by Rogan’s enormous audience.
Why are conspiracy theories so addictive? Having researched the issue for an investigative report last year, I think there are two main reasons. First, like actual drugs, conspiracy theories relieve boredom. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times argued during the height of the drone mania earlier this month, the “drones” were mostly planes, hobbyist drones, and stars, but “life does seem more exciting if you think the Iranians are specifically interested in the everyday activities of New Jerseyans.” Boredom was especially high during the pandemic, which is why so many otherwise stable people went straight down the conspiracy rabbit hole.
But while boredom is the gateway, ego flattery is why people keep coming back. The allure of the conspiracy theory is that you, Joe Nobody, understand a topic far more than the experts who spent their lives working on this issue. You understand viral transmission more than medical scientists. You see the hidden secrets of the “deep state” the journalists on Capitol Hill are missing. You, with your enormous brain, understand every field from nutrition science to American history far more than those people who study and research. This is why people who get into one conspiracy theory start digging into others. Feeling like you know better, while not having to learn anything, is intoxicating. It combines laziness with the will to feel superior. That most conspiracy theories affirm pre-existing beliefs is a bonus.
Nicole Karlis at Salon recently wrote an excellent article detailing the mania for raw milk in the MAGA movement. I’d label the discourse around raw milk a conspiracy theory. It’s presented as this near-magical health product supposedly suppressed by shadowy conspirators for nefarious reasons. That idea is certainly more exciting than the banal truth: pasteurization was developed to prevent foodborne illness. But it also flatters the ego of the raw milk enthusiast, who is convinced he’s part of an elite group with special access to knowledge that ordinary people can’t or won’t access. As a cherry on top, raw milk also feeds the fascist fantasy that life was better in the early 19th century when slavery was legal and women couldn’t vote.
By now, no doubt, a certain number of readers are raging at me because I haven’t offered a solution to get people to go cold turkey on the disinformation and return to the less exciting but healthier real world. In the interest of remaining reality-based, I have to confess I don’t have such a solution — and would advise personal resistance to anyone offering One Simple Solution to complex problems. (Although I hope the TikTok ban goes through, as that will help.) But the good news is that conspiracy theories have a way of petering out. They often rise as a response to widespread social stress. The upheavals of the 60s and 70s resulted in conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and the moon landing, for instance. The rise in divorce and women working in the 80s led to hysteria about “Satanic cults” at daycares. Eventually, most people stopped believing in, or at least caring about, those theories. It may take a long time, but eventually, even this mania will likely pass. The fight is in trying to reduce the damage they cause in the meantime.
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