This fuckin idiot…
KEVIN FOLEY: United States of conspiracies
Team Trump never talks to people who absorb information from many sources before forming their opinions. They’re speaking only to the QAnon crowd, InfoWars fans and Sean Hannity devotees, folks who can be easily manipulated because, for whatever reason, they don’t trouble themselves to look objectively at the world around them.
Where once we had only newspapers, radio and television newscasts, the internet opened the flood gates, sending all manner of “information” pouring into our lap tops and cell phones. Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of how the web works could become a subjective “news source.” Where once we relied on the integrity of real journalists to give us objective facts, the internet made truth relative.
A good example of this is the QAnon phenomenon, which goes some-thing like this: a person or persons known as “Q” and claiming to hold the highest security clearances in government says there is a “deep state” conspiracy under the direction of Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other so-called “elitists” who are plotting to overthrow Trump’s presidency. Q’s short, mysteriously worded posts are supposed to guide followers to evidence of the alleged conspiracy.
We don’t know who this Q is and the alleged “evidence” is nowhere to be found, other than in the imaginations of Q’s followers.
Contrast that with this week’s news that the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, implicated Trump in a felony and agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation, a story reported by credible news sources and real journalists using their real names. Regardless of how you feel about it, everything is factual.
While Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been mum about what he is finding, there’s nothing conspiratorial going on. He’s not secretly working for Trump to uncover Clinton and Obama crimes, as QAnon absurdly suggested. The Justice Department officials running the investigation aren’t hiding what they’re doing when, for example, they’ve repeatedly asked Trump to sit for an interview. This is what those charged with enforcing the law are supposed to do.
It’s also why the president is frantically trying to discredit these officials when he says things like Mueller is trying to swing the midterm election in favor of Democrats, as he alleged Monday. There’s no evidence to support Trump’s claim. None. In fact, Mueller is a registered Republican as is his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
What Trump is cynically doing is feeding misinformation to his QAnon and right wing media allies who “report” it as further “evidence” of their bogus conspiracy theories. Those willing to believe these unsubstantiated claims do so because they are predisposed to agreeing with them and unwilling to look at other information sources to expand their understanding of things like Mueller’s investigation.
This is known by the scientific term “confirmation bias.”
https://www.mdjonline.com/opinion/kevin-foley-united-states-of-conspiracies/article_fc9149e2-a73b-11e8-888d-9788c4356ab2.html
It goes on…