If it wasn’t for the American addiction to disinformation, Vice President Kamala Harris would have won the 2024 election. There’s a lot of tap-dancing around this reality — pundits and politicians don’t like suggesting that large numbers of voters are irrational — but it’s true. People turned out by the millions to vote for a lying conspiracy theorist in Donald Trump because they are drowning in social media-driven nonsense and struggle to tell fact from fiction. Belief in conspiracy theories has risen dramatically, while consumption of reality-based news has plummeted. There’s a high correlation between ignorance and voting for Republicans, so of course the GOP benefits as more Americans replace real news with a steady flow of baseless speculation spewed on popular podcasts and social media.
Over time, belief in conspiracy theories pushes people rightward. Kennedy is a good example.
Democrats have reached the “bargaining” stage of post-election grief because some are starting to whimper about how maybe it’s time to give in to the conspiracy theory juggernaut. The hope is that by indulging the disinformation fandom a little more, they can win over some voters otherwise sucked into the disinfo vortex. The first sign that some Democrats were flirting with conspiracy theorists was alarming: Colorado’s Gov. Jared Polis praised Robert Kennedy after Trump nominated the vaccine denialist to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Polis has generally been regarded as a sensible Democrat, so it surprised people when he posted a lengthy and effusive tweet claiming Kennedy “will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.” He then took some quotes from Kennedy out of context to falsely imply that Kennedy is interested in better health and nutrition for Americans.
In reality, Kennedy has pushed anti-science disinformation that has contributed to the resurgence of diseases like measles and the unnecessary spread of COVID-19. In the former case, one Kennedy-linked outbreak led to the deaths of 83 people in Samoa, including many children. That is the proportional equivalent of nearly 125,000 deaths in the United States. Kennedy also helped fund the film “Plandemic,” which falsely suggests that COVID-19 was manufactured to sell vaccines. At least 200,000 Americans have died from vaccine refusal driven by this conspiracy theory. There is nothing “healthy” about that much unnecessary death.
Polis has defended himself by making a lot of noises about the duty to “meet people where they’re at” and classifying anti-vaccine views as “personal beliefs,” instead of a deliberate disinformation campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of people. It would be one thing if he were just one politician operating under terrible logic. But this minimizing attitude is cropping up all over Democratic spaces. On the “Pod Save America” channel, hosts argued that Democrats should not be “scolds” who “get up in arms about conspiracy theories if they’re not damaging.” With millions of progressives leaving Twitter for Bluesky, we’re being subject to liberal hand-wringing about whether the latter is an “echo chamber. This ignores the fact that what people are fleeing on Twitter isn’t conservative views, but the deluge of exhausting lies and conspiracy theories that make up the vast majority of right-wing rhetoric.
Yes, it’s true that scolding people can backfire. We all know that persuasion means talking to people who don’t already agree with you. I tend to agree with critics who say Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast, to reach his immense audience. But there’s a way to do all that without indulging people who, wittingly or not, spread outright lies and disinformation. Going on Rogan’s show doesn’t mean playing along when he says false stuff. You don’t have to be sanctimonious about it, but folks on the left should stand strong against falsehoods.
Part of the problem is there is rarely, if ever, a truly harmless conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories tend to crop up around topics that are heavy, like health, sexuality, social structures, and government power. Even the less bad ones — like false claims the government covers up evidence of alien visitation — breed paranoia that can lead to people embracing more dangerous conspiracies. It’s been deemed “crank magnetism,” because it’s well-documented that once a person starts buying into one conspiracy theory, they tend to start falling for more. Jason Van Tatenhove, a former Oath Keeper who now speaks out against right-wing extremism, told Salon last year that conspiracy theories reminded him of “shooting heroin,” in that the high people get from disinformation encourages them to seek out more.
That’s bad in itself, but it’s also not great for Democratic prospects. Even if — and that’s a big “if” — there’s a short-term gain to be had in being more indulgent towards conspiracy theorists, in the medium and long run, only Republicans will benefit. Over time, belief in conspiracy theories pushes people rightward. Kennedy is a good example. He was once a solidly liberal Democrat, but after he got into anti-vaccination stuff, he went wild with all manner of conspiracies. Now he’s not just a Trump loyalist but supports dangerous food deregulation schemes and spouts racist ideas.
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Nor is Kennedy an outlier. The anti-vaccine conspiracy theory was initially seen as a “liberal” one, associated with heavily blue jurisdictions like the Bay Area of California or attached to “wellness” influencers whose hippie aesthetics read as “left.” But even a decade ago, it was becoming clear that the real epicenters of vaccine refusal were right-wing religious groups, not people with fading Barack Obama bumper stickers. But even the “progressive” vaccine-refusers — like Kennedy — were being misread. What they had in common wasn’t a political lean, but wealth and privilege. For rich white liberals who rejected vaccines, the rhetoric echoed what we hear from the likes of Rogan now. They believe their expensive diets and exercise regimens — which function as status symbols — are superior protection against disease. It’s not true, but it’s an alluring idea for the status-signalers. They want to believe they enjoy a “first-class” level of health care, and that the shots are for the common people.
As Naomi Klein documented in her book “Doppelganger,” many, if not most, of the people who thought that way have taken a full turn away from voting for Democrats and toward their true orientation as Ayn Randian types. Some even go the next step, viewing disease favorably as a low-key eugenics experiment, to wipe out those they deem inferior. We’ve seen a similar eugenics-flavored journey with Elon Musk, who went from a guy supposedly ushering in the electric car era during Barack Obama’s presidency to a far-right authoritarian and Trump benefactor. I suspect most of these folks had reactionary urges inside them, but it was conspiracy theories that created the conditions to fully travel from being vaguely liberal to what looks quite a bit like fascism.
I’m dwelling on anti-vaccination because it’s such a good example, but it’s generally true that conspiracy theories push people to the right. Conspiracy theories flourish in a space of cognitive dissonance, where people feel conflicted between what they know is true and what their often-subterranean desires wish were true. Maybe that manifests politically in different contexts, but in ours, it’s usually because someone is experiencing reactionary impulses that are not justified by either facts or decency. So they turn to conspiracy theories, which create a rationalization space for ugly feelings.
You have a lizard brain racist reaction to seeing immigrants walking down the street? You’re freaked out at changing gender roles? You don’t get the kids these days and their music that doesn’t sound like what you grew up with? You could accept the boring truth that change is inevitable and also that you, like all people, are slowly dying. Or you could embrace a conspiracy theory that tells you all your knee-jerk, ungenerous reactions are the right ones, and you’re the victim of evil forces trying to take away what’s yours.
People have always been like this, but what’s changed is that the supply of conspiracy theories has grown overwhelming. In the past, if a person had a low moment of bigoted thoughts, it would often just pass away. Now, that bigoted impulse is being fed and watered constantly by a relentless drumbeat of people online telling you that the mean little voice inside is right, and everyone else is the “deep state” out to get you. While it can be tempting to try to win those people back by saying, “go ahead and enjoy your conspiracy theories,” that attitude will backfire. Conspiracy theories aren’t static things, but actively suck people rightward through this justification mechanism. As hard as it may be, the goal has to be stopping conspiracy theories before they warp people’s brains. Otherwise, Democrats will be swept out to sea in the flood of disinformation.
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