This is what right wing media and Donald Trump have done to people’s minds. And apparently, there are a lot of them, even some in powerful positions in Republican politics .
Apparently, COVID isn’t the only virus in the land:
Dustin Carnahan, a professor at Michigan State University who studies misinformation, believes that conspiracy theories and misinformation is what led hundreds of Trump supporters and QAnon believers to storm the building that day, which disrupted congresspeople from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college win and forced them to evacuate the chamber and hide in undisclosed locations.
“There was this conspiracy that there’s this individual in government, Donald Trump, [former] President Trump is acting to kind of combat this cabal of secretive actors,” Carnahan said during a Zoom interview last week.
The conspiracy’s cabal included Hollywood stars and global elites working together to take over the government and the world, he said. GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene supported and perpetuated this theory and others in past social media posts. The House on Thursday February 4 voted to remove her from committee assignments.
“With conspiracies it’s all about how people formulate explanations about why the world is the way it is and how it operates,” Carnahan said. “It’s just understanding how it is that people go about kind of creating their own reality. It’s not necessarily rooted in actual facts.”
Carnahan said conspiracy theories and misinformation tend to be feelings-based and pry on people’s already anti-government sentiment. Trump’s rhetoric toward the media over the last four years, calling journalists ‘fake news,’ only fueled the sentiment even more.
“We’ve seen kind of a sustained attack against the press and kind of the generation of skepticism that journalists aren’t giving us the whole story, that they’re selectively choosing different types of facts to present in other facts. They’re omitting and they’re protecting people in power,” Carnahan said. “So, when you have those sustained attacks overtime what you see is a public decline in trust in news.”
He also said there’s been a decline in trust towards the medical and public health fields. There’s been increased attacks on doctors, scientists and other experts; people questioning their fact-based research and work.
“When you have the skepticism and you have that decline in trust in news media, and this almost anti-intellectual movement where we’re questioning and pushing back against official stories and experts,” he said, “what you see is the potential for people to start gravitating towards other sources of information and other explanations as to why something happened or why an election turned out the way it did or why a disease or how a disease originated.”
Those other sources that people gravitate to, he said, tend to be websites or online groups dedicated to misinformation, which in the wake of the riots on January 6, many social media giants have banned from their platforms.
More importantly, he said people started leaving the QAnon movement.
“You started seeing people say ‘wait a second this isn’t what we were told was going to happen. We thought President Trump had our back,’” Carnahan said. “You start to see people abandon the ideology and starting to abandon the conspiracy.”
I don ‘t think you can discount the right wing media and Donald Trump in all this either. They helped create the conspiratorial atmosphere that helped spread this virus.