What comes next is anything but
Back in college I worked a few construction jobs. Few of my colleagues were college educated, save perhaps for the most skilled tradesmen. These were their permanent jobs. This was a decade or more before Rush Limbaugh hit, and before Fox News and the internet made political propaganda ubiquitous. One of the lines you’d regularly hear from colleagues was, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth.” What came next was going to be a strongly expressed uninformed opinion on whatever the topic was. In the vernacular, a doozy.
Former Canadian “shock jock” Dean Blundell writes about that phenomenon at his Substack. A recent study by Ottowa’s EKOS Research Associates Inc. finds that “Trump’s approval rating among the most misinformed Canadians is 72%. Among the most informed? Just 1%. That’s not a typo.”
He’s glibly summarizing here, to be sure:
This study doesn’t just expose Trump fandom as a cult of personality—it lays bare a frightening link between disinformation, cognitive rigidity, and political loyalty.
If you believe vaccine deaths are being covered up, that climate change is a hoax, or that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen? Congrats. You’re likely part of the Trump fan club.
Additionally:
This isn’t correlation; it’s cause and effect. When lies shape your worldview, Trump starts to look like a genius.
And it doesn’t stop at Trump:
- Favourability toward Russia skyrocketed 10x among the disinformed.
- Favourability toward Ukraine? 10x higher among the informed.
- Trust in scientists and journalists fell off a cliff for the misinformation crowd.
It’s a worldview built on sand, curated by algorithms, and spoon-fed by propagandists.
Blundell goes on to emphasize how the kind of propaganda we see today erodes democracy:
When 70% of a major political base is actively misinformed, democracy doesn’t just erode—it warps.
Trump doesn’t need to convince people he’s right. He only needs to confuse them enough to believe that everyone else is wrong. That scientists, journalists, judges, and facts themselves can’t be trusted.
And guess what? It’s working.
Blundell brands the actively misinformed more harshly than I would. I work in election turnout. But a friend points out that what persuades people more than a pile of facts is how listeners perceive the speaker. As former president Bill Clinton said, ”When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.”
It’s not enough to have the facts. How you perform the facts matters. The left needs to be just as cocksure of their values as the right to break through. A little righteous anger wrapped in self-confidence and Americanism wouldn’t hurt. It’s why AOC and Bernie Sanders are attracting Republicans to their rallies.
(h/t SR)
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