How do you prepare someone to be lied to?

By Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch, October 7, 2024 - How do you prepare someone to be lied to?

I spent an hour on Sunday warning two devout Fox News viewers that they won’t be able to trust what their favorite network tells them next month if Donald Trump loses the election. Especially the evening hosts: There might be some sobriety during the daylight hours when no one’s watching, but the highly rated Watters-Hannity-Ingraham bloc will be pure storytime.

Trying to convince Fox watchers that they’re being misled is like trying to convince fish that they’re wet, though. They’ve adapted to a media environment in which their political priors are relentlessly affirmed. Tell them that they’re more likely to find the truth about the election in the New York Times than on Fox and they’ll look at you cockeyed and say, “But the New York Times is biased!”

And they’re right. .... The Times is biased. But there’s a difference between bias and propaganda.

Bias is having a rooting interest in a dispute. Propaganda is allowing your rooting interest to define your understanding of reality. (read it all)

Rod's Comment: I share the frustration. The Trump cult believes anything Trump or his minions say. All of my life I thought Republicans were much more rational than Democrats and I thought Democrats were much more predisposed to believe untrue things. Now however, it is the reverse. I can't believe it. If I share a fact with a Trump cult member, they will dismiss it with "Fake News," or something equally dismissive. They proudly have the default position "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts." 

The evidence is overwhelming that the 2020 election was fair, and that Trump lost. There is mountain of evidence that Trump lost the election, but the true believers are "true believers." The more extreme members of the cult will believe Haitian refugees are eating cats and dogs and that FEMA withholds assistance to areas of the country who voted for Donald Trump, and that California wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers (whatever that is) and will believe "they" manipulate the weather to harm Trump supporting areas of the country.

I consume a lot of new and sometimes sample the real weirdoes to see what the fringe of the fringe are thinking. The other day I came across a podcast in which two Trumpinista were seriously debating whether we were just being manipulated or if we were living in a simulation. Nothing is too bizarre for the true believer. It may start on the fringe edge and then become cult dogma. It is not far from a QAnon meme to the screen of Truth Social to Facebook friends sharing "the truth." 

One of the books that makes it onto my best insightful books of all times list is book called True Believers. It was written a self-educated social philosopher longshoreman called Erck Hoffer. I have not reread it in perhaps thirty years, but it made an impact. In the book Hoffer describes how people could become enamored of mass movements and support the cause regardless of facts. He says whether of the right or the left or a religious movement or a political movement, there is a commonality that causes people to be swept up in mass movement. I think it sheds light on the Trump phenomena and I recommend the book. 

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