There’s a tendency in this heated political climate to simply reject people who are saying false things and to write off conspiracy theorists writ large.
But as the US approaches the third straight election in which misinformation — and the fight against it — is expected to play a role, it’s important to understand what’s driving people who don’t believe in US elections.
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I talked to O’Sullivan about the documentary, in which he has some frank and disarming talks with people about what has shaken their belief in the US. But he paints an alarming picture about the rise of fringe movements in the country.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below:
WOLF: What were you trying to accomplish with this project?
O’SULLIVAN: So much of mainstream American politics now is being infected and affected by what is happening on what was once considered the real fringes — fringe platforms, fringe personalities.
And I think really what we want to do in this show is illustrate how these personalities may be pushing falsehoods, but they’re no longer fringe. This is all happening right now. And it is having a big effect on our democracy.
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One of the things I learned in sociology class in a Department of Defense high school in the 80s was educated people are easier to propagandize.
I’d go look look it up in Safari and come back to this message with links but whatever this client app is on iOS with the mouse icon will not save the state of my work and I’ll never find this conversation again .
my college educated and brown but still trump loving siblings are proof enough that propaganda works whether or not all citizens are educated.
even fediverse commenters will down vote you for pointing out that someone like biden voted to ban gays from marriage and the military and saddled everyone with non-discharge student loans despite it being demonstrably true and recent.
people will believe what they want to believe and it doesn’t matter how well educated they are.
Oh no, a dude was a product of his time, but as society got better he changed with society for the better, THE HORROR.
there are plenty of examples of others from biden’s time that didn’t vote the way biden did and clueless/misinformed takes like this are the reason why we will always have to vote for the lesser evil.
Nonono, don’t settle for the lesser evil… Cthulhu 2024.
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Counterpoint, not celebrating when someone changes for the better encourages shitty people to just STAY shitty people, and I could argue THAT is why we end up having to vote for lesser evils. You have to be 100% on the right side of history right from the moment you are born or else fuck you for the rest of time I guess
people who truly realize that they’ve fucked up work to right those wrongs they’ve committed meanwhile biden’s doubling down on the fucked up things he’s done so long as it doesn’t cost him votes from today’s democrats, as he has always done; willfully ignoring and reinforcing your own misinformed views is the reason why we keep voting for the lesser evil and not getting anything out of it.
Is he not restoring the LGBTQ protections that the previous president removed? Which part of that is doubling down on him being wrong in the past? Attacking everyone who doesnt fully agree with you doesnt change ANYONES minds, and in fact makes you more enemies, thus putting whichever cause you fight for further behind
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I don’t know for sure, but I think maybe they are downvoting you because pointing out that sort of thing about Biden right now when there’s a very good possibility Trump could win is not very helpful.
biden has abortion to run on; he’ll be fine.
I don’t have your crystal ball, so I’d rather chances not be taken at the moment.
It’s probably true, in some contexts.
If you are a foreign government? Or internal powers wanting to enact an authoritarian and religious regime that hurts the peoples it’s trying to convince? Then probably not. Educated people are going to be harder to turn against their own interests.
A DoD high school?
I think you’re talking about the effect of intelligent people being more prone to motivated reasoning
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Yep. because they have a false sense of what they know.
Esp the people who are educated at BA level… when you get to MA/PhD it gets different, but you can’t expect most folks to ever attain that level of education. Because it’s only in graduate work that you realize how little any of us really knows and how much work (a lifetime) it takes to be an expert of a very tiny slice of the world.