Conspiracy theory is the new normal: 2024 was the year QAnon went mainstream

[applegrove]

Conspiracy theory is the new normal: 2024 was the year QAnon went mainstream

The single biggest reason Trump won? The median voter ignores real news to consume endless disinformation

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 26, 2024 6:00AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/26/conspiracy-theory-is-the-new-normal-2024-was-the-year-qanon-went-mainstream/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

"SNIP............

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.

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.

...........SNIP"

[JCMach1]

1. It's also becoming shockingly common outside of the USA

As well. I just had a recent experience of a family member of my wife repeating some Bill Gates conspiracy stuff about vaccines circulating in Africa.

This stuff gets around

[applegrove]

2. Yes. And AI on facebook keeps posting false facts.

A way to get us not to trust the facts, names, dates, places, in order to be easier for oligarchs to control us as our sense of real, not real is continuously under assault. I expected AI to lie about politics and history, people and economic theory, but not to lie about space and time.

[JCMach1]

4. Facebook has become so enshitified it's unusable,

Frankly.

[Sympthsical]

3. A lot of the stuff she mentions isn't limited to Q-Anon or the Right

Luigi Mangione conspiracies, stolen elections, wild drone theories, the assassination attempt, the raw milk bullshit, etc. etc. etc. Yep. Read all about those in familiar spaces.

This may just be the age we live in where social media are out of control and people do not engage in critical or lateral reading of their sources. How many times a day are articles needing correction here, or a headline is different from the body and context of the article, and people only react to the headline and assume its truth?

All of the time. Constantly. Daily.

We have become a narrative-driven society that will pick up and discard facts in order to maintain the cohesion of the preferred story being told - being told to other people and the one we tell to ourselves as we claw together increasingly threadbare formed identities.

It's just how we are now. Dunno what to do about that one. You know what they say. An individual is smart, but people are stupid.

The Internet has created just about the biggest group of people managed in history. That lowest common denominator can always get lower.

[JCMach1]

5. The algorithm will keep adjusting that bar