Can an intelligent person believe the Big Lie?
By 
Sarah Longwell, a never-Trump Republican — I think she’s still a Republican while implacably opposing Trump, which is rapidly trending toward a formal oxymoron — did some focus group testing of why 68% of Republicans say they believe the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.
Not surprisingly, it’s because they’re a bunch of credulous conspiracy-minded rubes, who have no apparent critical thinking skills:
For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.
As a woman from Wisconsin told me, “I can’t really put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel right.” A man from Pennsylvania said, “Something about it just didn’t seem right.” A man from Arizona said, “It didn’t smell right.”
The exact details of the story vary—was it Hugo Chávez who stole the election? Or the CIA? Or Italian defense contractors? Outlandish claims like these seem to have made this conspiracy theory more durable, not less. Regardless of plausibility, the more questions that are raised, the more mistrustful Trump voters are of the official results.
That pretty much sounds like the common clay of the West to me, but Longwell doesn’t see it that way:
Perhaps that’s because the Big Lie has been part of their background noise for years.
Remember that Trump began spreading the notion that America’s elections were “rigged” in 2016—when he thought he would lose. Many Republicans firmly believed that the Democrats would steal an election if given the chance. When the 2020 election came and Trump did lose, his voters were ready to doubt the outcome.
Well yeah, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar. If he said the sun was rising in the east this morning, I’d go outside to check. So to believe Donald Trump’s pathological lies, you have to fail to perceive that he lies about literally everything, which means that you’re either a simpleton or delusional in some more or less clinical sense, because come on.
Yet Longwell is just in complete denial about what exactly what social scientists refer to delicately as “epistemic closure” actually consists of:
Attempts to set the record straight tend to backfire. When you tell Trump voters that the election wasn’t stolen, some of them tally that as evidence that it was stolen. A woman from Arizona told me, “I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t.”
These voters aren’t bad or unintelligent people. The problem is that the Big Lie is embedded in their daily life. They hear from Trump-aligned politicians, their like-minded peers, and MAGA-friendly media outlets—and from these sources they hear the same false claims repeated ad infinitum.
These people aren’t children. If they’re locked in their wingnut fantasy land it’s because they’ve chosen to stay there, because conforming is easy and thinking is hard.
Check out what happens if you put just a tiny bit of effort into not being a member in good standing of a fascistic cult (Oops I just created five more fascists by being rude about all this. Sorry.):
Fox News’ coverage of the world is so extreme and so overtly propagandistic that it might seem that its viewers are impervious to information from more mainstream news outlets. But a new working paper suggests that, if they’re actually shown the information, Fox News viewers can be open to absorbing unflattering news about politicians they support and can change their minds about hot-button issues.
It’s a fascinating finding that hammers home how Fox News isn’t just reflecting right-wing viewers’ opinions back at them, but is also feeding them a distorted picture of the world that pushes them deeper into support for extreme ideological positions and politicians. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
Political scientists David Broockman of Stanford University and Joshua Kalla of Yale University just published a working paper, which is under peer review, based on the results of an experiment studying viewers of Fox News. In the fall of 2020, they paid regular Fox News viewers to watch CNN, instead, for about seven hours a week for a month and then surveyed them about their political attitudes and what they knew about current events.
Broockman and Kalla compared the survey results of the experimental group of Fox News viewers who switched to CNN to those of the control group who didn’t, and they found that consuming CNN noticeably shifted the test group’s perception of the world.
At this point I’m ready to try the Ludovico technique.