“To serve Man,” indeed
“The Beat with Ari Melber” on Wednesday featured a segment in which astrophysicist Adam Frank offered skeptical commentary on the congressional UFO/UAP hearings. In her wrap-up, MSNBC’s Katie Phang quipped that she got her information on aliens from a “documentary” called Independence Day.
I like a good movie about aliens as much as the next person, but they are movies. The Twitter/Xitter/whatever comments on the hearings were withering. Most ran along the lines of, “So aliens travel here possibly from hundreds of light years away only to crash? Repeatedly?”
Perhaps what we need more than a congressional hearing on UFOs/UAPs is one on the credulity pandemic.
Among the key findings in the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) report that Kevin Drum references is this:
Continued Widespread Distrust in American Democratic Institutions and
Belief in Anti-Democratic Political Conspiracy Theories
About 40 percent of Americans share at least one attitude reflecting deep distrust of American democratic institutions – such as elections will not solve America’s fundamental problems and political leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties are the most immoral people in America – and this deep distrust is shared across the political spectrum. About 20 percent of Americans believe anti-democratic political conspiracy theories about how the country is run, but the exact belief varies across the political spectrum.
The Guardian on the report:
The number of Americans who believe the use of force is justified to restore Trump to the White House increased by roughly 6 million in the last few months to an estimated 18 million people, according to the survey conducted by the university in late June and shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Of those 18 million people, 68% believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and 62% believe the prosecutions of Trump are intended to hurt his chances in 2024. An estimated 7% of Americans now believe violence could be necessary to restore Trump to the presidency, up from 4.5%, or 12 million people, in April.
There’s no mention of aliens in the report. (And I thought Trumpers believed the election was stollen.)
Sigh:
That’s 16.5% of Republicans.